While there, I remembered a partially forgotten childhood in which Keiko Tapp, a Japanese woman, raised me in part on all sorts of food one could never find in the Playstead house. I don't even know the names of these snacks and foods, but as I wandered the Chinese grocery store (for the express purpose of getting more steamed buns) I saw and remembered eating rice cakes, and cookies, and seaweed, Pocky sticks and Hello Panda's. I could taste them on my tongue again--an odd idea. And she probably didn't even think twice about sharing them with me, but I remember them. And it became part of my culture.
It makes this job of a Field Study far too big for me, for not everything can be taken into account, which is always the case in life. I think about how every time someone dies millions of pieces of information die with them: elements of who they were that no one knew, cared to ask about, or could even know to wonder. We can't even figure out ourselves, let alone others.
People are not to be studied, or figured out. They're to be enjoyed, cared about, talked to, shared with. I'm really not interested in studying anything. I'm interested in a good conversation.
