Then
I was born in Helsinki, Finland. When I was three years old I moved with my parents to Västerås in Sweden, but that I don’t remember much from. My memories of the move to Kobe in Japan, where my father was to work for a Swedish trading company are considerably clearer.

By then I had become six years old and got a little sister, who was only five months old when we flew the long journey over the North Pole.

My contact with the Swedish language during our stay in Japan consisted of a couple of gramophone records with Grodan Boll, some reading-books for primary school and a subscription to Donald Duck (in Swedish). For a long time I thought Duck City was a town in Sweden. At midsummer we did the Swedish dance of the small frogs in the garden of my father’s garden and at advent my sister and I were given an advent calendar by the boss’s wife.

At home we spoke Finnish, at school and with my friends I spoke English. Outside that everything was in Japanese.

We returned to Helsinki, when I was eleven, but only for five months. After that we moved to a terrace house in Ludvika.

Does it sound a bit confusing? It was.

Spring semester in grade five. Scared, scared, scared. I have to go to school on my own. After my sheltered existence in Japan, where I was always driven to school by car, it feels very strange. I have never crossed a street by myself.

Here I am supposed to walk almost a mile to school by myself. I look in every direction several times to check that no cars are coming, even if there are only small roads and lanes with hardly any traffic.

I feel silly, especially when a classmate happens to walk the same way. I don’t want her to discover how frightened I am.
Father has suggested that I can have the room on the ground floor in our terrace house, but I am too scared.

I want to be close to the rest of the family and all the other rooms are on the top floor. What if burglars or murderers come? My sister would very much like to have the room even if she is six years younger, but daddy won’t let her - he thinks she is too young. I am ashamed about my childishness, the proof of which is that I continue to share a room on the top floor with my sister.

Everything is wrong.

I am ashamed. About not daring to live down there. About that I in nervousness often knock with my thumb knuckle on my chestbone making all my white blouses gray. About having breasts. About having my period. About being wrong.

But I’m not the only thing that is wrong. Everything else is wrong too. The children at school don’t stand up when they talk to the teacher, because of that I can’t see who he is talking to. Some classmates wear rubber boots in the classroom. I don’t like that - it would not have been allowed back in Japan.

The teacher makes an appointment with my mother to talk about how I am getting along - I look so frightened sitting rearmost in the classroom. He sincerely tries, but doesn’t manage to get in touch with me.

Here in Ludvika there is no British country club as a meeting place for people of all ages. At the Shioya Country Club there were the swimming pools and tennis courts to meet at in the summer and in the winter we could go to their library or
have our Sunday dinner there. Here in Ludvika everyone only has their own home to go to after work or school.

At the school canteen they offer strange food for lunch. I am used to bringing my own food, to have a say about my menu. A grumpy old teacher forces me to remain at the table the whole lunch hour because I can’

t swallow the fried pork I have on my plate. Lobscouse, hashed lights, pork and brown beans, lightly-smoked polona sausage with macaroni cooked in white sauce, I have not tried any of these Swedish dishes before.

Our class is sent to the dentist. He sees that I have many teeth that are loose and asks if I want anaesthetics.

Anaesthetics? What is that?

Since I ask with correct Swedish pronunciation he doesn’t understand that I really don’t know the meaning of the word. He thinks I’m just trying to be impertinent. When he brings out the syringe I get scared.

No, not anaesthetics! I shout.
He pulls out four teeth without anaesthetics. I cry. The nurse tries to comfort me. I cry all the way home. After that my mother takes me to a private dentist in stead.

My fears won’t stop. I cry at night. I want to go back to Japan. There life had some kind of order.

The world of literature becomes my haven. I read about Anne of Green Gables and other books about orphaned girls. In one of the books Anne moves from Avonlea to a larger municipality to continue her education. Anne and her friends visit each other, that is the ones who have moved there from Avonlea. Whom shall I visit? Who are the others who come from the same place as I do?

Between then and now

It was easy for me to learn new things and manage my studies well, but I didn’t play much with other children - I had had enough of separations. When I was fifteen we stayed for nine months in Helsinki again, but the company my father was working with there went bankrupt and since our housing accommodation was supplied by them we had to move. That spring semester I continued high-school in Hudiksvall in Sweden, where my father got a job with an office run by the State. I graduated from school with good marks.

After a year at the University studying to be a psychologist I dropped my studies and went off to India to search for The meaning of life. I always felt different and like an outsider and was drawn to those who also felt that way.

When I returned to Sweden after almost a year, I still didn’t know what to do with my life. I married a starry-eyed dreamer from the northern part of Sweden. He wanted to become a clergyman. Eventually I realized he was suffering from schizophrenia and had a drinking problem. We were divorced soon after our son Daniel was born.

I was impractical and inexperienced with housework, scarcely more than a child myself. I was obliged to develop other qualities to manage in this new situation. At the time Daniel was about two I joined a meditation group. It became a surrogate for an extended family. I experienced some affinity and warmth there. After fifteen years I left, because I had grown tired of their activities - everything felt like old repetitions.

When Daniel was seventeen he went through a crisis. He was thinking a lot about how his father’s life had been and started experimenting with drugs, among other reasons to obtain experiences of schizophrenic states. He had great hopes and visions about a better society. When he was eighteen he accidentally took a very high dose of LSD and drowned.

Now

I have a well-paid job and a good flat in a quiet area outside Stockholm. I socialize almost only with single women or with families, where one or both are of foreign origin. It is not a conscious choice on my part, that’s just how it has worked out. You seek the company of those you feel most affinity with.

It has taken time for me to discover what Sweden has to offer. It wasn’t many years since I found out that you can rent cottages in the archipelago of Stockholm. It is nice to be quiet and close to nature. Everything takes time, both learning to appreciate the area where you live, your own experiences and talents. During my teens I hated to live in Sweden, now I’ve understood that it is small towns and narrowmindedness that I don’t like. I like living in Stockholm - it is an international city of the same size as Kobe - and here we don’t even have earthquakes.

It is fun when I visit Finland and a bus driver or shop assistant thinks that I live there, that I belong there. I remember once when I was eight and was on holiday from Japan in Helsinki visiting my grandparents. We were walking on Unioninkatu where they lived, and I thought it was so fantastic that all the people looked like me and that I could read all the sign boards and understand what everybody said.

When I returned to Kobe a couple of years ago it felt sad that I don’t look Japanese and that no-one could see that I belonged there too. I met an Indian classmate, who had left Hinduism and joined a Buddhist sect - probably she had felt like an outsider in the Japanese Buddhist society. This search for belonging and meaning seems to be a universal characteristic. She said she had felt that the American Franciscan nuns at our school had favoured the Western girls and regarded the non-Christian Asian girls as inferior. That had never occurred to me. My family was not Christian either, but our teachers didn’t know that. Sheila and I discovered that we had been to India simultaneously when we were twenty - she in the North and I in the South.

I have turned out more of an observer of than a participant in life, I often watch the society around me from: oh, that is how the Japanese, Finns, Swedes, Englishmen or Indians do their thing! How interesting!

Earlier it was difficult, this not-belongingness. Now I am more relaxed about it.