This tribute to educator, mentor, and friend Jon Kawano would not have been possible without the words and memories of former students, colleagues, family, and friends whose lives, like mine, he touched deeply. Specifically, many thanks go to contributors to the March 2011 issue of the Columbia Prep Journal, Alan Paukman, and all of the commenters on the Facebook group “The Bosporus Starlings (Kawano Remembrance).”
1.
In a blog post dated December 25, 2010, just six weeks before his death, Jon Kawano wrote the following:
Eleven years ago, eighth grader Pacey Barron spotted Jesus in one of the stairwells of the high school. Ever since, bunches of seventh graders have been led down the stairs where they are instructed to "see," to explore the space before them the way they might a fine painting, edge-to-edge, corner-to-corner, in search of the holy vision. Some spot it right away. Others have to be shown. They are kids, so they always get a kick out of it. But the second coming is by no means guaranteed. All it takes is a sustained incuriosity following one last expedition in search of Jesus, and he will return to sepulchral obscurity, awaiting the return of just the right kind of child's eye infused with the right kind of enthusiasm which was always Pacey’s distinguishing talent.
It wasn't the only time he wrote of Pacey Baron in such glowing terms. She had, I learned, blossomed from a precocious 8th grader in 1999 to go on to lead the Columbia Prep Girl's Varsity Basketball Team in all scores for four years of high school. By the time she graduated in 2004, she became one of only a handful of students in Columbia Prep history to notch 1000 points for her high school career.
In a Flash post dated December 6, 2002, he writes of a particularly tense match between Columbia Prep and rival York Prep:
5:30 P.M. TIP OFF TOURNAMENT EXCLUSIVE: Girls in close match with York. Pacey disrupts their inbounds repeatedly at the far court, lays it in. Candace has huge rebound and it seems Lions have the win but York steals and scores. The whole team is celebrating but there is seven seconds left. Pacey takes the ball as the whole York defense arrays to stop her. With an inner fire which is often masked by her kicked-back California girl ambiance, Pacey busted through the defenders and with a contortionist's move, laid it in for the win.
For a trim, slight man of just over five feet—shorter even than many of the students he taught—and no more than 140 pounds, Mr. Kawano had an uncharacteristic zeal for basketball. At a time when almost no one in my memory went to home games of the Columbia Prep Lions, Mr. Kawano was a constant on the sidelines—in loose slacks and a blazer, shouting and cheering with as much vigor and force as a parent—willing the team to play at its best. Columbia Prep was never much of a contender in the New York Section 12 PSAL basketball division, but Mr. Kawano always seemed to be rooting for the underdog.
It hardly mattered that many of the students who played Varsity Basketball never took the classes that Mr. Kawano taught in Japanese and Creative Writing. He admired and respected them all the same. It was the same relentless, unbridled admiration that Mr. Kawano's students had for him.
2.
In 1999, the same year that Pacey Barron first saw Jesus in a high school stairwell, I had my first encounter with Mr. Kawano.
It was halfway through 7th grade and language classes were being taught as four one-quarter electives, with the expectation that after having tried French, Latin, Spanish, and Japanese, students would choose one to advance with full-time in 8th grade and into high school. Japanese was the last of the four languages in the circuit for me, and there were two teachers who were teaching it—Ms. Kobayashi and Mr. Kawano. Mr. Kawano's class was over-capacity, and me and two other students drew straws for the chance to stay, with the loser relegated to switching over to Ms. Kobayashi's. I drew the short one.
Class wasn't bad, but save for the ability to still recall the words to “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” in Japanese, I didn't feel like I got much out of Ms. Kobayashi's class. A part of me still wistfully pondered how Japanese would be different with Mr. Kawano, and I often wandered across the hall to his room before and after class to try to glean what he was doing. At that time, both rooms were located on the 5th floor of the high school, catty-corner to the chemistry classroom where I spent 10th grade double periods and the Forensics lab which bore strikingly little resemblance to the set of CSI.
