Be True to Yourself

Be True to Yourself!

A Handwriting of Mr. Hokage on the Board

Jean is thirty years old, sitting alone in a rented room on the third floor, with the lamp turned low and the city humming somewhere below her window like it has somewhere to be. She has a good job. A translation agency, appropriately enough — she edits other people's English, fixes other people's grammar, and is, by every measure her mother uses when she calls, doing well. Ten years since she left campus. Ten years, and the sentence still finds her the way it always does: quietly, without warning, somewhere between brushing her teeth and turning off the light. Have you been true to yourself? It hasn't gone anywhere. It has only gotten heavier, the way anything gets heavier the longer you carry it without setting it down.

She was twenty the first time it found her.

That morning, she had finished her grammar exam in ten minutes flat — fifty questions, all correct, while the rest of the class was still hunched over their papers, erasers going, pencils tapping. Mr. Bahari took her sheet with a look of mild alarm. “Don't rush,” he said, scanning it twice as if the speed itself might have caused an error. It hadn't. Of course it hadn't. He let her go, the way teachers always let her go, a little early, a little impressed, a little unsettled by how easy she made it look.

Jean walked the empty corridor with nowhere in particular to be. Outside the C building, she sat on a bench by the basketball court and asked herself why she'd left so quickly. A second voice answered, the one that always sounded more confident than she felt: Why wait for the others? You finished first. That's not arrogance. That's just efficient.

She believed it, mostly. She had always believed the version of herself that moved fast, answered correctly, and left rooms before anyone could ask her to stay in them. It had gotten her this far — top of the grammar class, top of most classes, a girl teachers described to her parents using words like promising and disciplined. Nobody had ever once described her as known.

She could trace it back, if she let herself. Not to one day, exactly, but to a hundred small ones that had all taught the same lesson. Her father, a man who loved her the only way he knew how to love anyone, by keeping score. Report cards laid out on the dinner table like evidence. “Ninety-eight,” he would say, tapping the paper, not quite a smile, already looking for the two points that had gotten away. Jean learned early that ninety-eight was a question — where did the other two go — and that a hundred was the only answer that ended the conversation. She had spent her whole childhood chasing the number that would finally let her leave the table without being asked anything else.

Her mother was gentler about it, which was somehow worse, because gentleness didn't leave marks you could point to later and say, here, this is where it started. “Just do your best, sayang,” she'd say, and mean it, and Jean had translated best the way she translated everything — quickly, efficiently, into the nearest available correct answer, which was always: better than everyone else, so no one asks any further questions. By the time she was twelve she had stopped telling her parents when something was wrong, not because they would have punished her for it, but because a problem, once named, required a follow-up conversation, and Jean had already worked out that the fastest way through any room was to arrive with nothing left to discuss.

It made her a wonderful student and a difficult person to actually know, though no one around her had the vocabulary yet to notice the second part, least of all Jean. Her friends loved her the way you love someone reliable — she always had the answer, always had the plan, always seemed, from the outside, entirely fine. She had been performing fine for so long that she had genuinely started to believe fine was simply her personality, rather than a costume she had never once taken off long enough to check what was underneath.

So when she sat on that bench outside the C building at twenty, fresh off another hundred, another early dismissal, another small proof that she was ahead of everyone else in the room, it did not occur to her to wonder what exactly she was ahead of them toward. It had never occurred to her to wonder that. That was the whole design.

The next classroom was empty when she got there, early again. On the whiteboard, in handwriting she didn't recognize yet, someone had written: Be True to Yourself. She stood in front of it a long moment. It was such a small sentence. She'd heard it a hundred times before, on posters, in songs, from people who said it the way they said good morning — a reflex, not a question. But standing there alone, she found she couldn't answer it. Not theoretically. Not honestly. She knew what the words meant. She did not know if she'd ever done the thing they asked.

Why was that so hard? She turned it over, annoyed at herself. She wasn't a teenager anymore. She was twenty — old enough, surely, to know who she was. Apparently not. Apparently twenty was not the age where that particular exam got easier. It was just the age where you were expected to stop admitting you hadn't passed it.

The room filled up around her while she was still standing there, still staring at the board like it might rewrite itself into something easier. Then Mr. Hokage arrived — the students' name for him, not the school's; he had Dumbledore's white hair and beard and a theatrical streak the school had never quite been able to explain, given that the subject on his roster was Translation, and the lessons he actually gave were about life, philosophy, and the slow, unglamorous work of becoming someone.

