When he asked me how to say “I love you” in Japanese, for some reason I translated linguistically, but mistranslated culturally, telling him it was 愛してる (Aishiteru). When we say “I love you,” our mouths widen into Midwestern vowels, lips and teeth cleaving the “v” and “y.” Japanese is important to me, and as such Jack has made an effort in the past years to slowly pick up turns of phrase, with the eventual goal of becoming proficient in my other mother tongue. Our relationship is an English language relationship. I had known from the moment I saw him, not in a “love-at-first-sight” kind of way, but in an “I am loving you” kind of way-a labor of incremental, deepening emotion, pursued day by day, moment by moment. The confirmation relieved me, my posture relaxing in a bodily sigh as I told him that, of course, I loved him back. Jack took it in stride, laughing, and then gently said that he loved me. Finally, one night, I turned to him in frustration and told him I thought such coy conversations were for cowards. When Jack and I first began to date, we skirted the phrase for months, leaving pockets of meaningful silence in conversations where “I love you” might have fit. One day not long ago, my partner Jack looked up from his phone to giddily tell me that his best friend had finally told his girlfriend he loved her. Her mother was exactly right: In Japanese, there is no way to say “I love you.”Ī tenet of American romance that I have never understood is the fuss surrounding the word “love.” In high school, my friends used to giggle while comparing when significant others would employ it, as if it was something to be kept locked away in a drawer until the right time. For my friend and me, it was cause for immediate peals of laughter. To non-Japanese speakers, this might seem like a strange sentiment. “Oh, I don’t mind,” her mother replied in English. Last week, a half-Japanese friend of mine told me that on a visit to Japan, she asked her Japanese mother if she felt any angst over her daughter not being able to speak Japanese. This is Mistranslate, a monthly column by Nina Li Coomes about language, self-expression, and what it means to exist between cultures.
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