Last night at book club we discussed Isabel Allende’s In the Midst of Winter. The basic premise of the book is that a chance car accident has a ripple effect on 3 people’s lives. The question “Has a chance encounter ever altered the trajectory of your life,” left me pondering the various serendipitous events that have made up my life.
I often felt the my first trip to Japan came about because I had asked the universe for an adventure. I was approaching my senior year at Oklahoma State University, as a liberal arts major in a rough economy, I was trepidatious about my future prospects. Most of my friends were going on to graduate school to stave off student debt payments--better to be a Ph.D in a booming economy than a jobless grad in a stagnant one. Competing fears plagued me as I considered my options: First, I was afraid that I was going no where with my life. I also feared I wasn't academic, financially solvent or committed enough to handle the rigors of graduate school. The one dream that drove my life was the hope, the desire, the visceral need to see the world with my own eyes and not from the pages of
books or in the comfort of my living room. I didn’t know much how people who had very few resources and substantial student loans were able to travel and live abroad but had a pretty good idea that I would need to work. I started at the library (pre-internet days) by getting the addresses of all the embassies of countries that I was even vaguely interested in visiting. I was pretty indiscriminate in the wide net I cast. Off went my hopes in sealed envelopes, returned were a surprising number of responses. Most really didn’t have anything to offer, but in the end I had decided the JET (Japanese Exchange Teaching) Program was the most promising. I put in my application and waited and waited and waited. It seemed that I hadn’t even made the first cut. I consoled myself with, next year or maybe something else will come up.
Then on February 14, 1989, I was studying in my dorm when the phone rang. I answered the phone, the caller asked: Are you Marta Wiggins? Yes, I replied. Do you want to go to Japan? Hesitant, I said Yes, who is this? It turned out, that the caller was my former roommate’s high school Japanese teacher. The teacher was from Ichinoseki, a small city in Northern Japan where a commercial high school was seeking an English teacher. The teacher thought of my recently married former roommate first. When Carolyn declined the teacher asked her if she knew anyone who would be able to go to Japan on short notice. My friend forever changed my life when she gave the teacher my name and contact information.
The next six weeks was a whirlwind of action. What to do about college?—I was in the middle of spring semester. What do about a passport?—I didn’t have one. What to do about a plane ticket?—my meager bank account barely supported me day to day. What to do about flying?—I had never been on plane in my life. What to do, indeed. In the midst of minor and major hiccups, I received a letter from the Japanese Embassy inviting me for an interview for the JET Program. I chose the bird in the hand and continued to problem solve with express envelopes until I received my visa in the mail the day before I was scheduled to leave. Because I was completely naive about many things but travel in particular, I never knew how vulnerable the whole endeavor actually was. I trusted that no matter what, I was going to be OK, that I would land on my feet. I did.
Several years go by, I move in and out of Japan and spend a year in San Francisco. Once again, at a cross roads, I apply for a fellowship in Eastern Europe. At first, I am not offered the fellowship, but then at the twelfth hour, I am selected to go to Slovakia. The hitch is that I will have to work on my official work visa while I am in the country working. I toss my life in the air to travel across Europe to become an illegal alien. I am assured that everything is a technicality and this sort of thing is done all the time—clearly my naivety was still intact. Hastily, I pack up my life and find myself several weeks later waiting and waiting at the train station in Vienna for my contact. After a while, I realize that something is wrong. I must wait hours to reach my contact at the University of Minnesota in the US to sort out the fiasco. I use my survival skills to problem solve worst case scenarios as a calming mechanism as I get a hotel and wait until it is a decent hour in the US but still quite an indecent one in Europe. Over a series of calls in a phone booth on the corner, the miscommunication is sorted out. Apparently, while I was at the train station in Vienna, my handler was 40 km away at the train station in Bratislava. By midmorning, I find myself back on track as a passenger watching the countryside disappear as my new
friend and I make our way between the two capitals. Two hours later, I find myself cradling my head as I fall head first down the stairs at the hotel I am housed at for the week-long orientation. Jet lag, after effects of the inoculations I received 48 hours earlier, uneven steps, all of these, none of these, I am not sure why I took the head first tumble-wow and once is enough, is all I have to say. These two incidents (the train station fiasco & the head first fall) foreshadowed the surreal nature of the remainder of my stay as an illegal worker, living in an illegal apartment getting paid a dead woman’s salary.
Eventually, I began to consider giving up. I had recently met someone and was assisting him with his business which showed a glimmer of a possible future but I wasn’t sure. On a lark to keep my options open, I decided to call Japan to ask my former employers to send me the want ads out of the English language newspaper.