He came in like the building was on fire, though nothing was wrong. He climbed onto a chair without warning and shouted the words already on the board — “Be True to Yourself” — directly at Jean, close enough that she flinched.

She had no idea why he'd chosen her. Out of a full room, he held her eyes and said nothing else. The class went quiet, waiting for the rest of the lecture, but there was no rest of it — just Hokage, looking at her like he already knew the answer she didn't have. Jean didn't look away. She wasn't sure she could have if she'd tried. The sentence went through her like something sharp and specific, aimed. Her eyes stung before she understood why.

He stepped down off the chair and went on teaching as if nothing had happened. Jean sat very still, holding her breath around the tears she refused to let arrive in front of thirty people. It was only a sentence. She didn't know, yet, that some sentences don't finish landing for ten years.

The strange thing was that he never mentioned it again — not that day, not the next week. He moved on to conditional clauses and false cognates as if he hadn't just reached into a stranger and turned something. Jean almost decided she'd imagined the weight of it. Almost.

Weeks later, in the same classroom, Hokage set a single sentence on the board and asked the class to translate it into English: Aku baik-baik saja. “Simple,” he said, spreading his hands. “Anyone.” Hands went up. I'm fine. I'm okay. I'm doing well. He wrote each version underneath, nodding, generous, until Jean's hand went up too, because the exercise was beneath her and she wanted it to be over. “I'm fine,” she said.

“Correct,” Hokage said. “Grammatically, idiomatically, correct.” He capped the marker and looked at the class the way he'd looked at Jean that first day — like he was about to hand them something they hadn't asked for. “Now. How many of you have said that sentence this week and meant it?”

Nobody raised a hand. A few people laughed, the uncomfortable kind of laugh. Hokage didn't laugh with them.

“This is the problem with translation,” he said, “and it is the problem with everything else. You can move a sentence from one language to another and get every word right and still translate a lie. Grammar doesn't ask if it's true. Grammar only asks if it's correct.” He looked, Jean thought, directly at her again, though she told herself afterward that she'd imagined that part. “Some of you are very good at being correct. I would like you to get better, someday, at being true. They are not the same skill. Most people spend their whole lives excellent at the first one and never attempt the second.”

Jean wrote nothing down. There was nothing to write down. It wasn't a rule; it was an accusation, and she had felt seen by it in a way that made her want to leave the room again, fast, the way she left every room where something might be asked of her that a correct answer couldn't cover.

She almost made it. She was three steps from the door when Hokage said, without looking up from the papers he was collecting, “Jean. A minute.”

The classroom emptied around her until it was just the two of them and the smell of dry-erase marker. He didn't sit down, and neither did she, and for a moment he just looked at her the way he had that first day, like he was deciding how much to hand her at once.

“You finish everything fast,” he said finally. It wasn't a question, so she didn't answer it. “Bahari tells me. Fifty questions, ten minutes, every time. I've watched you do the same thing in here. First hand up, shortest answer, out the door before anyone can ask you anything you didn't prepare for.”

Jean felt her face do something she hoped wasn't visible. “Is that a problem, Pak?”

“It's a translation problem,” he said, and almost smiled, though not quite. “You're very good at moving from a question to an answer. I don't think you're very good yet at sitting inside a question while it's still a question. Those are different skills. The second one is harder, and it's the one that actually matters, and no one is going to grade you on it, which is exactly why most people never bother learning it.” He picked up his bag. “I'm not telling you this because you did anything wrong today. I'm telling you because you're twenty, and you have decades to either get very good at that second skill or spend all of them running from it the way you ran out of Bahari's room. I'd rather you heard it from someone now than figured it out the hard way at forty.”

He left before she could decide what to do with her face. Jean stood alone in the classroom a second time, in front of a board that had nothing written on it now, and understood, with a kind of cold clarity she wasn't ready for, that he was right, and that being right about her was apparently something everyone who paid close enough attention eventually managed to be — everyone except her.

Five years passed the way they do when you are busy being excellent at the first skill and avoiding the second. Jean graduated at the top of her cohort. She moved to the city for the job at the agency, the good one, the one her mother described to relatives with visible pride. She dated a man for two years who liked how easy she was, how little maintenance, how she never seemed to need anything from him that he'd have to work to give. She didn't examine that description too closely at the time.

