The Deception of "I Understand"

['Tis the season, 31 Ice Cream! Scoops of Brown Sugar & Cinnamon and Rum Raisin!!]

I've recently encountered several occasions on which to tell the story of how my family ended up immigrating to the States. [It goes like this: When my father was young he had the opportunity to be a visiting scholar at UCR. Our family spent a year in Riverside, and after we returned to Japan, my mother expressed to my father that she wanted to live and raise her kids in California. My father said, "OK".]

The common reaction to this story—from men and women, from Japanese and non-Japanese—is "I understand" (or some variant of it). As in, they understand my mother's desire to want to live and raise her two daughters in the United States rather than in Japan.

To which I often want to ask: What do you understand? Do you understand that life as a woman is hard in Japan? Do you understand that being a parent, as well as being a child, is hard in Japan? Do you understand that America presents liberation for such women and children?

Or maybe you understand that the United States is home to commendable gender equality. Maybe you understand that life for immigrants is easy and unproblematic in the States. Maybe you understand that moving across the Pacific Ocean solves all sorts of problems for people.

Or do you perhaps understand that it's easy for people to ask their spouses to give up their jobs—the only source of income for the family—so that they can move to a new country and build a life from scratch? Do you perhaps understand that men have it so much better than women in Japan but now all of a sudden they get to experience an even more enriching enlightenment that is the non-patriarchy in the United States? Do you perhaps understand that this decision was so obvious, so logical, so easy to make?

People, please. What can you possibly know or understand. And better yet, what can you possibly, outwardly, verbalize as something you know and understand? It's not better or worse living in one society or another, and it's not easy or difficult to choose one over the other, either. It just is. And it just is to different people in different ways, and that's perhaps the closest you can get to something you can understand.

I think it's great to want to learn what it's like, what it's not like. I think it's cool to get educated, so that you can ask thoughtful questions. But you understand? Understand what, really. Please, do tell me; I'm all ears.