The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World, by Tracy Slater
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The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World, by Tracy Slater
Best Ebook Online The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World, by Tracy Slater
The brave, wry, irresistible journey of a fiercely independent American woman who finds everything she ever wanted in the most unexpected place. Shufu: in Japanese it means “housewife,” and it’s the last thing Tracy Slater ever thought she’d call herself. A writer and academic, Tracy carefully constructed a life she loved in her hometown of Boston. But everything is upended when she falls head over heels for the most unlikely mate: a Japanese salary-man based in Osaka, who barely speaks her language. Deciding to give fate a chance, Tracy builds a life and marriage in Japan, a country both fascinating and profoundly alienating, where she can read neither the language nor the simplest social cues. There, she finds herself dependent on her husband to order her food, answer the phone, and give her money. When she begins to learn Japanese, she discovers the language is inextricably connected with nuanced cultural dynamics that would take a lifetime to absorb. Finally, when Tracy longs for a child, she ends up trying to grow her family with a Petri dish and an army of doctors with whom she can barely communicate. And yet, despite the challenges, Tracy is sustained by her husband’s quiet love, and being with him feels more like “home” than anything ever has. Steadily and surely, she fills her life in Japan with meaningful connections, a loving marriage, and wonder at her adopted country, a place that will never feel natural or easy, but which provides endless opportunities for growth, insight, and sometimes humor. A memoir of travel and romance, The Good Shufu is a celebration of the life least expected: messy, overwhelming, and deeply enriching in its complications.
The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World, by Tracy Slater - Amazon Sales Rank: #781897 in Books
- Brand: Slater, Tracy
- Published on: 2015-06-30
- Released on: 2015-06-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.63" h x 1.25" w x 5.88" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World, by Tracy Slater Review
Praise for The Good Shufu
“Winning . . . Slater’s retrenchments [are] epic, spanning continents, cultures, and languages. She relates them in pleasingly earnest, self-reflective, and sometimes amusing ways.”—Boston Globe“With self-deprecating humor and a sharp recognition of the prejudices and stereotypes operating at both ends of the globe, author Tracy Slater quietly breaks down assumptions with a keen sense of humor. . . . The Good Shufu is a literary memoir with enough cross-cultural wisdom to warrant a place on any Japanophile’s bookshelf.”—The Japan Times“[A] moving cross-cultural memoir.”—National Geographic
“A heartfelt and moving tale, coupling insights into two remarkably different cultures with a love story that, as much as any true love story can, delivers a happy ending.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The pleasure of this book is Slater’s ability to wrestle with very real contradictions in her life even as she masterfully unfolds a story of falling in love and finding home in unexpected places.”—BookPage“Fascinating and often comical . . . You know what they say: Life is full of surprises, the heart wants what it wants, etc., etc. Slater’s touching story proves the adages true while shedding light on what it takes to make a relationship — inter-cultural or otherwise — work.”—Bustle
“Tracy Slater’s charming The Good Shufu reminded me of Eat, Pray, Love — rewritten by Woody Allen! With equal parts humor and heart, Slater narrates her tale of falling in love with a Japanese man and, then, Japan itself. Slater’s real triumph is her ability to probe both inward and outward, to chronicle both the ways in which Japan transformed her—emotionally, politically, even physically—and her evolving take on Japan itself. Brave, unabashed, and also just plain old fun.”—Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year “A thoughtful, involving examination of what happens when a thoroughly American woman says “I do” not just to a man, but to a new culture, country, and way of life. Filled with fascinating tidbits about Japan's quirks and customs, this debut is as informative as it is entertaining.” —Sarah Pekkanen, internationally bestselling author of Catching Air “From Boston to Osaka, Tracy Slater writes about the intersection of romance and culture shock with great sensitivity. The Good Shufu is a story about how people communicate and love each other in unexpected ways and places, a fish-out-of-water tale that illustrates the ever-expanding definition of family.”—Ann Mah, author of Mastering the Art of French Eating “Tracy Slater is one of those great women who refused to give up when so many people said she should. (She’s my kind of woman.) Honest, brave, and moving, this is the perfect book for someone who needs to believe big dreams can come true.” —Amy Cohen, New York Times–bestselling author of The Late Bloomer’s Revolution
“Told with tenderness and insight, Slater’s story gives us permission to gambatte (go for it!) whether our biggest dream is to travel the world or start a family. The Good Shufu upends traditional notions of strength and identity and offers a new language for what it means to be home.”—Janna Cawrse Esarey, author of The Motion of the Ocean