She was twenty-five at Dinda's wedding when the sentence found her again.

Dinda should have been two years above them, but she took an academic pause, so that she went into the same Translation Class. A face from the same hallway, the same building, though not someone Jean had kept up with — Jean had never been good at keeping up with people, only at being remembered fondly by them, which is a different and lonelier thing. They ended up at the same round table, plastic chairs dressed up in white cloth, and somewhere between the soup course and the second dance Dinda said, “Do you remember Mr. Hokage?”

Jean's stomach did something complicated. “Dumbledore,” she said, keeping her voice light, reaching automatically for the version of the memory that was funny instead of the version that was true. “The man screamed at me once. Climbed on a chair.”

Dinda laughed. “He did that to everyone eventually. He retired last year. I heard he still writes on whiteboards in empty classrooms for fun, like some kind of haunting.” She said it fondly. Then, quieter, not fondly at all, just honestly: “That sentence he was always shouting. I think about it more than I want to admit.”

This was the moment. Jean recognized it even as it was happening, the way you recognize a step before your foot lands on it — a small, ordinary opening where she could have said something true. She could have said: me too. She could have said: I still don't know if I've ever answered it. She could have said: I am twenty-five years old and I have built an entire life out of being correct, and I don't think I've told anyone in this room a true thing about myself in longer than I can remember, including you, including tonight, including now.

What she said was, “Right? So dramatic,” and reached for her drink, and the moment closed over like water.

Dinda didn't push. Up near the pelaminan, the organ tunggal shifted into a dangdut number, and a cluster of tantes in matching kebaya started clapping the beat, calling names across the tables, pulling reluctant nieces up to joget. Someone pulled Jean up too — an aunt of the bride's she barely recognized, delighted, insistent, both hands already reaching — and Jean let herself be pulled, and swayed along on cue, laughing, charming, note-perfect, gone before the song even finished — first again, always first, slipping out through the gate before anyone could ask her to stay for one more number — and cried in the back of the bus on the way home in a way she couldn't fully explain to herself, and blamed it on the heat, and never once used the word lonely, not even privately, not even to the version of herself who was, by then, extremely good at noticing when other people were being fine and extremely bad at noticing it in the mirror.

Now she is thirty, and the lamp is low, and the sentence has followed her into a room with no one in it to perform for. Have you been true to yourself? There is no Mr. Bahari to hand the answer to early. There is no classroom to leave before anyone can ask her to stay. There is no wedding, no drink, no upbeat song to be pulled onto a dance floor by. There is only the lamp, and the window, and the question, which has apparently been waiting this whole time for her to run out of rooms to leave.

Her phone is on the table, face down, the way she leaves it most nights now. Her mother had called earlier, the usual Sunday call, and had asked, the way she always asks, “Apa kabar, sayang? Semua baik-baik saja?” How are you. Is everything fine. Jean had said yes before the question had even finished landing — the answer arriving ahead of the sentence, the way a reflex arrives ahead of a thought — and her mother had sounded pleased, and they had talked for ten more minutes about nothing in particular, and Jean had hung up and sat very still afterward, turning the automatic yes over in her hands like a coin she didn't remember agreeing to spend.

It occurs to her, sitting there, that she cannot remember the last time she'd answered that question with anything but yes. Not because everything had, in fact, been fine — there had been a year, not long ago, when it very much had not been, when she'd sat in this same apartment for weeks doing the arithmetic of whether the effort of getting up in the morning was worth what waited for her once she did — but because yes was faster. Yes ended the call two minutes sooner. Yes required no follow-up. She had gotten so good at the fast, correct answer that she had, somewhere along the way, stopped being able to tell whether it was also the true one. That was the thing Hokage had been trying to hand her all those years ago, she realizes now, too late to say thank you for it in person: correctness and truth are not the same skill, and you can spend an entire life excelling at the wrong one without ever noticing there was a second exam.

She takes out a notebook, because she doesn't know what else to do with her hands, and the questions come out faster than she can soften them:

Have you been true to yourself?

Have you been yourself —

or the version of you that was easiest for everyone else to love?

Have you lived your life as you, for you,

not for someone else's idea of who you should be?

Are you the real you?

Why can't you answer that with a straight yes?