I happened to reach my former boss on her cell phone as they were on their way to the newspaper office to place an ad for a teacher. The teacher that had replaced me had unexpectedly been called back to the US at about the same time I was pondering my next steps—stay or go, work with my friend or stay with the school? It was agreed within 5 minutes of staticky overseas lines that I would make my way back to the US for the long holiday season in order to return to Japan in what would become my 4th and final stay. The timing for this abrupt shift was so precise the fingerprints of my beleaguered guardian angel were almost visible. This is how I found myself opening the door to the apartment that I had last left a year and a half ago, at 7:00 in the evening, December 31, 1996.
Time passed, a bit less than 3 years to be exact. I enjoyed my life, I had a good job, I was a
regular feature on expat scene, and I had ties to the military base for a steady stream of American culture and consumables. As I neared a decade of traveling with 7 of those years in Japan, I began to feel that I was at a crossroads. I needed to either commit myself to living in Japan or I needed to transition myself back to the US. In the end, I decided to try returning to the US to work on my Masters in Library Information Science. I narrowed down potential schools to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Weighing plusses and minuses of each location, my friend cut through all the mental chatter by telling me that there was no
dilemma, Hawaii was the only rational choice for someone who had spent as much time as I had in Japan. Of course, she was right, who wouldn’t choose Hawaii, right? I completed my stay, returned to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving and landed in Hawaii on Thursday, December 14, 1999.
Because I landed in Hawaii with no job, no friends, no real prospects, I booked myself into a cheap no frills (fleabag) weekly rental until I could sort myself out. That first evening, I felt fear as I looked around at the not very clean private room, shared kitchen set up. What if I failed? What if I couldn’t find a job? What if…? I allowed myself about 30 minutes of tears and self-pity before I bucked myself up, walked a block over to Safeway and purchased a bag full of cleaning supplies. I spent the next 3 hours, brightening my environment and my mood. The next day, as I breakfasted at Zippy’s, I decided I would spend the day getting the lay of the land and in the evening, I would contact someone in the local running club that I had reached out to before leaving Japan. I purchased a newspaper to peruse on the bus down to Waikiki. At the bus stop, a local guy in suit asked me if I was living in Hawaii. I’m not sure what his actual intentions were, I know I looked about as green as you can get. But in the light of day, I felt he was harmless enough for the moment and let him know that I was new on the island and that I was an English teacher. I would be looking for a job sooner rather than later. It happened that he sold advertising in a Japanese language newspaper. He had just visited a language school in Waikiki that was looking for teachers. He gave me the name and the address of the school. I made my way to the Institute of Intensive English to drop off my resume. I met with the Director, she told me that in January when new classes started up she would be able to give me a class. This was the best news possible, a two-week vacation followed by income. With a job in hand, I spent relaxing day exploring Waikiki, the tears from the night all but forgotten. In the evening I called Brad and arranged to meet him and other running club members for an afternoon on the boat before a late afternoon run. I guess, I passed the test because that evening Brad asked me to house sit for him while he was on the mainland for Christmas. Within 48 hours, I had a job, a new set of friends and an easy exit from the fleabag. Within 9 months, I was managing the language school. I credit the unexpected conversation on the bus that first morning with the success of my years in paradise. I ran into him a few years down the road when I took advantage of the opportunity to thank him for being my unwitting Hawaiian guardian angel.
Once again time flowed steadily through the years. I established residency, built up the language school and began work on my MLIS. By the fall of 2005, I was looking forward to a December graduation and began to wonder What next? On campus a friend told me that she was setting up interviews for the County of Los Angeles Public Library with a limited number of slots, did I want one? I was interested but the interview schedule conflicted with a work obligation. Fortuitously, at the last minute my schedule freed up allowing me to slide into that remaining interview slot. Later, I discovered how on Tuesday, August 16, 2005, I was tamping down nerves as I spoke into the spider sitting on the table connecting Hawaii with a panel in Downey, California. It happened that my future mentor, supporter and administrator was in Hawaii on vacation pondering how to fill her vacancies in hard to fill locations when she remembered that the University of Hawaii had a Library School. She contacted the school and spoke with my fellow student and former energy professional about letting students know about openings in Los Angeles. Because of Lillian’s previous executive experience, she suggested holding first level interviews via teleconference with Library Headquarters in LA. This unheard of procedure passed HR hurdles and became a reality. My newly opened scheduled allowed me to take part in the process which culminated when I reported for duty at Valencia Library on June 1, 2006 as a newly minted children's librarian. By January 1, 2007 I found myself in the high desert managing a small library. Once again, the delicate dance of timing seemed too perfect not to have been divinely choreographed.