Long Pauses

Tag: ESL

  • Happy Thanksgiving

    We had our annual Thanksgiving pot luck dinner last night. Along with the traditional turkey, stuffing, cranberry relish, and pumpkin pie, we had Polish mushroom rolls and potato salad, smoked salmon sushi, Mexican bread pudding, and two Taiwanese dishes: a sweet bean dessert and beef viscera. (Andrew, who brought the viscera, had been warned by his friends that no Americans would be willing to try it, and he seemed genuinely pleased when we proved them wrong.)

    Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

  • Calls to Conscience and Action

    Calls to Conscience and Action

    Jeffrey Overstreet, who’s writing a book about his experiences as a film critic in/to Evangelical America, has posed the question, “What would you show in a film festival about ‘Calls to Conscience and Action’?” Specifically, he’s looking for “works of art that make us want to put our hands to the plow.”

    Frankly, his question makes me uncomfortable. I say that, in part, because I’m having trouble coming up with one or two specific titles (a topic I’ll come back to later) but mostly because it’s been so long since my hand last touched a plow, metaphorical or otherwise. I’m more the “righteous indignation” type — the guy who carefully positions himself above the fray while the “Red States,” on the one side, react against liberal America’s progressive agendas, and the “Hollywood Elite,” on the other, try to decide which is the bigger evil: racism, homophobia, or, um, Joe McCarthy. I prefer to strike the pose of the humanist aesthete, sniping soldiers on both sides from the satisfied comfort of my expensive home theater. It’s so much easier than, you know, doing something. (Have you ever tried to plow? That shit is hard.)

    Sarcasm aside, I’ll admit to feeling a bit shamed by Jeffrey’s question. That it would arise from a book project addressed to Evangelical readers should come as little surprise. Whatever frustrations I feel toward that world’s cultural and ideological assumptions are always tempered by my genuine love and respect for so many people who have found their spiritual home there. Color me ambivalent. When, a few years ago, I suggested to some friends that we temporarily set aside our Bibles and study art instead, I first had to convince them that the questions we’d been trained to ask would remain essentially unchanged: What does this text (whether Scripture, a painting, or a film) teach us about truth, beauty, and grace? What aspects of God’s character are revealed here? And how do we apply these lessons to our daily lives? Say what you will about Evangelical America’s failure to meet Christ’s standards (and I’ve said more than my share), but that question of application — of putting hand to plow — is more prominent there than in any other American sub-culture I’ve inhabited.

    And so it pains me to review my life as a critic (for lack of a better word) and find so little evidence of my faith/politics/aesthetics translated into practical action. Maybe this hypocrisy (too strong?) is partly to blame for the ferocity of the public debate surrounding the Oscars this year. High-minded talk, whether from the Right or the Left, divorced from sympathy and service will inevitably come off as smug.

    I’m deliberately overstating the case here. Of course my sense of the world, of right action, of human tragedy and grace have been radically transformed by an immersion in the arts. At the heart of the matter, I think, is the simple idea of empathy. (Slacktivist, by the way, has written two great posts on the subject this week.) I wonder, for example, how I would view the war in Iraq if, instead of watching regional, humanist filmmakers like Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, and Majidi, I was learning about righteous vengeance, sadism, and “freedom” from Hollywood. The creative imagination, as expressed through great art, can be an empathy-making wonder. Christ, after all, was a prophet and a storyteller.

