He "is a second-generation Japanese-American, and is only able to speak a little Japanese." (Wikipedia)
"Oh, I'm sorry"
I'm not against learning that language of your native cultural background at all. If you know anything about me you know I've always regretted being unable to speak Cantonese. But it's hella annoying how it plays out almost every single time. Once the Chinese figure out you don't speak your home tongue, they act as though you've not learnt it out of stupidity, laziness, or sheer defiance. And then in a split second, you become a non-person, akin to a very young child, or perhaps a dog or cat. In the rare instance a Chinese person would continue looking or speaking to me after they discover this shocking flaw of mine, they'd express their pity and/or disgust quite clearly, and THEN commence ignoring me. I can't tell you how many times this has happened, and how many more times it will – predictably – occur in the future.
This used to shame me before, as I absorbed the idea that my sister and I just weren't smart enough to be good Chinese kids. Sure, no one ever spoke Cantonese in the house unless my parents were fighting (and they didn't want us to understand what it was about). Sure, no one ever thought we should try to learn Chinese until I was 15, when the rest of our first level classmates were 5 or 6 years old, and all the teachers looked at us and said "Good Luck" with their eyes and proceeded to treat us as described above. And sure, being unable to learn Chinese reading, writing, and speaking strictly by rote memorization only served to enforce the idea that my true identity (or at least half of it) was going to be completely lost to me ... wasted on an ungrateful dumbshit American-born kid like me.
Sure this is how it panned out early on, but I assumed it was my fault for not overcoming the obstacles anyway, since all the other Asian kids in my school also had less-than-perfect parents, but STILL they got 5.0's, played a perfect game of tennis, were key members of 7 different social and academic clubs at once, attended every lunchtime Agape meeting, play virtuoso violin/piano, AND STILL they could speak unaccented Chinese to their so-pleased grandparents every weekend at dimsum. How could I still think I was just as smart as those kids (if not smarter in some cases) when I couldn't even figure out how to do just 1 of those million things they juggled daily?
15 years later, I'm not ashamed anymore, and I especially don't compare myself to most other Asian kids anymore (doubly-true when they resemble the kids I grew up with, even slightly). I decided long ago that it wasn't healthy to care about the Why-Aren't-You-Like-Them's, since all I could ever seem to manage was to be myself, anyway. This is the only Traci I am familiar with. So if I still lack after all these years, FUCKIN TOUGH SHIT
And anyway, I AM going to learn Cantonese, so keep them friggin shorts on. But please just give me this: I need to get all the other languages out of the way first – because I know I can learn them fast and I'll enjoy it – but most importantly, I need to know first that it's not because I'm dumb or lazy or that I hate all culture except for the white-American one that I can't speak Chinese yet. I need to have these other languages under my belt because maybejustmaybe that's what it will take to finally muster enough courage to learn the one language that makes up the other half of my biculturalism. Deal? OK deal.
After all this time it's still hard to reconcile certain disparate parts of me ... and here in the first 45 seconds of this 1992 interview, all Iha has to do is laugh and think, Honey, don't you know I'm still a rock star anyway? and then proceed to rawk Tokyo's face off. Hence the 2nd best thing about James Iha, learned here:
