My wife once whispered something in japanese, thinking I couldn’t understand a word. She was wrong. for months, I stayed silent, gathering proof. But when our baby arrived and the nurse handed me the birth certificate, I finally spoke — in perfect japanese. The look on her face said it all.

My wife confessed her darkest secret in Japanese, not knowing I was fluent. I’d been married to Aiki for three years when she finally got pregnant. We were so excited that she broke ten years of no contact with her mother.

“Konnichiwa,” her mom exclaimed when they arrived.

“Hey,” I responded, smiling benignly.

The thing is, I spoke fluent Japanese. But I’d always been too embarrassed by my past obsession with anime and manga, so I pretended I didn’t understand. Her white American dad, Robert, was already setting up a crib he’d brought over. I went to help him, and that’s