    But to answer Jeffrey’s question: If offered the chance to program a “Calls to Conscience and Action” festival, my opening night film would be The Gleaners and I (2000), Agnes Varda’s documentary about the long-standing tradition of gathering up leftover crops (“gleaning”) after the fields have been harvested. Varda, as much an essayist as filmmaker, explores gleaning as a hypertext of ideas: gleaning is an alternate economy; at times it’s a moral choice, at others a lamentable necessity; it’s both transgressive and communal; and, finally, it’s a metaphor for the artistic process itself. As Jonathon Rosenbaum points out, Varda expresses the ambiguities of gleaning even in the title of the film, though her point is lost in translation:

    There’s a suggestive discrepancy between the French and English titles of this wonderful essay film completed by Agnes Varda last year. It’s a distinction that tells us something about the French sense of community and the Anglo-American sense of individuality — concepts that are virtually built into the two languages. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse can be roughly translated as “the gleaners and the female gleaner,” with the plural noun masculine only in the sense that all French nouns are either masculine or feminine. The Gleaners and I sets up an implicit opposition between “people who glean” and the filmmaker, whereas Les glaneurs et la glaneuse links them, asserting that she’s one of them.

    Regardless of what would follow on the festival program, The Gleaners and I would properly frame the central question of conscience and action, making it a matter of community (or, to satisfy the pomo Christians in the audience, we could call it “kingdom” instead) and foregrounding art as an underutilized means of consciousness-raising, community-building, and (dare I say it) worship.

    I would also program The Gleaners and I for personal reasons. For a large number of viewers, the most memorable sequences in the film involve a young man who, despite having earned a Masters degree in Biology, has chosen to glean his food from a Paris market and to live in a shelter, side-by-side with the newly-arrived immigrants to whom he voluntarily teaches French most nights of the week. I can’t imagine that I would have become an English as a Second Language teacher myself had I not first met so many non-Americans through the literatures and cinema of their countries. My ESL work is as close as I’ve come, I suppose, to pushing a plow, though that metaphor distorts the actual experience. It implies calloused hands, sweat, and sacrifice.

  • Haruki Murakami

    I often get the feeling that things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me. Some kind of balance inside me has broken down since the elephant affair, and maybe that causes external phenomena to strike my eye in a strange way. It’s probably something in me.

    The fall semester of my ESL class kicked off last night, and we began with a discussion of Haruki Murakami’s “The Elephant Vanishes,” which is, quite frankly, one of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever read. This year I assigned The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories, edited by Daniel Halpern. My hope was that, by reading an occasional story from his or her home country, each student would have an opportunity to be the “expert” for a week, to provide us with the context or insider’s perspective we might lack. Our one Japanese student sat quietly last night, unfortunately, but the rest of the class was eager to discuss Murakami’s tale, which is a kind of urban, magical realist fable — the kind of story that Tsai Ming-liang might write if he wrote stories.

    The narrator is obsessed by the recent disappearance of an elephant and its keeper, both of whom had come to live in his Tokyo suburb when the local zoo was bought out by a real estate devloper. He lives a life of mundane ritual — the alarm goes off at 6:13, he reads his paper front-to-back over two cups of coffee — and is a PR man for a manufacturer of kitchen appliances. His latest assignment is convincing retailers and consumers that the new line of stovetops and ovens brings perfect “unity” and “balance” to the modern kitchen. When pressed by a magazine writer on the ultimate importance of “unity,” he replies:

    A kitchen probably does need a few things more than it needs unity. But those other elements are things you can’t sell. And in this pragmatic world of our, things you can’t sell don’t count for much.

    “The Elephant Vanishes” never explains exactly what those “few things” are, but, by showing us the world through the narrator’s wonder-seeking eyes, they become obvious: nature, beauty, mystery, communion, all the things we ignore in our mad dash to purchase order for our lives. (We went with Jenn-Air products in our recent remodel, by the way.) The narrator has a bit of Binx Bolling in him. He’s also on “the search.” “The Elephant Vanishes” has a perfectly sad, perfectly satisfying ending. Great stuff.

    Can anyone recommend other writing by Murakami?

  • So We Beat On . . .

    Back in May, I asked for suggestions for an American novel to read with my English as a Second Language students. Twenty-two comments later, and after spending four or five hours browsing the shelves of my local Borders, I decided to ignore everyone’s suggestions and warnings and go with my first choice, The Great Gatsby. We finished it last night, and I have to say, the book killed. Absolutely killed.