Mr. Kawano was no doubt what some of his admirers and critics alike would have called “eccentric.” Not one square inch of his room was devoid of material—corners were piled high with xerox copies of syllabi and mid-term study packets in every conceivable color of paper. On the windowsill were a pair of jade plants and a vase full of water that lucky 7th graders with the highest test scores were allowed to add a drop of food coloring to. There were 32 oz. bottles of Gatorade that never seemed to get touched, a vial of essential freesia oil on his desk, and a mysterious liquid jolly rancher that he refused to throw out. The chalkboard was framed by large swaths of sanctioned-off areas that were not to be erased—boxes for interesting discoveries, reminders, announcements, details to record for later use, and the names of students who were close to being kicked out for bad behavior.
At the front of the class, Mr. Kawano probably spent as much time teaching as he did shouting, pounding on tables, or throwing whatever was in reach at those unruly students. He would drag desks up to the front of the classroom, kick garbage cans, and arm good students with rolled-up newspaper to monitor the bad ones (it was against the law for him to physically abuse them, he said, but not for his students). At his most frustrated, he would give a resounding “goddammit,” hit his head against the wall and exclaim, “Do you want me to go back to being a bike messenger?” If someone asked a question that he didn't feel like explaining, he would say, “Well, I think two-thirds of the class has it down so we're going to move on. I'll give you my number and you can call me later.”
Mr. Kawano hunched over a stack of test papers, circa Hallowwen 2008 (photo courtesy of Tony Eurdekian).
Mr. Kawano wasn't an imposing man. He was a wiry ball of energy, practically bursting with life and a profound respect for emotional creativity, that commanded attention. His teaching techniques were often unusual, and the vast majority of what he brought to the classroom was entirely his own invention. As a long-time lover of comic books, he drew overweight superheros at the tops of tests and homework assignments to reward outstanding effort, everything from Spiderman to Wonder Woman to Hawkman (he had a particular fondness for Green Lantern). Participation and good behavior were rewarded with “ants”—actual tiny plastic ants that one could save up and use for extra points on exams and as homework credit. Each test had an “ETC. box” where students could write down anything else that they had studied that was not specifically on the test.
He taught as much off the syllabus as he did digressing from his own head. Often, he would end class by passing out an article dated from the mid-90s that you could tell had been xeroxed a dozen times, each with the addition of a new underlining or scribble in the margins, and told us to read it for extra credit. They always had to do with art, philosophy, life's secrets, or discovering a new way of looking at the world. He was always more concerned with making good human beings than good students. Later, at the end of a Japanese character test, he would pose a question from the article, just to see if we had read it. Sometimes it was worth more than the entire rest of the exam.
3.
Following the 7th grade language round robin, I chose to take Spanish going into 8th grade. I enjoyed Japanese but I figured that Spanish was more practical—I could progress in the language faster and it would also bring me closer to my mother who, though she never formally taught me, was born in Cuba and grew up speaking Spanish at home. But even after two years, the urge to take Japanese was still there. I saw the other students from my grade who had decided to take Japanese—almost all exclusively from the Kawano and not the Kobayashi camp—excelling and truly enjoying the class. And so, at the start of 10th grade, I decided that I would do something that no one in my grade up until then had done—I enrolled in both languages.
On my first day of Japanese 1, I was humiliated. As a 10th grader, I out-aged everyone in my class by two full years and I felt like a flunkey who had to be left-back to complete his coursework. In high school, at a time when upper and underclassmen rarely mixed ranks, I was an anomaly. It wasn't until Mr. Kawano himself said something that public opinion began to change. No longer was I Daniel, nor even my given Japanese name of Danieru. From that day forward I became sempai, an honorific term roughly equivalent to “mentor.” More than simple seniority, sempai implies a relationship with reciprocal obligations. He garners respect and obedience from the kohai (“protege”), and in return, is responsible for guiding, protecting, and taking care of them as best he can.
The name stuck with me through all three years of Japanese, and I did my best to live up to it [in 11th grade, my name was changed simply from sempai to dai-sempai (big sempai), because a then-10th grader enrolled in my Japanese 2 class and became ko-sempai (small sempai)]. Despite the difference in age, I became close with my fellow classmates and after a time there were no discernible differences in the way we treated one another. I also strove for perfection in his class. I always came prepared and had my homework completed. On tests, I perennially scored among the best in the class. In another Flash post, dated January 22, 2003, Mr Kawano wrote the following:
FLASH EXTRA — JAPANESE 1 TOP 3: Trevor Vaz rocked the Imperial Palace with a 99. Ross Reisman one point behind. Ko-sempai a.k.a., Ben Wlody upset Dai-sempai (Daniel Claiborne), tying Chloé Cargill for third honors with a 93! Dai-sempai only a point behind. From there were a whole bunch of numbers clumped right under.
