The Star Festival
Shelby Lin (Ward Melville High School)
My mother lived only the first years of her life in Japan before her parents moved to Hawaii, and she
and her brothers spent their childhood in the United States. Years later, when their children had children of
their own, my grandparents moved back to the same wooden house in Tokyo that they had built decades
before. They had gone to sell that house but months became years, and they never left.

We visited them there two summers ago. It was my first time in Japan and the breath of culture and
heritage we encountered shocked me. We arrived the week of Tanabata, the Japanese star festival, and the
sidewalks of their Sugamo neighborhood were adorned with colored strips of paper and folded cranes.

My grandmother met us at Tokyo International Airport and as we walked along crowded sidewalks she
explained the meaning behind the tanzaku that hung from bamboo stalks.

“You write wishes on the backs of the paper, then hang them on the trees,” she said, laughing a little
as I stopped to read one before realizing it was written in beautiful little characters I could not understand.

My grandmother had always been healthy for her age, but it had been a couple of years since I had last seen
her and I’d not noticed before how slowly we had to walk for her to keep up. I was taller than her now as
well, by a combination of my growth and her rounded back.

“Wishes?” I asked, fingering them and wishing I could know what these people hoped for. We passed
modern apartments and tiny white houses set along straight narrow streets in precise lines. The feeling was
so orderly that when we came upon their house it was a shock. The lawn was an overgrown mess of grass
and bushes, adding a wild feeling to the beautiful wooden house.

My grandfather, eighty years old at the time, was sitting outside on a wooden stool when we arrived.

I could barely remember the last time I had seen him, which was about a decade before. He leaned over a
cane when he walked, and spent much of his time gazing off in silence. My mother treated him like a
fragile object and we followed his example. I wasn’t sure what to say to him then, though I wish now that I
had asked him what his Tanabata wish was.

We spent ten days in Japan, during which I spent each day with my grandparents and saw more of the
half of my heritage that I had been missing. I felt regret in my chest each time I heard Japanese being
spoken, but most especially when it came from my mother’s mouth. She’d never tried to teach it to us and
after that visit I wished she had. Japan was so different, so exciting and beautiful, that I decided that I
would return in the future.

That day in Tokyo, I looked at those tanzaku slips and wished that I could read them and write my
own in those beautiful little characters. I began taking Japanese lessons the month after we came home.

The next year, my grandfather passed away in his house with my grandmother seated beside him. She
moved to California to live with one of her sons, and their house in Tokyo eventually burned down, but I
have the feeling that a part of her still lives there.

I still plan to live in Japan one day, hopefully for a year after college to teach English or work as an
interpreter. Japan, the homeland of my mother and my ancestors, represents an unknown part of who I am,
a part that I will one day explore.

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