Cultures

"But yes, summers with grandfather were the best. He was a man of culture, he insisted that my mother learn how to cook traditional Japanese meals since she was American, and my mother, bless her poor soul and heart wanted to please her father in law, anything he asked, she did with no questions asked." said Ernest.

"I did grow up fusing American culture and Japanese culture together. I would act American with my friends, I would speak a bit of Japanese with my father when he was home and when I visited my grandfather my cousin and I had to observe all the rules and cultures." said Ernest.

"No shoes were allowed inside the house so Cornelia and I would often opt to pack only one pair of shoes when we went to visit him. We would bow and pay our respects. He would show us this very lovely bonsai tree that was a hundred years old. It was passed down from generation to generation and he carried it here with him to America when he fled Japan." said Ernest.

"We spent our evenings singing outside and eating food, singing songs while he told us about how he met our grandmother who had sadly passed away when my aunt got married." said Ernest.

"He would not call us by our English names, no, instead he called us by the Japanese names that he specifically gave us." said Ernest as he smiled.

"Mine is Benjiro and Cornelia's name is Chiyo, he made sure that we answered to those names, in fact, still to this day my lovely cousin and I still address one another with those names in honour of our grandfather." said Ernest as he smiled.

"I was about thirteen years old when my grandfather passed away from old age, but you know what, I don't think that he died from old age, if you ask me, it was a broken heart. You see, he loved my grandmother dearly and you could tell from the way that he spoke about her that he missed her dearly." said Ernest as he smiled.

"He was still a very young man in my opinion, he died at the age of sixty five, I think he died because he wanted to, he was tired of leaving life alone, and now that I am old, I completely agree with him." said Ernest as he smiled.

"With his passing, gone were the summers of laughs and love with my cousin, but his stories, his lessons and his words lived on in our hearts." said Ernest as he smiled.

"My mother wanted me to have an education unlike she and my father who never had the chance, so she began to sow. She would mend the damaged clothes of the neighbours for a very cheap price just to be able to save some money to put towards my education." said Ernest.

"But I was never really interested in any of that educational nonsense (That is what I called it back then.). From the way I grew up, it was clear to me that education would get you nowhere, only hard work would." he said.

"I was not very good in school, but I had very good communication skills, all my friends knew that, and with my communication skills came the desire to make my own money, to contribute money to the household and help my parents." said Ernest.

"So after school I would go to the parks, to the stores to the malls and ask people, especially the employees who needed things but couldn't go buy it themselves till their break. They luckily would trust me and give me money along with a list of things they needed and I would go buy it for them." said Ernest.

"Doing this almost everyday, I earned a lot of trust and respect, they trusted me with their money, everyone in the malls knew me, the people in the parks trusted me and that was how I started to build connections with the people of the community. I was known as earnest Ernie and if anyone needed anything they would refer them to me." said Ernest.

"All my friends knew that if there was something they needed, I was their man, because I always knew someone who had what they needed, be it pencils, textbooks, pots and pans, I knew someone and I would refer them to the person." said Ernest.

"It was through that that I became a middleman in transactions. Since people trusted me they knew that I would never cheat them, the price my contact gave me was the price I told them it was." said Ernest.

"Through my years of hard work and connecting people, I started to get little commissions from my contacts. When I was seventeen, I had to drop out of school, my father got ill and was unable to work." said Ernest.

"It was a very hard time in our family, but I concluded that what I needed at the moment was not an education, but money. My mother was distressed, my father depressed, but I knew what I had to do." said Ernest.

"Since I stopped going to school I would offer my help in the mornings at construction sites, in the afternoons I would sweep the streets and in the evenings I would help my neighbour in the market, she sold fresh produce and anything she could not sell in the day she would give me to take home." said Ernest as he recalled his youthful memories.

"The older men on the construction site all loved me, I was their little errand boy, anything they wanted I got for them. It was through my time spent with them that I gained the contacts of distributors of their building materials." said Ernest.

"It was then that an idea popped into my head. I had seen more than enough to know that the delivery system implemented in my city was in jeopardy. Everything was a mess, no one trusted one another for fear of materials getting lost and someone being blamed, for that reason once every week I would have to journey to the neighbouring city to get all the materials since I was the only one everyone trusted." said Ernest.

"The system was broken, and it pained me that it was broken. I wanted to fix it, I needed to fix it." he said.

"All the years of being an errand boy, all the years of seeing the people around me work their entire lives with nothing good to show of it finally opened my eyes to tell me that I did not want to be a worker, I did not want to be an employee, I wanted to be my own boss, my own employee." said Ernest.

"At the age of nineteen I decided to leave home and venture into my own business, a delivery business. I started small by delivering packages from people in my city to their relatives in other cities." said Ernest.

"I would take a bus, or two, or three back and forth until all packages were safely delivered to the addresses." said Ernest.

"By that time my father had miraculously recovered from his illness, instantly returning back to work and as he did so, the stability of our family returned and my mother was more at ease with my frequent trips even though she still worried about me." said Ernest.

"After a year and a half of saving my earnings, I was able to finally buy my first car, it was a really old car from the scrap yard that one of my friends was able to restore. I needed a car you see, to make my trips easier, and buying that car really made me feel better about myself and the future of my small business." said Ernest.

"Then one night it suddenly came to me, why was I restricted to my city alone? Why was it impossible for me to deliver goods all around the country? What was stopping me from taking that leap forward, what was stopping me from registering my company legally? Well the answer was it was me and me alone." said Ernest.

"It was that very moment that I agreed to stop limiting myself. Things were different from the way my grandfather grew up, from the way my parents grew up, from the way I grew up. The world was changing, the country was booming with several opportunities and I would be a fool not to take a chance and try them." he said.

"I can tell you that for the first time in my life I did not do something for money, no, I did it for myself, for my own hard work, to make a name for myself and to build a good life for myself and my family." he said. 

"From then on, I continued venturing further and further away from home, offering my services to people outside my community. At first it was difficult, people did not know if they could trust this young looking man with their money and packages, but with time, they did and learnt to know that I was a trustworthy person and still am."