I learned an incredible amount from Kawano sensei—about how to write the stroke order for each character using actual calligraphy brushes and ink and how each letter of the hiragana and katakana alphabet could be memorized by using pictorial stories. He had a particular gift for teaching the language through off-color references and scatology—shakuhachi is a wooden Japanese flute, ji means constipation, and ikitai, in a loud, high-pitched voice, translates as “I want to come.” Every year we went on a field trip to the Mitsuwa Mall in New Jersey, where we had to complete a scavenger hunt for various Japanese-related items, speak to clerks in Japanese, and (inevitably) stock up on heaping shopping bags of the newest in Japanese candy, snacks, stationery, and dessert.
From left to right: Eric Chan, Ben Kaplan, and yours truly at the Mitsuwa Mall in Edgewater, New Jersey, circa October 2004 (photo courtesy of Jon Kawano).
There was no question that I worked hard and was a good student, but I think in some ways, Mr. Kawano held that against me. I know that what he probably saw in me was a person with potential, but who was conservative, who played it safe, and who didn't take many risks. I was secretly envious of the more radical boys in my grade who had already experimented with drugs and alcohol, who wore backwards spray-painted caps, used graffiti tags, rode their skateboards to school, and wore baggy jeans held up with metal chains and belts clad with pointed metal studs. These were the students who were worthy of the precious extra minutes with Mr. Kawano, whom he begrudgingly let draw pictures on his whiteboards and loiter in his classroom after school. It was the same group of students who Mr. Kawano had bestowed the distinction of “Seeds of Genius,” a moniker that I was at once perplexed and insanely jealous of. If you brand a student as a genius in high school, I wondered, how could he possibly go on to live up to his potential?
4.
Everything got written on the Flash page. From sports results to student's test scores to what was served that day at the cafeteria. It was a repository of quotes, anecdotes, stories, news, and so-called “slice of life” moments, all collected in a place that was secret enough that students could swear and not worry about getting in trouble and public enough that friends who were also in the know could read it. In an age when blogging was just beginning to get its legs, the Flash page was eponymous. It was not officially sanctioned by the school, which made it cool, and yet it had the support and backing of one of its teachers, who gave extra credit to those intrepid students who wrote for it.
The posts were split roughly 3-1 between students' and those written by Mr. Kawano himself. Even if one hadn't known the identity of the author, it would have been easy to pick out Mr. Kawano's posts from most of the others—he had a certain tone that he used, a mixture of authority and candidness that punctuated his writing. Rather than droll on about the weather or how boring classes were, he would pick out specific moments to highlight about the day, and often times, those highlights were his students. Mr. Kawano had a way of motivating students who would normally be prone to under-perform, and make them tap into and make full use of their potential. On January 18, 2002, he used the Flash page to highlight the achievements of two members of the “Seeds of Genius”:
Rather than suffer the trauma of progress reports, and preferring the Flash readership to their Deans and parents, Alan Paukman and Jacob Melinger, having both recently achieved record-setting test scores finally in line with their potential, if not outright genius, hereby submit that their future achievements and misdeeds appear here on the Flash Page.
And it didn't stop there. Further achievements were duly noted. On January 28, he wrote:
Jacob Melinger earned an A on a Farnum research paper, The Rate and Degree of Diffusion as Affected by Volume. Ben Kaplan typed up a 4-page skit on the Crusaders for Ms. Sonju and got his first A in history.
Mr. Kawano cared deeply about his students and did everything he could to foster their growth. He made it a habit to talk to students about what was going on in their classes and write those accomplishments on the website. A great deal of his accolades were also showered on alumni whom he had previously taught. Many of them, including, Andrew Hamilton, Ben Safdie, Alex Fishman, Ethan Ravetch, and Damian Soghoian, were upperclassmen that I knew very tenuously, but whose reach and influence was so huge that I found myself idolizing them throughout my time in high school. Unfortunately, though, I never had the chance to see if he would continue to follow-up on alums after I graduated.
“Seeds of Genius” at the Mitsuwa Mall, circa October 2004 (photo courtesy of Jon Kawano).