    This was the third time I’d read Gatsby, after the requisite high school manhandling and an only slightly less incompetent stab as an undergrad. It’s only in recent years that I’ve come to relish the language of great writers — the language itself and, by extension, the imaginations that create it — and, strangely, that evolution can be attributed in large part to this website, which has allowed me to experiment as a writer and as a thinker and which has proven, again and again, just how damn ellusive great writing is. If you haven’t read Gatsby as an adult, I’d encourage you to give it another go. Because it is packed with great writing.

    Like, I’m sure my 11th grade English teacher pointed this paragraph out to us. I’m sure she explained how this paragraph, coming as it does on the final page of the novel, is Fitzgerald’s most explicit and bittersweet and poignant comment on the death of the American Dream. But I’d forgotten all about it until yesterday afternoon when I read it five times. It’s the end of summer, Gatsby’s dead, the lawns around his gaudy mansion are overgrown, and Nick is making one last visit. He wanders down to the beach and sits in the sand.

    Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

    I love how, despite his disgust and anger, Nick is still moved by the vision — how he is unable to ignore its beauty while also acknowledging the human misery that now populates the land. This one paragraph, in both tone and theme, is the entire novel in concentrated form. Amazing.

    A few observations from my students. By week three my friend from Iran was angry with Nick. “He is so indifferent to everyone and everything around him.” (I’ll never stop being impressed by the ways in which adult students of English take possession of the language in ways that most of us native speakers seldom do. “Indifferent” is the perfect word.) A young woman from Seoul told us that the novel felt like a fairy tale that she might read to her son, and she’s right. I’ve always thought of Fitgerald as a realist, but there is something Modern and disorienting to his style. His world is recognizable but a bit oversized, distorted.

    And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a novel that critiques so many of America’s defining tropes — Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism, egalitarianism, and the American Dream, in particular — should be such a great text to read with a class of immigrants and visiting students. Our discussion of the last two chapters lasted about 30 minutes last night; the rest of the evening was spent talking about America and the stories that define it.

  • What Are We Talking About?

    Given the content of this here website, what I’m about to say might come as something of a surprise: Except under certain circumstances, I really hate to talk about movies, literature, religion, and politics. Yesterday Joanna and I went to a 4th of July picnic where we knew only the host and one other couple. At some point I found myself talking to a guy who, after learning about my dissertation and my film writing, used my interests as an excuse to tell me about Ayn Rand and Memento. I got the sense that this guy was accustomed to being the most knowledgeable (or at least the loudest) guy in the room, so I was content to let him talk until he ran out of steam, hoping all the while that Joanna would wander back in our direction or that a meteor would destroy the apartment complex across the street. Anything that would give us an excuse to change the subject.

    But nothing like that happened. And the guy wouldn’t let me off the hook. “So what’s the best film you’ve seen in the theater this year?” Um, Pin Boy, probably. It’s from Brazil, I think, or maybe Argentina. I forget which. It’s a great little film about . . . “I don’t know anything about Pin Boy. What about American films?” This year? I guess The Life Aquatic was the most interesting American film I’ve seen this year, but I was actually a bit disa . . . “Okay, what about the last ten years? Did you see Memento? How about Fight Club? The Usual Suspects?”

    And on and on it went. At some point his friend joined us and, after listening for a while, added, “Oh, I get it. You’re one of those ‘I don’t watch summer blockbuster movies’ types, right?” And if you’re guessing that he said that in an effete, high-pitched voice, then you’d be right. “Don’t stereotype the guy,” Mr. Memento said. Hey, sometimes the stereotype fits, I joked.