About the Author Tracy Slater is the founder of Four Stories, a global literary series in Boston, Osaka, and Tokyo, for which she was awarded the PEN New England’s Friend to Writers Award in 2008. An essay on her bi-continental life was published in Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008, and her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, The Chronicle Review, and the New York Times Motherlode blog.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1 I met him in Kobe, Japan, in May 2004. Three weeks later, he told me he loved me. At least I thought that’s what he said. We were hidden away far past midnight in my dorm room at a corporate training center. He was balanced above me on his arms while I stared up from below. I was a new faculty member in an East Asia executive MBA program. All twenty of my students were men. He was one of them. I’d already fallen in love with him, too. I was supposed to be teaching these men business communication: how to lead teams and run meetings in a language and culture not their own. I knew almost nothing about English as a second language—or ESL—and had been hired under the flawed assumption that since I taught writing to American graduate students in Boston I could coach this group of Asian businessmen to talk like native English speakers. I began to realize what I was up against on my first day of class, when I learned that most of my students had never worked with a woman who didn’t serve them tea. Anyway, by now, a few weeks into the job, I was already failing miserably in the classroom, never mind my extracurricular late-night transgressions with a student who could barely speak English but had already begun to make my heart spin.*** Back in Boston a month and a half earlier, on the day I’d been recruited for the job, I’d been warned I might confront challenges as a young American woman teaching senior Asian businessmen. It was early April, before I’d ever set foot in the Far East, and the Korean faculty director of the program had tried, indirectly, to prepare me. I had yet to learn that in East Asia the most important communication is almost always indirect, where meaning is often a destination arrived at through multiple circuitous way-stops. The director was sitting behind the broad desk in his office, books piled high against the wall, when he introduced his pitch to me. The window behind him boasted a panoramic view of the Charles River, Cambridge stretched out beyond. One of MIT’s domes stood proud and gray in the distance, as if nodding sagely at its lesser colleagues across the water. “The executive students all work for global Japanese and Korean corporations,” he said. “You’ll be traveling with them to Kobe, Beijing, and Seoul for each of the program’s monthlong summer modules, where they’ll see firsthand the manufacturing sectors across a range of markets. Then they all come here for nine months.” He drew his hands wide in an expansive sweep, as if displaying the whole group in miniature right there. “They’ll finish their degrees in Boston before returning next spring to their homes and companies in Asia.” He smiled broadly, then sat back and folded his hands. “You won’t be giving them grades. Just sit with them at meals, get them talking, go to their marketing and strategy classes with them. Help them on their case studies and assignments. Some may be demanding, but you can handle this, yes?” He leaned forward toward me, both hands on his desk. “You have a Ph.D., so you’re a professional, no?” Sitting back, he laughed then, at what I wasn’t sure, but I laughed along with him. I wanted to suggest that—for the business-class tickets and a summer semester of highly compensated travel as a kind of “conversation coach”—this was work I could easily manage. In truth, not only had I never been to East Asia or taught ESL, my Ph.D. was in English and American literature, not linguistics or organizational behavior. Moreover, I barely had an interest in cultures other than my own, although within my liberal academic circle, my provincialism wasn’t something I’d easily admit. That April morning, just hours before the director offered me the job, I’d woken in my street-level studio apartment in Boston’s South End, the city where I’d always lived and planned to settle for good. As the sun streamed through my old floor-to-ceiling windows, I lay in my high-thread-count sheets and savored both the stillness and predictability of my life as a left-leaning, thirty-six-year-old confirmed Bostonian: overeducated, fiercely protective of my independence, and deeply committed to the cultural values of the liberal northeastern U.S. Around me in the silence, the light swept across my bookshelves, full of volumes leaning left and right. Somewhere in the middle of all the Shakespeare and Milton, the Hemingway, Mailer, and Morrison, and the barely skimmed pages of literary theory, stood my own thinly bound doctoral dissertation on gender and violence in the modern American novel. On the floor lay a half-read copy of Vogue. My laptop was perched on a makeshift desk in front of kitchenette shelves stuffed not with dishes or pans but with papers and syllabi from ten years of teaching at local universities, which were crammed next to shopping bags and old tax returns. In the storage loft above the mini kitchen were all the shoes I couldn’t fit in the studio’s small closet, rows of heels and boots and little ballet-slipper flats stacked on wooden racks. As I did most days, I lingered awhile before leaving for my meeting on campus, luxuriating in the quiet, grateful for both the life I’d built around me and what it lacked: no complicated marriage or crying child to colonize my