 I talk for a living.
I teach strangers. People far from home who don’t speak English. I know the grammar: adjective clauses, the usage of simple past vs. present perfect (when has there ever been a perfect present?), how to write a thesis statement, how to support ideas in the very particular style of academic writing that is common in US universities but is not the only way to write. It’s not much. But it could be the difference between a bridge and a shut door. I have had students from the Sudan who knew how to survive in the bush at five, were elders at seven and eight, carrying friends who couldn’t swim on their backs across the Nile to escape the civil war, doing a crazy chopping stroke to scare away the crocodiles. Then back again for another friend, knowing the danger. They chewed leaves from the scarce plants in the desert, extracting the fluid, putting it in their friends’ mouths with their finger to keep them alive. One told me once “when I knew I was going to die, I drank my own urine.” What did I know at seven? How to change the channel on the tv. But I’m the teacher. I know how to live in the US. So, I take refugee friends shopping to help them navigate an American supermarket. We walk around the store in Boston. This group of young men who spent ten years in a refugee camp in Northern Kenya, three cups of corn meal for two weeks, are staring, mouths agape. A whole aisle of cat and dog food. Aisles of chips and candy. Soda. “Do you recognize anything here?” I ask them. Two things: rice and okra. They could not understand: all this meat, wrapped in plastic, but where are the cows, they ask. They come from a tribe of cattle breeders; as young boys they tended the cows on the outskirts of their villages, which is how they survived the burning of their village. How could it be: meat without cows nearby? They came here with the assistance of the UN High Commission for Refugees. They want to get an education, but they have 3 months to find a job with health insurance and begin paying back the US government for their airfare here. I am college-educated with a master’s, and I have never yet had a job with health insurance. Their sole education was in a refugee camp without electricity, without computers, in a language that was not their own. They have to learn how to navigate the subway, how to use a cell phone, the heating system, a stove, a microwave. They have to learn to shake hands as a greeting, how to make eye contact (since not making eye contact is a sign of respect in their culture), how to make small talk. Good luck with the job search. With the adjustment to 21st century Boston in the middle of winter. In a graduate school class for teaching English as a Second Language, the professor puts us in pairs: brainstorm essential vocabulary for beginning Adult Language Learners. The professor is imagining multiple class lessons. My partner and I are cynics. We write: Thank you. Please. You’re welcome. Excuse me. Paper or Plastic? Would you like fries with that? Have a nice day. When Americans hear that I teach English to speakers of other languages they ask: “Why don’t they speak English?” Because they can only find work with people who speak their language. Because they work two-three jobs and don’t have time to learn. Because there is a two-year waiting list for the free English classes. Because by the time they get called for the free English classes, they no longer have the same work schedule and so unable to attend classes at the time they were offered, they get put back at the bottom of the list. Because who will watch the kids while they attend the English class? Because even if the kids are old enough to not need watching, they still see them so little already. Because it’s embarrassing to be an adult and talk like a child. Because they weren’t that well-educated in their home country, so it’s hard to read, hard to learn another language. Because they were highly educated in their home country, so it’s humiliating to not be able to communicate well. Because they are tired. Cleaning our office buildings late at night, our universities, our banks, invisibly, after everyone has gone home, cleaning our houses, efficiently, in teams of two-three, picking our vegetables, bagging our groceries, cashing us out at the 24-hour convenience stores, serving our fast food, inputting our checks in our bank accounts. Tired, doing the work most Americans don’t want to do. I am teaching at UMass Boston. Many of my students are Vietnamese, Haitian, Cambodian. Cape Verdean. I say let’s brainstorm together: what do you think of when you see the word “childhood.” Stuffed animals, dolls, playing ball, cuddles, innocence, riding my bicycle. I write the words they call out on the board. “Blood, fear, separation, bullets, running,” says my Cambodian student. “Why aren’t you interested in the story,” I ask my student from Guatemala, on break from his job in the school cafeteria. We are reading When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, a memoir by a Vietnamese woman about coming of age in the midst of the Vietnamese war. Many of the other students in the class are newly resettled Vietnamese refugees. “I know it is not about your culture,” I say, “but war, survival, courage, longing for peace, are universal themes.” He shuffles. Doesn’t meet my eyes. Hands shoved into his jeans pockets, he shrugs, goes back to serving from behind the counter. Two more weeks of silence, eyes blank as marbles, arms crossed. In the cafeteria, he sidles up to me as I pour a cup of coffee, looks down at his feet. “I was a child soldier,” he says quietly. I am teaching workplace ESL in Northern Massachusetts for workers at a retirement community. They are from Honduras, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic. In the retirement community, they clean the apartments, do the laundry, work in the kitchens. Most of them speak almost no English. The manager of one of the kitchens, Larry, tells me the program is a waste of time. Carlos, his dishwasher, has been here sixteen years, can’t even say hello. Can’t understand basic directions. He’s hopeless, hopeless! After a few classes, they have an assignment: go to your manager. Ask two questions and write down the answers as well as you can. Come back and share what happened. We make up questions; students write them on a 3x5 card, then they practice asking the questions. Carlos goes to his boss. He says “Hello. How are you today?” Then he asks about his boss’ cats, having spied a framed photo on his manager’s desk. Larry adores his cats. He goes on and on about his cats. Carlos comes back to class beaming. He tells us all about Larry’s cats. Leaving