Before moving to Sendai, my life went quite well by going with the flow of the so-called river. But now I faced a challenge and the reality was more devastating than before. At the same time, I noticed I could restart anywhere if I had not built anything in my career. Suddenly, the idea of going to the US popped into the mind of a desperate girl.
Truthfully, I was thinking of going to graduate school in the US after undergrad. The reason why I didn’t was that I was influenced by other people to get a job in Tokyo, and at this point, I regretted every decision I made so far including this. I began thinking that the idea of “going with the flow” was incredibly stupid, so I decided to respect my thoughts before going with the flow. And it dated back to my university days.
But I really wanted to work to get social acknowledgment rather than study again. When I asked myself what I wanted to do, my days working as a marketing strategist was always popping in mind. I had never worked in the US and my English level was not high, but the possibility to intern was there. I thought it was just great timing for me to try new things, and felt I should find a marketing internship in the US.
When I came to this conclusion all of a sudden, I googled “San Francisco Internship” the next day. I found the blog of a Japanese person who joined an internship at a design company in San Francisco — the one I would eventually work for later.
Two months before this, I visited my best friend living in the East Bay. She was from the same university as me, and we spent time together in Utah as exchange students for 10 months. After working in Tokyo for 10 years, she moved to the US after getting married to an American guy and started working in San Jose.
My major was American Studies. The reason why I wanted to study about the US was due to the diverse culture. Growing up, I, one of the third-generation Koreans living in Japan, felt I didn’t live in the right place, and so I was attracted by this big country having many ethnicities and cultures in a community handling many frictions and issues inside and out.
The reason I went to Utah in the first place was because of somebody else’s influence, of course. I knew there was a notice to start the application for the exchange program, but I thought it was not for me but for smarter students. When the first round of applications was over and the second round opened, my professor told me “you should go.”
“No way, I won’t be able to catch up with classes in a university in the US,” I replied.
But he said, “You don’t need to be worried about the credits. You should just feel how the country is like. All you need to do is just to live.”
Then I quickly took the TOEFL test, the English language proficiency test needed for university, work and immigration. But the results were not delivered until the day of the interview of the exchange program. Even one of the interviewers was amazed and told me, “How are we supposed to judge if you are qualified without a TOEFL score?” I thought that it would be no surprise if I did not get the position in the program with such a hasty, last-minute idea, but there was my name on the notice paper of selected exchange students on the school notice board.
In this way, my participation in the program was decided in a very short time. And I knew there was another student from our university to join the program. I still remember when I first met her in the fast-food shop close to our university. She was so nice and smart, and I was a little bit overwhelmed.
I lived in Logan, a small city in northern Utah, which was conservative and less diverse compared to San Francisco. Still, it was a lot more diverse and the ratio of minority people is higher than in Japan, and I liked it. It was in 2002–2003, but I think the university made many efforts to drive students’ awareness on diversity, such as inviting Spike Lee as a special lecturer and setting a coming out week for LGBTQ students.
These 10 months are a treasured memory in my life. Every experience was so amazing to me, and I still feel like it was more than 10 months. There was no social media, no Youtube, no nothing at that time, so I was quite isolated from information about Japan. I remember Japan was so fresh in my eyes when my program ended and I came back to Japan for the first time in 10 months.
The biggest memory in my exchange program was interviewing about ethnic identity with a Korean American student. He immigrated to the US when he was little from Korea, but he said “I’m definitely American,” and it shocked me. I was born and grew up in Japan, and I cannot speak Korean, but I have a Korean passport and never thought I was Japanese. It was simply envious that he can have the sense of being a member of the country where he lived regardless of birth country or ethnicity. This experience made me feel like I needed to live in this country longer.
After coming back to Japan at the end of my program in Utah, I spent a busy life and started thinking that living in the US again would be an unrealistic idea. I was okay with my life since many other people had similar ones. On the other hand, my best friend, who spent treasured time with me in Utah, went back to the US and started a new career. She got a job and developed a new life there. It was inspiring to me who was sulky in Sendai where I still had no friends and no true job.
So, when I thought I wanted to restart my life in the US, I thought San Francisco would be the right place to go. There was no logic. Just my intuition. Thus, I went with the flow again and started looking for an internship position in San Francisco.
