American Impostor

Do Chinese People have Quinceañeras?

Tokyo. July 2017

Though I've never lived here, I feel a strange nostalgia while walking through Tokyo. It could be because the last time I was here I was a different person. Even though It was only three years ago, I hadn't started taking the tests yet and I was still discovering that the world outside Chicago was a much more privileged world for someone that looked like me. I was still discovering a much more privileged version of myself.

I could also be feeling this because Tokyo reminds me a bit of the 90's in America. Power lines still line the streets. An old man brandishes a cigarette indoors at a diner. There are vending machines at what feels like every corner. Even arcades are alive and well, filled with players and joysticks and buttons that went extinct in most of America when I was a teenager.

Tokyo still looks like its glory days in the 90's, when Japan was one of the strongest economies in the world, set to overtake America's economy by the end of the century. When the Americans (or I guess I mean we) feared them. Movies like Back to the Future II or Robocop 3 depicted its protagonists living in a future under Japanese corporate overlords. Tom Clancy wrote a Jack Ryan book about the "unfair" trading practices the Japanese used against Americans. The animosity stopped for the most part after Japan's economy crashed and stagnated.

But the feeling is probably because my adolescence was spent watching the media of this country. I didn't like watching WWE wrestling or MTV's The Real World or whatever the cool white kids were watching. I watched Dragonball Z on Toonami after school and pirated episodes of obscure anime I was recommended by the nerdy white kids I was friends with. The sounds of the metro or the summer sounds of locusts or even the architecture of the walls and buildings are somewhere deep inside my formative memories.

I need to stop pondering about my feelings though. I'm not here for a vacation like last time. I'm here for an exam.

This will be my first time taking an IELTS. I won't know what the process is. That gives me some anxiety.

I've never taken an IELTS because they usually don't pay as well. There are a lot of people that can pass a basic English test. The other exams need college-level English, math, science, logic, whatever.

There's fewer of us that are smart enough to ace those exams, brave/stupid enough to be an impostor, and without-alternatives enough to do it. ADHD probably put me in all these categories, especially that last one-- The reason I don't take these exams for myself and go to some prestigious school for my master's is because I know what'll happen after I have to get a job with whatever degree I've chosen-- The same thing that happened the last three times. I'll get bored, depressed, and I'll fail.

But where was I? I didn't take the tests that paid lower because the tests all cost the same to me. The real cost isn't time or energy. I enjoy flying to new countries, and unlike other impostors, I usually didn't need a return flight-- I just stay in a country and explore it until the next exam flies me somewhere else. It's a perfect arrangement for me. It fits my mind's hunger for novelty, stimulation, and knowledge. Anyone I've met that's been abroad for as long as me seems to have ADHD too.

The real cost is the risk. The Black Swan. The tiny, tiny chance I'll get caught. The tiny, tiny chance someone will want to call the cops instead of just kicking me out. The tiny, tiny chance that some company will decide to fuck me by pressing charges on me in a foreign country or the legal system will care enough to imprison me rather than just deport me.

Gao, the guy who introduced me to the tests, was only deported from the States when he was caught, so it's a good bet I'll only be deported if I get caught.