Shortly after I left the school in 2005, the scrappy group of bloggers had transformed into a full-fledged student group (“CGPS Flash”) and was taken over by another English teacher. Mr. Bailin, whom I read Zola's Germinal and Sinclair's The Jungle with as part of my first-semester of 11th grade English, wasn't a bad teacher, just considerably less engaging than Mr. Kawano. The website, which started in some ways as anti-establishment and underground was now being moved to the mainstream. Students had to consider a wider audience and Mr. Kawano was no longer there to motivate the group forward. It wasn't long before the club disbanded and the website ceased to be updated.
5.
“Think about your deepest, darkest secret, and write it down on a piece of paper.” This is how he started one of our Creative Writing classes halfway through my junior year. The class hid their nervousness in misbehavior, ignoring the assignment and talking in low murmurs. Mr. Kawano kept us on track. “No one else will read these secrets. They are for you and you alone. But acknowledging a secret, even if only to yourself, is enough to take the weight off of it, to make it easier to live with.” I ripped out a sheet of notebook paper and very slowly wrote down one thing that I had never told anyone. We kept the sheets of paper in our Creative Writing folders, which stayed in the classroom, and at first I was worried about someone tampering with my folder and discovering it. However, two weeks went by and I didn't think about it again. When the time came to collect our folders, Mr. Kawano noted that each of us had left our deepest secrets in a public place. We no longer had to be afraid of what our secrets said about us. Instead, we could put them behind us and move forward.
At first glance, it may seem unlikely that a Japanese teacher would also teach Creative Writing, but Mr. Kawano was less strictly a language teacher than he was an instructor on how to live life, of which writing and the arts play a huge part. He used to joke that the school's administration didn't invite him to English faculty meeting even though he was technically a member of the department. Outside of my immediate family and my closest friends, he is probably the single most important influence on my growth as a human being. It's impossible to accurately and comprehensively catalog the ways in which the material he taught in that class has fundamentally influenced my relationship with art, literature, and music.
What Mr. Kawano taught was like the Gospels, and I hung on to every word accordingly. To this day, whereas almost everything else I have from high school has long since been scrapped, I have kept every single piece of paper that he has ever given me. I regard the four-gigantic folders of hand-outs and stories, literally bursting at the seams from two semesters worth of Creative Writing, like my own personal Bible, a veritable who's-who of the literary and cultural world. It was as if every word that passed his lips was being transmitted from a source of many lifetime's worth of knowledge and experience.
It was through that class that I was first introduced to and subsequently have developed a lifelong love of The New Yorker, NPR's This American Life, and graphic novels. It was because of him that I walked around Brooklyn's Prospect Park with a dog-eared photocopy of Tony Hiss's 1987 walking tour in hand, trying to spot landmarks and secrets invisible to the naked eye. It was his interpretation of Lolita that quickly made it my favorite book of all time—that at its core was about the power of love, and that Vladimir Nabokov (who preferred that his first name be pronounced like “Redeemer”—he taught me that one too) had a remarkable gift for capturing human emotion.
He always asked us to “slam” stories—to give them a first-impression rating from 1-10. Once he brought in an excerpt from a great short story and asked us to slam it. We all gave it 10s. He then revealed that the story was his own. He tried (and failed) to secretly video record the class once to see if he could capture us on film without the self-conscious awareness of being taped. Once a year he would hand out invitations around school to a special “End of the World” lecture, where he taught us everything he would have wanted us to know if the world were to end tomorrow. During one of these, he talked about the merits of art, that art is anything that lets you see the world differently, and that that the closest thing dogs have to art is maybe better dog food.
At the start of each class Mr. Kawano taught us a new word. My favorite was raconteur, which means storyteller. He encouraged us to compile our best stories from our lives and savor them. We didn't need to set aside time or use special equipment—storytelling was a craft that could be practiced every day. To this day, I carry around a small notebook with me at all times, recording the small, seemingly insignificant details of everyday life. It was then that I realized that storytelling would become my life's greatest ambition—that if you look hard enough, everything has its own story to tell.
6.