time. Then I climbed out of bed, showered, dressed, added a swipe of makeup, and stopped at my usual café for a soy chai before heading to the Boston-area university where I now taught. On my way out for the day, I ignored the mezuzah my mother had insisted I hang on the door frame, its tiny Old Testament scroll hidden in silver casing. The only time my regular morning ritual differed, before my trip to East Asia changed everything, was the one day a week I’d go to Norfolk Corrections Center, a men’s medium-security prison. Then I’d wake at dawn, skip the makeup, wear an old pair of flats, and drive the barren highway west. I’d reach the barbed-wired complex early, then pass through a series of electric gates before arriving at the classroom where I’d spend three hours teaching literature and gender studies in a college-behind-bars program to male convicts. This was the work I truly valued, one in a string of progressive education jobs I’d had: running writing classes for homeless adults, preparing inner-city teens for college, teaching first-generation undergraduates at a public university. The writing seminars for American MBAs funded my work in these other programs. Either way, whether I was headed to prison or the ivory tower, I always began my morning firmly rooted on the exact path I had scripted for myself, what one ex-boyfriend termed “your life as a nonpracticing communist.” I had a large circle of like-minded friends; a combination of academic jobs that satisfied me politically, socially, and intellectually; plus cash to buy great shoes. I’d planned each aspect of my world meticulously until together they created a kind of bulwark against the handful of mistakes I swore I’d never make: to take blind leaps of faith, give up my home in Boston, become dependent on a man, build a traditional nuclear family like my parents had, or, most important cook dinner on a regular basis. When he sought me out, the Korean director knew me only from my reputation around the business school. The year before, the deans had hired me to create a new writing curriculum for their on-campus graduate management program, and though I told him I’d never even been to East Asia, let alone taught there, the director had convinced himself that I was the woman to turn his foreign execs-in-training into English conversationalists—and to start in just a few weeks’ time. Once he floated the idea by me, I assured him (remembering my Spanish- and Vietnamese-speaking students in lockup), “Well, I have had nonnative speakers in my literature classes before, lots of times.” “Excellent.” He nodded, confirming my perfection for the job. I played along. After all, I reasoned, the money they were offering for three months of work was more than five times what I’d make in a whole year teaching in prison, and I liked to travel. Besides, what could these East Asian executives possibly throw at me that I hadn’t already seen either behind bars or in an MBA classroom?
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Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful. A delightful cross-cultural love story By N. B. Kennedy Tracy Slater had a dream life. She lived in Boston, a city she loved with a passion, in an apartment that was dear to her. She had a promising academic career, teaching gender studies to undergraduates and creative writing to MBA students and to the inmates at a prison. One day, she's picked to teach East Asians in an executive MBA program how to lead teams and run meetings in English. That assignment changes her life forever.Almost immediately upon her posting to Japan, she meets Toru, one of her students. Their attraction is instant, despite an almost total lack of ability to communicate orally. Toru is what is called in Japan a salaryman, an employee of a company he most likely will work for his entire life, most likely in Japan. He's the oldest son, which tasks him with the care of his elderly and failing father, a role that further precludes him from leaving his life to join Tracy for hers in America.So, what's an independent American gal supposed to do with that set of facts? It isn't long before Tracy is jetting between Boston and Japan, trying to hang onto her old life while adopting a new one in a culture that is absolutely baffling to her, not to mention seemingly the opposite of everything she stands for. "How did I become this person? This woman, the one who would consider forfeiting her way of life, her home, her world for a man's? And for a country like Japan where women hold so little power?" she writes.Tracy tells an enchanting story of negotiating two such different worlds while she contemplates becoming what is known in Japan as a shufu, a housewife. She writes of how she begins to let go of her preconceived notion of what her life would be like. Because of her deep and abiding love for Toru, and his encouragement of her independence and patience for her emotional journey, they make it work. The author ultimately settles into a new understanding of herself. "I wanted to believe I was an independent woman, but deep down I wondered if, even more than autonomy, I prized how completely Toru took care of me, especially in his country," she writes.The book is divided into what one psychologist has called the five states of culture shock: departure, honeymoon, disintegration, reintegration, autonomy. The author is a perceptive and charming host, and she tells a story that fascinates from beginning to end, never falling into generalities or stereotypes as she introduces us to her expanding world. I'm a big fan of The Good Wife, and now of The Good Housewife!