    Eventually the subject changed to The Lord of the Rings, which drew Joanna’s attention and which gave me an excuse to slide over to the one couple I knew. I asked them about their upcoming trip to California — a brief tour of Hollywood, followed by a four-day drive up the coast and a long weekend in San Francisco — and, quite unexpectedly, I soon found myself talking about movies again. After telling me about California, they asked if Joanna and I had any trips planned and I mentioned Toronto.

    “You know, many Iranian directors make films for that festival in Toronto.” Yeah, Kiarostami had a new film there last year. And I think Makhmalbaf’s daughter did, too. I forget her first name. “Yes, they make these films for Western audiences that are so depressing. Poverty is a part of Iran. I don’t deny that. But I can’t understand why festivals love these films.”

    Assana is in my ESL class. I had known her for several months before learning that in Tehran she had been a doctor. On Thursday I plied her with questions about the election, and she seemed grateful to have found an American who was interested. Yesterday, I told her a bit about Kiarostami’s Ten, which had given me my first glimpse of middle class Tehran.

    I’m not sure what this story illustrates exactly. (Joanna would say it illustrates that Mr. Memento is an asshole.) Sociologists have been saying for years that popular culture serves an organizational function in America. The people who line up on opening night at theaters in Anchorage, Kansas City, and Miami (or who watch the Super Bowl or who read the latest Harry Potter or Purpose-Driven whatever) are actors in a shared experience. Pop culture guarantees some kind of connection between strangers. But it’s always the most superficial of connections, and so small talk becomes a discussion of which film has the most realistic depiction of human evisceration, The War of the Worlds or Independence Day. And it makes me crazy.

    Maybe I’m the asshole.

  • Notes on “Sonny’s Blues”

    Notes on “Sonny’s Blues”

    All that hatred down there. All that hatred and misery and love. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart.

    In a few hours I’ll be discussing James Baldwin’s story, “Sonny’s Blues,” with my class of English as a Second language students. For the last year we’ve been working our way through anthologies of American literature, cherry-picking stories that I felt were appropriately readable, aesthetically interesting, and representative of their era. In other words, I want good stories that teach us something about life in America. (Toward those ends, I can highly recommend The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, which is a 768-page steal at $13.57.)

    Over the last few months, my concept of what is “appropriately readable” has expanded dramatically to match the inspiring efforts of my students. They’re just amazing people. One told me that he spends ten hours each week reading, carefully annotating, and then rereading and re-rereading each 10-15 page story. Can you imagine? In the last four weeks, we’ve read Jack London, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor. Unbelievable. And tonight it’s time, finally, for “Sonny’s Blues,” which might just be my all-time favorite story.

    The room where we meet is a typical Sunday School class, with children’s art projects on the wall and an old upright piano pushed into the corner. I set aside ten minutes at the end of class last week to introduce Baldwin. I told them a bit about Harlem and Baldwin’s preacher father, and then I asked what they could tell me about the blues.

    Blank stares.

    “It’s boring,” Martha said, and a few people, myself included, laughed.

    So I pulled out my boombox and played for them the first five minutes of “Freddie Freeloader” from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. I walked over to the piano and fumbled through the three-chord, 12-bar progression.

    “Those chords, those three chords — that makes it the blues. Hear how they repeat? Over and over again? Almost every blues song is built from that same series of chords.”

    They nodded.

    By that point, Wynton Kelly and John Coltrane were trading solos.

    “The song started with a really simple melody, remember? Daaaaaaaa-daaa. Daaaaaaaa-daaa. [and now a few steps higher] Daaaaaaaa-daaa. [and back down again] Daaaaaaaa-daaa. And so on. Now, hear how the piano and saxophone players have moved beyond the melody? They’re improvising. Making it up as they go. Creating new melodies as they play. That improvisation is what makes it jazz.”

    I’ve never played music in class before. Never spent that much time prepping the group for their next reading. But I can’t imagine reading “Sonny’s Blues” without knowing what the blues and jazz sound like, without knowing something about improvisation and the conversational story-telling that goes on between the best soloists. Tonight, some Charlie Parker might be in order.

