Essay

An Oxford anomaly

By Mariko Kato

"Keats ... ah yes, such a youthful dichotomy on external and internal beauty ... and so burdened by his admiration of Milton ... ?" So began my weekly one-to-one tutorial with my white-haired professor in his rooms at Oxford University. He handed me a small glass of red wine and poured a large one for himself, waiting for me to respond intelligently to one of his questions-that-aren't-questions.

I was reading English. Unlike Japanese university students, English university students have to choose one subject of study from the beginning of their course. There is an on-going argument in the U.K. that children are forced to choose too narrow a field of study too early in their lives.

Oxford University consists of 39 colleges. I had applied for Christ Church College, which perhaps wasn't the smartest choice. It had the reputation of being the most "white public schoolboy" college at Oxford, and I was a Japanese girl from Croydon, a south London town notorious for gun crime and chavs.

Founded in 1524, Christ Church was owned by King Henry VIII and it protected Charles I during the Civil War. It was here that writer Lewis Carroll modeled his famous heroine on the Dean's daughter Alice, and the college has produced 13 of Britain's prime ministers. It is visited by hoards of tourists as a film location for the Harry Potter movies, and in the fountain in the main quadrangle lives a large koi carp reportedly donated by the Empress of Japan.

The "white public schoolboy" image of Christ Church is at least partly true. In my matriculation photograph, there are only two Indians, one Chinese and one Japanese in a sea of a hundred white faces.

There have been moments too perfectly stereotypical to be believed. For example, a college cathedral service was joined late by a blonde (gay) tenor in full horse-riding attire, complete with whip and a whiff of manure. Since the age of six, I have grown up among Londoners of whom a third were ethnic minorities. A significant number of them were living in poverty. At Christ Church I was certainly on unfamiliar ground.

And yet, it was at Oxford that I confronted my Japanese identity for the first time in 12 years. I was introduced to the world not as an English person with a Japanese face, but as a Japanese person who somehow wound up at Christ Church. It gave me carte blanche on which I could build a new identity without the weight of past assumptions and prejudices. It was a rite of passage granted to students, which the young idealistic Keats would surely have envied.

Shukan ST: March 7, 2008

(C) All rights reserved