Serendipity

A friend of mine once told me that her life had been all the things that happened to her while she was in pursuit of goals she never managed to attain. This was a woman in her seventies who'd had a very rich and happy life, but perhaps because I was in my twenties at the time, I thought there was something a little sad about such an assertion. Now that I am older, I am amazed at how my own life has turned out much the same. Not only has my life taken turns I never imagined it would take, but a lot of the major events of my life have had a lot to do with serendipity.

One of those events was meeting my husband. Two years before I met Peter, I went on an interview in New York for a job teaching English at a school in Northern Japan. The woman who interviewed me was a Japanese American. Throughout our meeting, I kept wondering who she reminded me of, and thirty minutes later, as we were concluding, I suddenly realized who it was.

"You know, you look exactly like a man I once studied Japanese with in Tokyo," I blurted out. "And he was Japanese American too."

"What was his name? My brother studied Japanese in Tokyo."

"Colin Wakabayashi."

Her jaw dropped. Colin Wakabayhashi was her brother.

I got the job, and Caroline assured me that it was not because I'd studied Japanese with her brother. Caroline and I eventually became friends and worked together for the better part of two years in Northern Japan. I took the job to return to Japan, in the expectation that a man I had been involved with for several years would join me there. This was sadly not meant to be; he ended up breaking up with me after keeping me on hold for a year. I was miserable and heartbroken, and not long after our break up, I decided to move down to Tokyo in order to find a better job.

In Tokyo, I went on at least a dozen job interviews, and had my heart set on two university teaching posts which I never got. On a whim, I answered an ad for a job at the British Council's school in Tokyo, and to my amazement, they gave me an interview. I suspected (with very good reason, it turned out) that the head teacher at my former post would not give me a good recommendation, however, and had little hope of being offered a job. So when they called and informed me that I could start teaching in April, I was overwhelmed.

I was even more amazed a few days later when Caroline told me what had happened. On the day that my interviewer at the British Council called my former school, Caroline, who had left the school shortly after I did, happened to have dropped by for five minutes. While the secretary was out of the office, the telephone rang. Caroline answered the call and it was my soon-to-be boss at the British Council, wanting to know if I was a decent teacher worth the trouble of hiring. Caroline wasn't employed there anymore, but she assured him I was hard-working and conscientious, that I had left our former school of my own volition, in order to find a better teaching post. She was considerate enough not to mention the fact that I was tired of twelve-hour schedules and not a great fan of our former head teacher -- or that she was no longer an employee of the school.

"I'm surprised they even gave you an interview, though," Caroline said. "A friend of mine told me they aren't all that keen on hiring Americans. They're not prejudiced or anything, but the students expect British teachers at the British Council."

One thing is for certain: if she had not dropped by and picked the phone up, I would never have gotten the job and I would never have met my husband.

Shortly after I started working at the British Council, they changed their policy and stopped hiring Americans.