    I’ve probably read “Sonny’s Blues” ten times over the years, but today will be my first chance to teach it, and, as usual, “preparing” the story yesterday afternoon forced me to read it better than I ever had before. That paragraph about the narrator’s daughter, Grace, stills makes me choke on tears, but I’d never really noticed before how Baldwin develops dissonant images of a barely-remembered childhood innocence from the opening pages on. When Sonny’s old friend, now a junkie, grins, the narrator tells us:

    It made him repulsive and it also brought to mind what he’d looked like as a kid.

    When the narrator catches sight of a woman in a juke joint, Baldwin writes:

    When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still-struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore.

    And when the narrator and his brother are reunited after Sonny’s time in prison, we get this:

    Yet, when he smiled, when he shook hands, the baby brother I’d never known looked out from the depths of his private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light.

    I once delivered a pizza to what can only be described as a crack house. Two women, both in their early-30s, I’d guess, paid me with a handful of crumpled bills and loose coins. As I stood there waiting for them to count it out, I watched the children in the room, five or six of them in front of the TV, ranging in age from maybe 2 to 12. I saw those kids again yesterday when I was reading, saw the bright, shining eyes of the two-year-old and the broken, tired expression of her oldest brother. Their faces were like a portrait of defeat.

    (I’m just another white guy, born into the relative comfort and stability of middle class America, and so I’m always in danger of being patronizing when I say things like this, but I’m so grateful for works of art like “Sonny’s Blues. Empathy doesn’t come easy here in Suburbia.)

    When I introduced the story last week, I told my students that the blues is also about transforming pain into something beautiful, that that transformation is what Sonny is pursuing as if his life quite literally depended on it, and that Baldwin, in fact, accomplishes the same feat in his story. What I noticed this time through, though, is how Baldwin actually takes on the rhythms of jazz in his writing style, “improvising” within individual sentences. “Sonny’s Blues” is littered with sentences like:

    When the last bell rang, the last class ended, I let out my breath.

    And now, even though he was a grown-up man, he still hung around that block, still spent hours on the street corner, was always high and raggy.

    But it was as though he were all wrapped up in some cloud, some fire, some vision all his own.

    I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting.

    Like a soloist, Baldwin introduces an idea, a phrase, then he explores it, explodes it, develops it until he finds something new, something more precise or melodic. Baldwin accomplishes in his story what Sonny accomplishes in that jazz club. And, really, isn’t this just the most beautiful “vanishing evocation” (as the narrator describes music) of what art is capable of doing?

    Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.

  • Some Kind of Perspective

    For the last few months, during my weekly English as a Second Language classes, I’ve been teaching stories from The Best American Short Stories of the Century, a better-than-average collection edited by John Updike. The stories give us an excuse to discover new vocabulary and American idioms together, but much more importantly, they offer context. We began the semester with Benjamin Rosenblatt’s “Zelig” and talked about the turn-of-the-century immigrant experience. We read E. B. White’s “The Second Tree from the Corner” and discussed where the things of true value might be found in our lives. We read Mary Ladd Gavell’s “The Rotifer” and debated whether or not any of us truly has the power to effect positive change in another’s life. Not surprisingly, I had much more to learn from my students than they from me.

    Last night we discussed James Alan McPherson’s “Gold Coast,” a story about an interracial couple set in Boston during the late-1960s. I began the night by drawing some comparisons between the America of 1968 and our current climate. “Because of the civil rights movement and President Johnson’s escalation of our military involvement in Vietnam,” I told them, “many Americans really wanted change.” I told them a bit about the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year and about the riots that broke out in so many urban areas. I reminded them of the assasinations and the rise of groups like the Black Panthers, and, because the story addressed the topic directly, we talked a bit about hippies and “limousine liberals.” And I told them about how Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey by nearly a million votes, even though 56% of the population voted against him. “America was deeply divided,” I told them. “Kind of like now.”