I applied to college as an engineering major. My dream was to go to MIT, to become an electrical engineer and to apply all of my many years of positively-reinforced left-brain thinking to their natural and logical end. I never liked writing. English had historically been my worst subject in school and I blamed my inadequacy on my mother's Chinese background and having immigrated from Cuba at a young age. I was good at math and science, and happy to play up to the Asian stereotype. I took Creative Writing on a whim. I figured that if I enjoyed Mr. Kawano's Japanese classes, Creative Writing might be fun to try. I needed a break from AP Pre-Calculus and Honors Physics, and thought I should give my right-brain some work for a change.
The rest is history. I fell in love with his class, so much so that I even agreed to take the extra second semester elective that met during my lunch periods. When I was applying for college senior year, I came to Mr. Kawano to ask for a recommendation, for which he agreed to write. Though he obviously knew all of the colleges to which I was applying, it was only until after I got accepted and agreed to go to Oberlin that he told me he was an alumnus (he graduated in 1977 with a degree in Government). And it was only after I got to Oberlin that I would realize the profound influence that Mr. Kawano and his classes would have on the direction my life had taken.
A snapshot from Mr. Kawano's first trip to Eastern Europe, circa 2004 (photo courtesy of Rachel Kb).
Without having known Mr. Kawano or taken his classes, I would not fundamentally be the person that I am today, and for that I will be forever thankful. I looked to him for guidance and inspiration, and as a result, he changed my understanding of who I was. Writing is in my blood. My father is a writer, as was my grandfather. And though my father, to his credit, tried to encourage me to write for many years, it was only through Mr. Kawano's class that the spark actually caught fire, and I was armed with the tools and confidence to proceed. Looking back now at my high school efforts, they are sophomoric at best, but it's exactly like what he told me then—that I should never be complacent or satisfied with anything that I write, that I should always strive to be better.
I never did take an engineering class at Oberlin. In fact, I never even took a math class. As a freshman, I enrolled in Japanese II (with the help of a placement test), an English first-year seminar called “Ways of Seeing, Ways of Knowing,” Modern Japanese History, and Technique and Form in Poetry. Creative Writing became a singular passion that, after every workshop and seminar, kept bringing me back to his class. The rest of my college career followed suit—I ended up spending a semester abroad in Japan and graduated with a double major in Creative Writing and East Asian Studies (with a focus on Japan). And what did I do when I graduated from Oberlin? I became a teacher.
7.
Beware of reflective surfaces. Collect your details lovingly. Shrink your buttons (so you're less vulnerable to your enemies). Invest in high-quality pens. Look for unwatched phenomenon (the peculiar verities in life that most people never give a second thought). Good bread is the keystone of a good sandwich. If you miss the bus, buy a lottery ticket (because in an alternate universe, you won the lottery). You can spot a good pachinko machine by the number of cigarette butts in its ashtray. Keep a journal. Garlic is a cure for all maladies. The bones of the language are near the surface.
Mr. Kawano had a lot of sayings, but perhaps his favorite was “turn on your lights.” Simply put, it means that good writing draws on material from an author's life. Most ideas and concepts have already been expressed, better and more eloquently, by writers who have come before. The only way to still come up with fresh ideas is to keep our eyes and senses open—to notice and record those things that most people miss or take for granted. “As an adult,” he said, “it is an artist’s job to teach you to see as a child again.” He described our world as a wealth of things to be perceived and information to be processed. Our synapses are like a door of perception that shrinks with age until it becomes a narrow peep hole. As children, our gates are wide open, absorbing the flood of the world. He wanted us to preserve that precious time, to keep those doors open for as long as possible.
A gift from former students to Mr. Kawano, circa June 2005 (photo courtesy of Teny Eurdekian).
His favorite of all of those senses was smell. He taught us about Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. He made fun of the critics (“philistines, all of them”) who would endlessly debate the seven-volume tome and still never really understand it. To save us the trouble of reading the whole thing (the same, he said, of Moby Dick, Atlas Shrugged, and anything by Tom Clancy—all of which he deemed to be “overrated”), he boiled it down to a simple concept—that smell was our oldest sense and had the strongest connection to memory. If we looked at a picture of a firetruck or a building on fire, for example, it still wouldn't conjure the emotional intensity of escaping a burning building as much as, say, the smell of smoke or of burning embers. The same can be said of the smell of New England salmon being a more visceral reminder of a family vacation to Cape Cod than the sound of the ocean.