28 of 36 people found the following review helpful. This is No "Eat, Pray Love" it's More Like "The Ugly American" By BumbleB This could have been a good match for me, as Ms. Slater and I have a few things in common: I grew up in Massachusetts, I spent a lot of time in "Southie" when it was still an Irish, blue-collar section of Boston and we've both spent time in Japan. But because of my background I'm afraid this book was not the right match.I have a degree in Japanese Language and Lit and lived in Japan for two years. I started in HS hosting Japanese students over three years, then went to Okinawa as a junior. After college, I was the only American in a prestigious girls' private school with over 1,500 students and over 100 Japanese staff (about 50/50 men and women) with a Principal and Vice Principal who were Japanese NUNS. I came back to the US and spent two summers teaching Japanese college students from Nagasaki English (boys and girls).:: Stop here if you do not want to read spoilers! ::As a memoir, I cannot say anything to invalidate Ms. Slater's experience in Japan, of course, as we all experience life through our own eyes and it's an individual's POV. However, I take exception to the book's implication that Japan is place so alien and unreachable (and somehow less than society and culture in the US) that Ms. Slater's experience and POV is a common one any American would experience. In fact, I found the first 148 pages of her not even trying the least bit to communicate, making assumptions about the Japanese people and culture based on American thought and refusing to do anything to learn the smallest thing about Japan except through her husband disingenuous.This is someone who is highly educated, teaches graduate students at a top Boston university and lived a life of upper class privilege (although she claimed at some point in the book to be "middle class") who can't navigate the simplest thing (shopping, eating out, basic phrases, walking in the neighborhood) in a different country where the people bend over backwards to help you and graciously ignore any faux pas or rudeness you cause. At the same time, she had very high expectations for Toru, her future husband, to fit into life in Boston complete with speaking English at a higher level than he could manage and being social with her friends. I don't get this double-standard.I'm concerned about her assumptions and stereotypes about Japan giving readers in the US an incorrect view of the people and culture. I get that from a writing standpoint there needs to be a story arc or character arc, but this goes beyond building a story board where the main character make a complete change by the end.For example, Japanese women being subservient to their husbands and having to stay home instead of being independent. It's not always the case at all. I worked with dozens of Japanese women who taught full-time (6 days a week in Japan) with families, some were still working at over 50. My landlady ran a large boarding house and taught part-time with kids going into college and one entering high school. My Japanese best friend and her fiancé clearly had a relationship where he worked but she called ALL the shots and he accommodated her fully much like Toru did for Ms. Slater. This was the case for several other Japanese women I knew. The biggest reason someone needs to be home in Japan is that the education system is so demanding that a parent (99% mothers) has to manage their child's educational career from pre-school on. The mother takes care of every need and these kids study 12-14 hours a day.She includes "cute" anecdotes that are supposed to show how alien and quirky Japanese people are, for example, otaku: "Toru explained that Japan bred otaku of every stripe, fanatics passionate about one phenomenon or another: manga, anime, even cosplay, where adults dress up and walk around as characters from video games, movies, and comic books." Um, we have that in the US... Hasn't Ms. Slater (or her big publisher's editor) ever heard of Comicon? Or watched the Big Bang Theory? Or heard of geeks or nerds (I am a proud one!) It's 2005 in the book, but readers may think that it's referring to today. Many, many US teens love anime, manga and graphic novels that are the fodder of otaku pursuits in the US, too.Finally, after page 148 where she realizes she can't communicate the slightest bit with her new future in-laws, clearly causing social situations that are difficult to tolerate and maneuver for Toru and his family, Ms. Slater decides to learn some Japanese. I felt this was a more realistic direction although she is self-serving to the bitter end of the book. And it's the only reason I gave this book "three stars" instead of two.I could go on, but I think it's up to the reader to see the incongruity and discrepancies and to read knowing that this person's experience is not a true education on Japan and Japanese society. If you are interested in reading some (fictional) books that include insight to the Japanese mind and experience I highly recommend Ruth Ozeki's "A Tale for the Time Being" A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel which through the story and footnotes, she conveys a lot of Japanese culture in a compelling story about a non-mainstream Japanese teen. Also I enjoyed the fictionalized "American Fuji" by college professor, Sarah Backer, who writes about her experience teaching in Shizuoka, Japan.American Fuji
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. We Need The Good Shufu Because We Need to Believe By Megan Sullivan In "Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” Philip Lopate explains that non-fiction writers need to make themselves characters in their writing; they needs to exaggerate their flaws and laugh more at themselves. In other words, the best writers should get their point across all the while making the reader feel more at ease. Tracy Slater does this brilliantly. One suspects the author is more generous and more intellectually circumspect than she may initially appear in her memoir. The astute reader understands this because she recognizes that Slater always points out how Slater has misread a situation in the Japanese city she has moved to in order to take a chance on herself and love. Slater consistently acknowledges the intellectual gap between what she believes and what she feels. In her version Japan is never the problem; Slater always is.Slater makes herself a character, because she believes that while her story is unique (she has moved from a happy, comfortable, intellectual life in Boston to a less comfortable, happy, and sometimes more restricted life in Osaka), we readers could and would do the same thing. Slater believes we too could suspend disbelief, put on hiatus the intellectual and cultural life we have so carefully cultivated, and move across continents leaving family and friends behind to be with a man we love and a culture we would learn to call home.The thing is, though, most of us would not do this. Most of us would be too afraid to leave behind uncertainty and comfort, the known and the familiar. Furthermore, most of us would not be nearly as honest and as forthright as Slater is (not to mention as beautiful a wordsmith as she is), and that's why we need her book.
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