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While the school lunch was provided at elementary school, we needed to bring lunch from home everyday at junior high school. I went to a hardware store near my home with my mother to get a lunch box. My parents had always told me about one particular kind of lunch box that they thought represented the junior high school life. It was a big, square, silver aluminum box with a sliding case on the side for chopsticks, which my parents also used to have when they were students. According to them, it was a status symbol for junior high students and a must-have item. We got one of those at a small mom-and-pop store and my parents said that now I had officially become a junior high student. Again, it was a mistake to trust my parents. I was the only one at the privileged school who brought a big aluminum lunch box. Other students used a cute, small lunch box of plastic or Tupperware with a pretty design on it. They curiously looked at mine, as they had never seen a lunch box like that before, although it was common and largely prevailed among students in my parents’ world. They laughed and said how big it was, or asked where I could possibly find and get one of those. One day, my mother had forgotten to put chopsticks in the sliding case and I had no means to eat my lunch. I was trying to scoop rice with the cover of the case when a girl from the privileged elementary school shouted at me, “That does it!” She yanked me out of the classroom and took me to the school cafeteria. She picked a pair of free disposable wooden chopsticks there and told me to use those. We weren’t close at all and it seemed her action wasn’t from her kindness. It was just intolerable for her to be at the same school with a dowdy girl like me and she couldn’t take my weird behavior any more. The school prepared free Japanese tea for lunch. The students on day duty carried a big teakettle from the school kitchenette to the classroom. I brought a cup from home everyday for the free tea. But the service suspended because students had bought juice and no one had had free tea except for me. They didn’t appreciate free stuff like I did. I had to ask my mother for extra money for juice, and she was furious at other students’ weird custom…