To prove it, he had us conduct an experiment, the same lesson that he did with probably every group of students he ever taught. He pulled out a small vial of essential freesia oil, a scent that for me is inextricably linked with his classes. He talked about his particular fondness for the scent—the delicate balance of lightness and sweetness—and dabbed a few drops of it on the front page of our notebooks. I still use that same notebook to this day—and ironically, it was only in the last three months that I filled the final page of it. He told our class to make a memory at that moment. There is still an oblong circle on the front page inscribed with the date and time: October 15, 2003, 1:44 pm. And even now, nearly eight years later, the lithe, flowery scent of freesia is still palpable.
The "Unwatched Phenomenon" board, which hung outside of Mr. Kawano's classroom (photo courtesy of Alan Paukman).
His reverence and commitment to creating memories was perhaps his greatest gift of all, and perhaps fittingly, what will live on as the most lasting and salient reminder of his impact on his students—for as long as there is freesia, there will be the nostalgic memory of his life. In class that day he played us a song by Suzanne Vega called “The Queen and the Soldier,” one of his favorites and one of the only songs that he said could really make him cry. He told me that even the most painful things in life can inspire art. Writing can be used as a source of stability and comfort, a tool for overcoming adversity. When I heard about his death, I started writing—it was my own coping mechanism for grief. I didn't need to hear the song to cry—just remembering the scent of freesia was enough.
8.
I didn't become just any teacher. I came to China and became a foreign language teacher. It was a difficult adjustment, but an initial decision that I never thought twice about. A semester abroad in Japan had peaked my interest for the world at large and I told myself that, regardless of where, after graduation I would spend at least a year away from America. China came to me as a logical next step after Japan. Though I enjoyed my time abroad there, I was hungry for a new adventure, and one that tapped into reconnecting with my mother's heritage. Studying Chinese came with a fervor and enthusiasm similar to that of learning Japanese, and I spent my senior year at Oberlin and an intensive summer with the language before moving to China in August of 2009.
We had had some training before being shipped off and many months to ready ourselves, but nothing can adequately prepare you for two years abroad in a foreign country where you can barely speak the language and with a job that you've never done before than simply doing it. A part of me was eager for the uncertainty involved. I wanted to prove that I was capable of breaking the mold and doing something so utterly out there that I would be forced to challenge myself on a daily basis. Such was the case with Chinese—though obviously not without its daily vexations, it is something that I have developed a great joy and fondness for. A similar thing can be said of teaching.
It's difficult teaching students whose first language is not English. Encouraging them to speak is hard enough, let alone ever considering trying to instruct them in how to write. But I still try to make my students think differently about the world and question their old-world view—that there is a lot that we don't know and understand, but it our job as learners to never stop asking questions. I try my best to encourage free discussion of ideas, teach them about an America they can't learn from textbooks or movies, and above all, explain that creativity and individuality are traits that should be celebrated rather than concealed. Mr Kawano was of a rare few, one who was genuinely curious about the world and not jaded, and his example has encouraged me to pay it forward.
Then again, there are days where I can hardly bear my classes, when I'm so frustrated with students who are unruly or simply don't want to cooperate that I want to slam my own head against the wall. It is at these times that I sympathize most with Mr. Kawano. I always wondered how he ended up teaching at a prep school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when surely there were places in the city where the majority of the students weren't spoiled, over-privileged brats who didn't appreciate his efforts. Though they don't fit the latter description, the majority of my own students probably wouldn't choose to take my class if they had the choice. Unlike Japanese and Creative Writing at Columbia Prep, Oral English is not an elective at Shanxi Agricultural University, and each of my three 30-student classes of first-year graduate students must take it to graduate.
But Mr. Kawano had a strategy for dealing with even the most obstinate of students. In a blog posted entitled “A Guide to Teaching High School,” Mr. Kawano laid out a 3-step plan for working with students. The first, he wrote, was what he coined as “Teaching in the Interstices.” Students, he said, are never more attentive than when they've succeeded in deflecting you onto a digression, and in these prime circumstances, you should always have something ready to teach them. You can start by teaching them a word like “interstices” by drawing a railway line with a terminus at both ends, where each terminus can be any origin and destination. He continued by writing:
What’s most obvious, what everyone pays most attention to, are the two endpoints. But where you’ll most likely find something new and unexpected is in the interval, or interstice (In TER stiss). You can find treasure sometimes, when you slow down the process on the way to the destination.
