The incident happened in my second quarter at OIT. I attended a class in Purvine Hall. The class had a friendly atmosphere. Even I had a few person that I could talk to. Actually, that was a rare class with favorable level of tension where I could ask students sitting next to me about something unclear in the lecture.
In most of the classes, particularly during my first term, I was often the only foreign student in the classroom. The courses were for freshman students, who were so called straight-out-of-high-school kids. They had no extra room in their minds to imagine what it would be like to listen to lectures in a foreign language. They were literally surviving in the course, as I noticed some of them, one by one, disappear due to the loss of financial support after some bad grades. It was natural to them that they get along only with those who could provide them with some benefit.
In a sense, I was a handicapped person. Linguistically handicapped, for sure. And their selection over who to talk with was done cruelly and instantly. They seemed to regard me as potential burden to their studies. Once I tried to talk to the student sitting next to me, when I missed to hear explanation on the next assignment. The person, without gave me a chance to finish my question, said, “That’s not my job. That’s professor’s. Leave me alone.” This kind of reaction happened quite often until they began to consider me beneficial.
Anyway, that was my situation in the first foreign campus life; when I attended a class in Purvine Hall. Purvine was a beautifully designed building. It has a spiral stairway with small hall at the foot of them, where students could take a rest. After the class, I passed by the small hall toward the stairway. I noticed a girl waving. She was smiling on the stool and waving to someone.
I looked around because her eyes were obviously watching somewhere around me. There were some other students coming and going. They just walked away, without giving any glance on her. She kept waving and said “hi” to someone unidentified.
I looked at her. She was sitting about 20 ft. away from me. I could see her in the eye, which meant she was quite possibly waving to and saying hi to me. The burning question was her reason for waving, since I did not know her at all. I did not know her at all. No one that I did not know would say hi to me. I turned around to walk away from her as others did.
Then she yelled “Hey!” The “hey” drastically increased the possibility of myself as the object of her waving. I decided to take a risk. The risk of feeling embarrassed by mistakenly reacting to a total stranger. I turned back. I pointed myself and said “Me?” in a small voice, just in case that I was wrong. She could not hear my voice. She appeared a little happy with my reaction and smiled. She said, “Don’t be rude. I want to talk to you. Don’t you have some time?”
There still was more than 15 ft. distance between me and her. I wanted to make sure that she was really talking to me. I pointed myself again and said, “Are you talking to me?”
Suddenly she stood up and strode toward me. She started to speak like a machine gun, “You are Sho, right? I’m Cathy. You know Cindy. I’m Cindy’s friend. She and me went to Mazama together. You know Mazama? A high school ’round here. Anyway I’m taking Math 102 and got this killing assignment. I called Cindy yesterday and told her about it. She told me to ask you for help. ’Cause you know, she told me you’d helped her doing her homework before. So I went, like, ‘Hey I know that guy. I’m taking a class with him.’ Cindy didn’t know that we are taking this class together. Do you have a minute now? Let’s sit here. Okay, will you take a look at this one?” She continued like an endless English listening drill material.
Her English was too quick for my English processor to synchronize to decode what’s going on. Furthermore, I was amazed to see how abruptly she broke into the conversation with a stranger. Frankly speaking, I was at a loss for words. Then she noticed me lost and paused to talk about her math assignment. She wanted to make me follow her by resetting the conversation. She said, “Hey, Sho. You know, when I was waving to you, I was wondering. I was wondering what’s wrong with your nose.”
This was the first time that I realized that the Japanese people point their own noses when they indicate themselves.