Scattered All Over the Earth

by Yōko Tawada

one of the nice things about living in a small country is that you’re rarely ignored.

“I’d be really happy if you’d say Danish was more beautiful than any other Scandinavian language.” “pronunciation difficult because soft, mushy.

The smaller the country, the less time it takes to make friends.

Hmm

In the country where I was born, though, sexual hormones have long been practically extinct. Men weren’t expected to have hairy chests and arms, or to need to sleep with some woman at regular intervals, and women didn’t have to have breasts like balloons, and always be wanting to have children.

Among the Europeans, whose clothing grows dark and drab as summer ends, we looked dangerously gorgeous.

“I hear the policy of sending people to America has ended,” I said in as bright a tone as I could manage. “Of course, non-English speakers have an advantage over English speakers. For staying here, that is.”

With Mexico’s economy booming, Spanish speakers are now flooding in from California, greatly decreasing the West Coast’s work force. And since China has stopped exporting goods, America must produce all its daily necessities domestically, but no one there knows how to sew anymore. This being the case, they’re desperately trying to recruit immigrants who can speak English and are good with their hands. Europe, on the other hand, has developed a comprehensive welfare system that covers everyone, including immigrants, but with national budgets running low, they would rather have all the foreigners who can speak English move to America.

While many Indians come to Europe to study or for sightseeing, no one wants to stay here and spend a life suffering from cold and a lack of spices.

“The Dutch and the Scandinavians don’t bother much about how food tastes, and look how tall they get,” laughed Knut. “Maybe worrying too much about flavor stunts your growth.”

Nevertheless, to any employee, work is to some degree a place where strangers pull at you from right, left, above and below, pinching, rubbing, and generally making a mess of you from morning to night.

Though Denmark has a low crime rate, there was one crime that was on the rise. That was hate speech.

They arrived in summer, but our summers, like hope, don’t last very long: they are followed by endless winters.

What if the things we saw on the computer screen were just what somebody had cooked up, and the outside world no longer existed? True, whatever we ordered came right on time. But what if there was only one huge factory somewhere across the sea where everything we ordered was manufactured, and the rest of the world had disappeared?

“I envy you, going to such a warm place,” one of the girls said. To us, Denmark is practically the tropics.

“I’m sick of living in a Great Power, and wanted to try a little country.” I guess Americans think of their country as Great, which must mean big.

“We Eskimos never hunted because we liked it; we killed only as many animals as we needed to live, then preserved the meat and ate it slowly, never wasting it, and used the skins to make our clothes and shoes,” I explained. “Then foreign fur traders came to trick us, threatening us until soon we were killing as many sea otters as we could because their fur could be sold at high prices. After many years there were no more sea otters nearby, so we started making long trips in search of new hunting grounds. But that time was like a bad dream we don’t want to remember. Now that it’s over, we are all relieved.”

By contrast, George said, his own country was based on competition and greed, and because everybody thought only of themselves, the whole society was always in danger of falling apart. It was left to the politicians, with their public speaking skills and charisma, to somehow hold the country together.

The gap between rich and poor is so small for both men and women that there aren’t very many influential or powerful people, either. So women don’t choose a man for his wealth or rank in society. In fact, they hate arrogant men, or men who think too much about getting ahead and making money. What they really want is a kind man who likes children, and when they get hold of him, they try to get pregnant as soon as possible. What scared me most was getting a woman pregnant and not being able to go home to Greenland.

And since Denmark has no dark past of ruling India as a colony, Danes have no guilty conscience to put the brakes on their innocent curiosity.

German sentences were like trains sliding smoothly down the tracks of the grammar already embedded in my mind.

The houses that lined both sides of the street looked more like well-dressed teenagers than nouveaux riches. Money to spare, but spent with modesty and good taste.

“The light here is very beautiful. So is Mediterranean light, but it’s too comfortable, placid, lazy, muddy. Scandinavian light is transparent, always changing, second by second.”

The days when you could design your future were over.

It was difficult even for ultranationalists like Breivik to explain the difference between Norway’s traditional values and those of other European countries. In fact, Norway’s long relationship with whales was about its only distinguishing feature.

Denmark’s better off as a small country. We can leave size and greatness to the rest of the world.”

Cell phones always whisper, “Go ahead, lie,” even to callers with nothing of the sort in mind.

People are always saying the humanities are dead so it’s strange how many conferences there are.

When she asks what the conference is about, I string together a lot of English words like global transnational cross-cultural postcolonial bilingual translation to muddy the waters.

But then how to get rid of that “I represent democracy and all that’s right” sort of mask that comes with English?