The second, he said was something he called “The Big Duh,” which means being aware of your persona and how you come off to others. Because your work persona is necessarily different from who you are, being able to make adjustments to that character gives you control over your effects. And the third, simply, was to “Be On Their Side.”
When I learned of Mr. Kawano's passing last week, I taught my students the word raconteur. I told them that the best stories are found in the times between moments, the interstices, and how “turning on your lights” allows you to see things you might otherwise miss. After I finished, I stepped back and waited for the gleam in each of their eyes.
9.
In his last email to me, dated January 6, 2011, nearly a month before his death, Jon Kawano wrote the following:
Hi Daniel,
Your dispatches are pretty interesting. I wonder if you might play around with your voice some. In other words, for example, sometimes, sound a little more casual, formal, sarcastic, etc. (having control over how you are coming across) or at least be aware of your baseline "reporter" voice.
Did you hear about the Oberlin filmmaker? How is Eric?
JK
I will forever regret how long it took me to reply, and indeed when I finally did in March (a month after his death—though I didn't know it at the time), it was almost spooky to go back and read over those words. I told him about my writing, how I thought my baseline “reporter” voice was still a remnant of my work in magazine publishing and my somewhat outdated dream of becoming a foreign broadcast journalist. I told him about Eric, one of my best friends from high school, who was working at a small consulting firm in Manhattan and had recently moved into an apartment with his brother. I told him that I had not only heard of the Oberlin filmmaker (Lena Dunham) but had known her personally as we had been in Creative Writing workshops together my freshmen year. And I ended with some questions of my own: “How are the new crop of students treating you? Still working on the Flash page? Any new writing of your own of late?”
Learning of his death now, over three months since he passed, has been a surreal experience. News travels slowly in China, and it wasn't until an alumni email from my high school that I found out. I have spent the last week doing research, pouring over friend's testimonies and my own personal database—trying to find anything that would make him feel alive in my mind again. I discovered that he had just finished writing a novel called Tokyo Girls, and I thought about how much he probably would have liked to be remembered posthumously.
Similarly, it felt weird to be reading his old Flash posts from the early 2000s. It was like looking at a journal I never kept, a specter speaking from the grave. In some ways, I have been lucky that he was the first close friend of mine who has passed away. His passing made me reexamine and reassess my relationship with high school—forcing me to dredge up memories that have long since been buried, even forge connections with old acquaintances I have not talked to since graduation in an attempt to grieve and make sense of his death. I realized that despite my regrets and misgivings about my high school years, it was the time spent learning in his classes that was truly a bright spot in my life, propelling me towards becoming who I am today.
A jar of Bosporus Water on Mr. Kawano's desk. The back side says “DO NOT DRINK” (photo courtesy of Alan Paukman).
His death came very suddenly. The story is that he had had a heart condition for a number of years and was put on medication. Eventually, he got sick of the treatments and decided that he would just start eating healthy and exercising. It seemed to work well for a number of years. Then, one morning he went out for his routine jog before work when, somewhere in his neighborhood, he fell, someone called an ambulance, and he died on the way to the hospital. That week, his family organized a memorial service and many friends came to share stories. There was a table with a lot of his old belongings (letters, comics, music, stationary) that people were encouraged to take as a memory.
Mr. Kawano will forever remain one of the most unique, gifted people I have ever had the privilege to know. He doted on us, his students, because he truly believed we were geniuses—and it was our job to realize those ambitions for ourselves. He had a remarkable love for the human race and was able to find creative inspiration in everything. He took on a challenge that few teachers take up—to teach us more than knowledge, to teach us to learn from life. He gave each of us a gift—an awareness to keep the world rushing in and to never narrow our perception. He was a special man, a man of enormous ability, who looked at life through a different lens. He is the reason why I treasure emotional connections and the little moments in life, and most likely always will. The best thing that we can do now is remember his words and live his lessons in our everyday lives.
He told us once about a friend of his who had just died and he said that he missed her and missed talking to her, but that he wasn't afraid of death. He couldn't understand why anyone would be afraid of coming from something abstract, enter life trying to define it, and exit back into the abstract. Here's hoping we can all go that gently into the abstract. You will be missed, Jon. We were lucky to know you.