Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on November 2012

“Karin made Teresa stupid!” was a familiar chant in our Japanese language class. I didn’t mind. Half the time, I initiated it.

After six months of studies, I could only barely keep up with the vocabulary—let alone speak in complete sentences. My teachers were patient with me; in return I butchered their language. Language skills are acquired through diligent practice and repetitive refinement. That wasn’t my style.

I was the kind of girl who put on her planning cap two weeks before the exam. For two weeks, every chapter, every grammar point, every hour was accounted for. On final exams, I regularly scraped through.

I had the utmost confidence in my cramming techniques. After exams, I thanked my brain for coming through again and then took it on a semester-long siesta. In its dormant state, my brain tended to settle itself into the lower tier of the class. It knew it wasn’t living up to its potential, but it was content.

This was before the Italian girls showed up.

The five of them flew in that summer straight out of three years of East Asian studies. Unlike my classmates and I, they didn’t sign up to acquire a student visa, but to perfect their language skills. When it came to deciphering kanji, we marveled at how two Italians were as knowledgeable as one Chinese. The teachers were taken aback by their passionate debates over the subtleties of Japanese grammar. Or rather, we could only guess at the subject, for Italian had overthrown English as the lingua franca.

The rest of the class saw the girls as variations of the same student. I got to sit next to Teresa, however, and she was special. In class, she shouted out answers (usually correct), then turned to translate the meaning for me in English. For fun, I joined in on the shouting out. The learning curve had gone up and I suspected my Japanese level with it.

But it made Teresa too relaxed. She went from engaging her brain to distracting her neighbors (me, mainly) with naughty doodles on the teachers’ handouts.

One day, Teresa called out an answer. “Chigau!” Nishiguchi sensei snapped. Wrong!

Yet, when he revealed the right answer, it was exactly what Teresa had said. From that day, every time the sensei looked over to us, he shouted “Chigau!” Was he displeased with us for messing around, or was he the victim of selective hearing? Teresa was nearly in tears and inexplicably, I felt guilty. “It’s me, isn’t it? I’m contagious.”

Teresa looked at me sadly. She wasn’t being cruel, just aware of a greater force at work when she answered, “Yes, you made me stupid.”

And so it became our running joke. She was able to blame her brain blips on me and for the first time, my Japanese abilities, or lack thereof, acquired a power. Stupid power. Shiromizu, the kindest of our teachers, shook her head at us.

At the end of term, I decided to approach the final exam differently. Instead of cramming, I reviewed at a comfortable pace. I wanted to see what my brain was really capable of.

The Italian girls ended up with scores in the 80s. Teresa got top spot—the fooling around clearly hadn’t affected her.

My respectable 70 left me in an unfamiliar limbo. I couldn’t tell whether it was cause for relief or despair but at last, I knew where I stood: I wasn’t stupid.

That day, Shiromizu sensei patted me on the back. In her eyes, any struggling student who passed the test should be commended. I understood then why she’d disapproved of our “stupid power” jokes: it must be hard teaching someone who tells herself she won’t learn.

The exam result made no real difference to my day-to-day performance. But it did affect the way I sat. I no longer slouched as the illiterate dimwit who needed an overhaul to survive the final exam. Though Teresa and her Italian sisters flew back home, the occasional urge to shout out answers stayed with me.
I did miss those brain siestas, though.