feitclub

Not sure if you’ve heard yet, but we had another kid. Raising one boy was so easy we simply had to raise the stakes by having a daughter.

I’m kidding, of course. My son Go has been a handful but we decided that the time was right to have a second child. We’re not getting any younger, after all. Many of you have heard the news and have sent messages of congratulations. We appreciate them all and all of you for that.

Yet there’s been one question I’ve been asked again and again these past few days that I’ve been reluctant to answer: what’s the baby’s name?

Naming our first child took a long while because of the (somewhat arbitrary) rules I came up with in choosing a name: It had make sense in both Japanese and English. It had to be easy to pronounce for both sides of the family. It had to be something that could be written in kanji, because with my katakana last name I didn’t want my kid to stand out anymore than we already would in Japan.

In my son’s case, we settled on a totally kick-ass name that fits so perfectly with my last name, people often do a double-take when they hear it. Naturally, a lot of people wondered if we would do the same for our daughter. Many suggestions were made: Mai, Yuu, Mi, etc etc etc…

But not this time. Naming a girl in Japan following the above rules was hard, but I complicated it further by adding another stipulation: I didn’t want to saddle my daughter with some cute-laden crap name that would have her peers/teachers/employers treating her like a child even as an adult. I see so many of my students (and co-workers!) with kawaii-names that are so adorable I cannot picture taking them seriously.

So we went in another direction, ultimately settling on a name I heard in passing once or twice, one that has no pun-like properties but we both agreed sounded nice: Shanoa (沙乃亜). We threw some kanji together without much care for meaning, although the last one, 亜, is used to write both “Asia” and “America” in Japanese. I thought that was nice.

In the end, I can’t help but notice a parallel to me and my sister. My parents gave me a vanilla name (and middle name) straight out of the Old Testament. Three years later they gave my sister an unconventional name, with an S no less.

(by the way, I tried to upload a picture three times and Tumblr twisted it to the side everytime. Sorry, I’ll upload a few more shots to Facebook very soon!)

Today is the first Father’s Day of my life without a father. I have no important phone call to make and no gift to send. My son is too young to even comprehend what today means, and in Japan wives do not pretend like it’s Husband’s Day (as Mako put it bluntly once, “You are not my father”). It’s as if Father’s Day just didn’t happen this year.

My idea of Father’s Day went through some radical changes over the last ten years. I used to have to plan a trip into New York to spend the day with Dad. Then I was living with him while away from school. And then I moved out of the country and across the International Date Line, making it all but impossible to actually talk to him on Father’s Day at all. And now I don’t even have that.

When the time is right, I’ll use Father’s Day as an excuse to talk to my son about Dad and remind him how much his grandfather loved him. It’s the only real gift I can give Dad at this point.

In a weird twist, however, today I got word that my Dad may be giving me a gift. My sister told me his stock of frequent flier miles is fully transferable, so it looks like I will be able to take a trip this summer despite having committed all our savings to investing in this new house. What better way to use these miles than to return to New York and pay my respects on the anniversary of his passing?

So to all my loved ones in New York, expect me to show up this August. And if you haven’t already, call your Dad today. He deserves it, and so do you.

Year One

There’s not much I can say about my son on his first birthday. In most ways, he’s still barely a person. We can’t talk about anything. I have only the vaguest notion of what he likes and what he doesn’t. Yet in the year that I’ve known him I’ve seen him undergo a dramatic transformation from flesh-lump to genuine proto-human. He emotes. He stands up. If I hand him something, he will look at it with a clear expression on his face: “what the hell is this? does it please me?”

He may not be able to vocally express much beyond happy or sad, but it is in those moments that his burgeoning personhood is on display. It’ll take a few more of these cakes before he and I can really start building a father-son relationship, but I know this: I love him, and I’m pretty sure he loves me.

More pics to come. Oh, and if you’ve never read what happened one year ago today, this is the perfect time to do so.