She cries the way she didn't let herself cry at twenty, or at twenty-five in the back of the car on the way home from Dinda's wedding — without an audience, without a lecture going on around her to hide inside, without a joke ready to reach for the second it gets to be too much. She looks for the answer in books, the way she's always looked for answers, underlining, cross-referencing, treating the question like something with a correct response if only she read enough sources. She finds mostly noise. But one line stops her: “And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me.” (51:56) Part of her still wants to call it a cliché, the kind of verse that shows up on a wall calendar in a relative's living room. But she sits with it anyway, longer than she's sat with anything in years, and for once she doesn't argue back.

It doesn't hand her the answer. She notices that, and something in her unclenches slightly at the noticing — maybe that was never the point. Maybe being true to yourself isn't a question you get to finish once, correctly, in ten minutes, and then leave the room. Maybe it was never a grammar test at all, however much she'd wanted it to be one, however much easier her whole life had been when she treated every hard question as something with a right answer she could get to first. Maybe it's a question you're still supposed to be asking at thirty, and forty, and however old Mr. Hokage was when he decided the bravest thing he could teach a room full of translation students had nothing to do with grammar at all — that you could get every word correct and still be lying, and that the second skill, the true one, was the one worth spending a life on.

She thinks of him climbing onto that chair, an old man making a fool of himself in front of thirty bored twenty-year-olds because he'd decided, somewhere along the way, that being useful mattered more than being dignified. She thinks of Dinda at the wedding, the opening she hadn't taken, and wonders whether Dinda ever thinks about her the way she still thinks about that classroom — whether somewhere in this city, or in whatever city Dinda lives in now, another woman is sitting up too late with the same unanswered sentence, both of them too well trained in being fine to admit it to the one other person who might understand.

Jean gets up. She crosses to the small mirror by her door, the one she checks herself in every morning on the way out — hair straight, expression composed, correct — and she picks up the pen still in her hand from the notebook. On the corner of the glass, in handwriting she barely recognizes as her own, unsteady in a way her exam answers never were, she writes something down. Not the question this time. She's done enough of that for one night, for ten years.

She writes: still trying.

It isn't yes. She isn't ready for yes, and some part of her suspects that yes was never really the assignment — that Hokage, screaming on his chair, was never asking for a finished answer, only for her to stop leaving the room before the test was over. Still trying will have to be true enough for tonight. She looks at it a moment longer than she means to. Then she turns off the lamp, and for the first time in ten years, she doesn't rush.

In the morning, her phone lights up with the usual message from her mother — a good-morning sticker, a reminder to eat, the small daily proof that she is loved by someone who has no idea how to ask her the harder questions and never learned to expect the harder answers. Jean looks at it for a while before she replies. Then, instead of the reflex, she types something slower. Not fine, not I'm okay. Just: Actually, I've been thinking about something for a long time and I want to talk to you about it sometime, if that's alright. She reads it twice. It is, by every standard she was trained in, an incorrect answer to a simple good-morning message — too much, too slow, likely to invite exactly the kind of follow-up conversation she spent her whole childhood learning to outrun. She sends it anyway. It is the smallest possible translation of still trying into a language someone else might understand, and it is, as far as she can remember, the first time in a decade she has said something true before she had time to make it efficient.

She does not know yet whether her mother will call, or what she'll say if she does, or whether one honest sentence sent before coffee is the kind of thing that can start to undo ten years of correct ones. She doesn't know if she'll manage to say something true again tomorrow, or next week, or the next time someone asks her, lightly, at a wedding or a dinner table or across a desk at work, whether everything is fine. Being true to yourself, she is starting to suspect, was never a question with an ending, the way Hokage's classroom always had a bell that eventually rang. It is more like translation itself — something you keep doing, sentence by sentence, imperfectly, for the rest of your life, getting a little better at hearing the difference between what's correct and what's true. She sets the phone down. Somewhere across the city, in a school she hasn't set foot in for ten years, she imagines an empty classroom, and a chair nobody has climbed onto in a while, and a whiteboard someone will eventually walk into and stand in front of, the way she once did, staring at four words that refuse to be answered quickly. She hopes, whoever they are, that it doesn't take them ten years to stop rushing. She hopes it takes them less time than it took her. But if it doesn't — if it takes just as long, or longer — she thinks, for the first time, that this might be all right too. Some questions are only worth asking if you're willing to keep asking them badly, out loud, imperfectly, for as long as it takes to finally mean it.