During my first year of study at Tenri University in Japan, I met my cousin Erisa. She was from a line of my dad’s family, the Yoshidas, who emigrated to Mexico, whereas my family went to Los Angeles. I never even really knew we had Mexican relatives until I met Erisa.
She spoke zero English, and I spoke high school level Spanish (just enough to not be able to do anything with), but we were both starting to learn Japanese, so we ended up using that over the time she was in Japan (just a couple of years, whereas I stayed for 13 or 14 cumulatively). We were both totally Japanese in appearance, so it must have been a sight when we had these multilingual conversations out in public.
Even though I was using e-mail and laptops before anybody else around me, nobody else was, and I’ve lost track of many good friends from those days. So it made me immensely happy to reconnect with Erisa on Facebook back in August, by accepting her friend request and commenting on one of her posts. She just replied to the comment today, so I guess she was busy or whatever, but I know I can contact her whenever, now. Maybe this leaves the door open for me to visit family in Mexico sometime…
I still hate Facebook for being evil and selling my private information to boner pill companies, but it did a good job for me today.