for the day, Larry stops me. “He asked me a question! Carlos said hello to me and asked me a question! We had a conversation!” Suddenly Carlos is human. “Why did you want to learn to read,” I ask Matiop, a South Sudanese young man. “No one in your family knew how.” “When I read, I felt like someone was whispering in my ear. I felt like I was not alone. I saw people in the refugee camp, they had nothing, like me. But they were educated, they had the knowledge in their heads. And floods could not take that away. Burned villages could not take that away. Earthquakes, war, could not take that away.” A teacher at a fancy private school in Boston, a refugee himself, wants his school to offer one of the “Lost Boys” (as they were named in the media, but not a name they themselves would use) a scholarship. Matiop is the top candidate, but the teacher wants to know: how will you feel being in a school with almost all white students, mostly wealthy. Matiop-- 6’3 ½”, mostly legs, 130 pounds, skin a very deep brown, tribal scarification marks on his forehead: 3 straight lines fanning out from between his eyebrows, wide, gap-toothed smile-- will not blend in, slouched in the back of the class. Matiop bristles at the question, looks the teacher in the eye: “I will be another student.” At first the teacher doesn’t understand, thinks Matiop has not addressed the question. Then the teacher realizes he has: I will be another student. We will have this in common. That is more important than what is not shared. I hope he is right. I have students in my class from Serbia and Croatia at the same time, from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, from Hong Kong and Taiwan and mainland China at the same time. I don’t know how they will get along; what political grudges they bear, how the weight of history, oppression and violence has fallen on them. It is hard to keep up with all the geo-political conflicts, the shifting alliances. I cannot make assumptions where students stand based on country of origin, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. My own Ukrainian Jewish grandparents were hidden and protected by their Christian neighbors even as other neighbors joined the pogroms. I consider their backgrounds at first when I put students in small groups for discussion, but over time, I hope trust builds, that with continued exposure, experience breaks down barriers. They are all so far from home; I hope they will agree to “be another student.” I have seen it happen, again and again. But you never know. She was older than the other students, had already completed a degree in literature in her home country, Vietnam. Now, in the US, she is studying to be a nurse. A year after she graduates, we meet for lunch in a small Vietnamese restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown. Her hair is much shorter than before: a chin-length page boy. She cut her waist-long hair to donate to Locks of Love, to make wigs for cancer patients. After checking my food preferences, she orders for both of us, and we catch up. Yes, she is working as a nurse, but also working for an organization that assists Asian survivors of domestic and sexual violence. “I do counseling, education and advocacy,” she tells me. She lives alone, having gotten her own apartment when she landed her first job. What is a normal rite of passage for American kids, is unusual in the Vietnamese community. Her traditional parents are appalled: an unmarried woman living alone. But she did not ask for their approval. She found an apartment, signed the lease, and told them she was moving. They do not approve of many things, as it turns out. She speaks frankly about sex, about gay people, about abuse. They had hoped she would become educated, but now she is becoming “American.” What happened to their polite, obedient daughter? Nothing. She is the same. I remember her in class, discussing a character in a Sandra Cisneros story who became a prostitute. Most of the students think the woman deserved what happened to her, that she brought it on herself. They speak of the character disparagingly. Phuongmai disagrees. She tells a story to support her point. Her best friend became a prostitute, she says. The friend’s father had died several years before; the mother died when they were sophomores in high school. She had a much younger brother who she promised her mother she would always take care of. She dropped out of school to support them, doing menial, physical work. They fell deeper and deeper into poverty. She ultimately accepted the exchange: money for sex in order to pay her brother’s school fees, purchase his uniform, put food on the table. Phuongmai’s parents ordered her to not associate with her friend. But Phuongmai would not do this. She met with her friend secretly, shared what she was learning at school, sometimes lent her friend her books, so she could keep up her studies. She was noble, Phuongmai argued; she should be respected as a good sister, not scorned as a prostitute. She was not afraid to speak her mind then, not afraid to live her values now. Sometimes students email me years later: “Dear Professor Ellen, I know I was not a good student in your class. But yesterday I got back an essay from my art history professor, and I got an A. So, thank you….” Or I get a WeChat or What’s App message: “Hi professor! I miss you!” And they share some story about our class from their perspective now or then. A thread of connection across the years, across an ocean. Often I see posts on Facebook. Smiling faces, gathered round a table, celebrating another birthday. A wedding, the birth of a child. They have come out, accepted themselves, found their people. They announce a dream job, a promotion, an award. They look so mature, well-adjusted; they are thriving. They have become themselves: more expansive, vibrant, multi-faceted versions of themselves. I have colleagues who are wizzes at grammar, who know how to teach pronunciation so precisely. They are turned on by this stuff. I was never like that. For me, it was always about the students. People. What it means to be human. There are approximately 281 million migrants in the world— more than at any other point in history. Why are we afraid of strangers? The crisis is not that they are at our borders. The crisis is that they need to leave their country. As the poet Warsan Shire says “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” Why are we afraid of strangers? I have been teaching for years. But I am done teaching. I don’t even want to pretend to be the one who “knows.” I want to learn, the world as my classroom. I promise to pay attention. To be “another student.” |