Two "Off-the-boat" stories

I have been brought to tears twice in the past two days by stories of immigrants newly arrived in America. But these are not the oft-published stories of grand injustices like the tearing apart of families or the withholding of housing, jobs, or rights in court. 

The first comes from Paper Daughter, by M. Elaine Mar. Five-year-old Yee arrives in Denver with her mother, following after her father who departed from China years before. Nixon is in office, we learn for a sense of timing, and Yee joins an all-white first grade classroom. 

The trials of school are almost incommunicable but Mar poignantly and impressively details the difficulty of answering a question in math class: 


Mrs. Tate wrote the equation in big chalk figures on the board. She asked for a volunteer. The more enthusiastic students raised their hands. Mrs. Tate scanned the room, then decided, "Let's give Elaine a chance." I didn't understand a word, not even my new name. There was silence. "Elaine?" Mrs. Tate repeated. I ddin't respond. "That's your name," San reminded me. My classmates started giggling. "Oh," I said. I immediately knew the answer, but I couldn't think of the word for "seven" in English. "Um," I said. The children laughed some more.

Mrs. Tate made a shushing sound, one finger in front of her lips. She drew tally marks next to the numbers. "Now, here we have one, two, three," she said. "And here we have one, two three, four. If we put them together, how many do we have?" She looked at me significantly.

I still couldn't think of the word. I wanted to ask San, but I wasn't allowed - Mrs. Tate would think I was cheating. I'll write it on the board, I thought. I slid out of my seat.

Misunderstanding my action, Mrs. Tate said, "No, no, you can't go to the bathrom now." The class exploded with laughter. San translated the sentence for me. "I want to write the answer," I told him. 

Too late. Mrs. Tate decided to solve the problem herself: "All together class, one, two, three --" she tapped at the lines she'd drawn "--four, five, six, seven. The answer's seven!"



As I read this I think of students who don't respond right away when their names are called - students who have read the text and probably have understood, but who can't speak their words. This is why I so rarely cold call. But I am afraid that I must often not give students enough time to respond to a question that just takes them time to translate in their heads, then translate back into English. 

This isn't the scene that made me cry - that was the scene when the whole class submits forms and money to buy school-logo tee-shirts which Elaine's family cannot afford. Her shame, instead of her lack of English, prevent her from being clear about why she can't submit the form on time. This kind of shame must be the experience of so many kids, immigrant and not. 

“You may have ‘The Lives of the Poets’ under your oxter, but you don’t have them in your head, so go home and read.”

The other immigrant story is this excerpt from 'Tis: A Memoir by Frank McCourt. The excerpt appeared in the New Yorker in 1999 and has been reprinted this week. At first I thought it was just going to be an enjoyable and light read. But the final scene, which is indeed funny, and describes his mishaps in a New York movie theater a few days after he's arrived from Ireland, is also very sad. The pain of having an expectation of how you will enjoy simple pleasures, and having that expectation so utterly smashed, is hard to read about. OK I didn't actually cry, but I felt like crying, and certainly had I been in his shoes I think I would have cried.

Reflection of one culture in another

This morning I started reading a memoir called Paper Daughter by M. Elaine Mar. This is not the first account by a Chinese of her upbringing in China which has enthralled me from the first sentence. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club cast a similar trance with stories of an unabashedly autocratic parenting system which teaches young girls to be obedient, helpful, demure and feminine.

I love the contrast between the parents' stifling tactics and the child's natural impulses, or the ways the child misconstrues some of the parents' carefully conveyed messages, as when the narrator's mother tells her that her grandmother doesn't have to follow the same rules as everyone else only because she's old and has earned privileges.

"Oh yes," the mother says solemnly, "You must respect your elders." The young girl does respect her grandmother immensely, but only because she's allowed to go about without combing her hair. The girl hates her daily appointment with her mother's comb, and longs for such freedom from tyranny to be her right.

Or when the child understands things the parents never attempted to teach, lessons learned through experience and observation. For example, Ms. Mar learns from watching her mother and their female neighbor give each other false compliments to fulfil a social expectation of flattery alongside self-deprecation. Her mother coos at the young child of their neighbor, and the neighbor says

"'Isn't auntie kind! Oh see how much she likes you!'
Moy-moy, who was two, tottered off to fetch her chamberpot for me, prompting laughter from the two mothers. 'See how much she likes you, little Yee?' they asked. Perched on the rim of Moy-moy's toilet, I began to understand the meaning of subservience, a proxy for affection in our culture."

There are aspects of Ms. Mar's childhood which recall significant moments of my own. She recalls that her mother told her the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf every single day. I remember the first time my mother told me that story, and how profoundly that message hit home. The narrator of Paper Daughter says that she shivered when the boy died at the end, eaten by the wolf because of his own foolishness. I think my version was the sanitized American translation, in which only the lives of a few hapless sheep are sacrificed to the moral of the story. But the effect was strong. I think my mother told me that story only once, and she did not follow it with the narrator's mother's daily commentary: "You must never lie."

Yesterday, our second day on Beowulf in the 11/12 classroom, students wrote at the beginning of class about what people in their culture tend to talk about when they get together. The natural division that arose in first period and was maintained in the rest of the day was the generational gap - they students wanted to divide the conversation topics into what Older people talk about, and what Younger people talk about. After they discussed with their partners, we took feedback as a class, which resulted in these lists.

                







Then, we read the opening segments of Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney. Our question was, what do these people seem to care about? What do they talk about? Several of the same things came up - leaders, how to be "good," how to achieve power and wealth, former struggles, community problems.

I need to find a way to post our conversation topics in the class, so we can keep an eye to what these people are talking about that we also talk about.