Former Student Makes Move Across the World By J1 Reporter Theresa Mueller Kyoko walks up the 999 stone steps of the Kuno-Zan temple, it is New Year’s Eve and she must make it to the top to pray and celebrate the new year. This was an annual tradition for Kyoko in her hometown of Shizuoka, a prefecture of Japan outside of Tokyo, where she and her sister, Yasuko, spent their whole childhood. They went through school all the way to college, but once Kyoko had graduated, she decided she wanted to see more of the world than the same place she had lived all her life. She was going to move across the world, all the way to America Creighton was the sister school of her college, and Kyoko was at a high enough level of English to be eligible to study abroad. She arrived in America in 1992 with general confidence in her ability, but soon the overwhelming reality set in: she was in a completely foreign country, and Americans spoke much quicker than she had anticipated. She was not totally alone, there were other exchange students, but they were not all Japanese. They came from all over the world, from India to Israel, and she was assigned to a dorm room with a native English speaker and was not able to rely on her Japanese classmates. “Yes, it was very hard,” Kyoko said, “I spent the
first three weeks crying.” The language barrier was a difficult hurdle to overcome, she didn’t feel smart compared to everyone else, but soon things began to look up. She made friends with a student from India in her aerobics class and many other classmates. After only a year, Kyoko’s English had greatly improved and she was finally finding confidence and branching out. When moving, Kyoko said America was nothing like she had expected. She had initially thought it would look similar to New York City, or like the movies she had seen like “Home Alone”. Instead, when she got to Nebraska, it was open fields and much smaller of a city than NYC. Still she persevered, staying open-minded. “It is important to stay open to other culture[s], you take the good parts with you,” she said. Kyoko certainly does, bringing Japanese superstitions to her American household. She keeps a figure of a cat (called Maneki Neko) that moves one of its paws, as if bringing in or welcoming good fortune. Symbolic meanings vary. For example, the number 4 might not seem like a big deal, but in Japan, it symbolizes death, which was unfortunate for Kyoko during a major exam at Creighton, who
got assigned table 4. It is superstitions like these that she keeps, making it clear she still values both cultures even after the move. Kyoko got married in 1997 on Valentines Day to an American and later had four children together (Baily, Kaylen, Kyra and Liam) and after divorcing, got married to her current husband, David Sterns. She still keeps in contact with her family, all of whom are in Japan, over calls and messaging. After years of being away from her hometown Kyoko said, “I miss my family, but I love my freedom.” Her parents had been very traditional,
focusing on school work and setting strict curfews. She hopes in America her kids feel comfortable to talk with her. After the struggle of moving across the world to a completely different country and the tears that came with, she has been able to create a life for herself through the determination she had brought with her from Japan.
“It is important to stay open to other culture[s], you take the good parts with you.” -Kyoko Sterns
26