    And then one of my Mexican students reminded us of the 1968 Olympics that were held in Mexico City, where only ten days before the games opened 267 students were gunned down and more than 1,000 were wounded during a protest at the Plaza of Three Cultures. And then two of my South Korean students told us of their government’s secret decision to send troops to Vietnam despite the public’s protest against such a move. And then one of my Chinese students, a remarkable young woman who exudes joy like no one I’ve ever known, said, “Yes. The same in China. During the Cultural Revolution.”

  • Beautiful

    When I asked my ESL students last night about the great literatures of their native language, one of the Iranians told me about the Arab conquest of Persia. In their effort to erase all evidence of Persian culture, the ancient Arabs outlawed the speaking of Farsi, which, of course, only served to inspire a new generation of writers.

    “Our language was saved by the poets,” he told me.

  • Trying to Understand It All

    There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
    — Harry Truman

    I’ve become interested in Iran lately. For personal reasons. I have a new student in my ESL class who arrived recently in America by way of Switzerland and Tehran. He’s a religious and political refugee with nothing but contempt for the Islamic fundamentalists who dominate his country. Each time I’ve chatted with him, he has spoken nostalgically of the days under the Shah. I shake my head knowingly and listen with rapt attention, but my fuzzy understanding of his country’s history is formed mostly by childhood memories of the hostage crisis and by the snippets of wisdom I glean from Kiarostami, Panahi, Makhmalbaf, and those other brilliant Iranian filmmakers.

    It’s a start, though. When he mentioned that his last job there had been building an apartment complex on the outskirts of the city, I said that Kiarostami’s films make those mountains look like the most beautiful place on earth. His eyes lit up, then he told me about the hours and hours he had spent hiking and rock climbing there.

    With my new friend in mind, I read with great interest H.D.S. Greenway’s review of All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer. In “The Iran Conspiracy,” Greenway offers a usable introduction to the political and economic rationale for the CIA’s involvement in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist government. The parallels with the current situation are impossible to ignore.

    In the current age of American unilateralism and preemptive military interventions, it is hard to remember that just after World War II America still stood for something quite different in the Middle East. Although the US emerged from the war as “the leader of the free world,” the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese still ruled over vast empires. To many colonized people the United States was identified with Wilsonian idealism and anticolonialism. . . .

    In the early 1950s Stephen Penrose, a president of American University of Beirut, wrote: “Until recently American enterprise in the Middle East has been almost entirely non-governmental, an important difference from most other national patterns. Americans have never been seen as colonizers or subjugators and it is hard even now for most Arabs to conceive of them as such.”

    When President Bush first mentioned the “Axis of Evil,” I nearly choked, knowing that, in doing so, he was drawing a line in the sand — a line that would re-establish a Cold War-like polarity and dominate foreign policy and political discourse (and eliminate nuance in the process). I’m only now beginning to understand, however, just how intimately the Cold War and Middle East have been bound.

    The war in Korea changed America’s outlook and policies as surely as did the attack on September 11 in the current administration. The invasion from the north came in June of 1950, and convinced the United States that the Western nightmare of expanding, militant communism was coming true. The Korean War coincided with the growing crisis over Iran’s nationalization of its oil industry, and had the effect of narrowing Washington’s differences with the British at Iran’s expense. Korea played into the American decision to reverse its early opposition to an anti-Mossadegh coup. Coincidentally, the Korean War ended in July 1953, while [Kermit] Roosevelt was plotting his coup. . . .

    In many ways America’s obsession with terrorism since September 11 is an echo of its obsession with communism fifty years ago. Today the United States and Britain claim they must occupy Iraq because of the threat of terrorism. Officially, both say they want to get out as soon as possible; but ideologues in the Pentagon dream of Iraq advancing America’s interests, and Israel’s too, in the Persian Gulf as the Shah once did. Talk of a new American imperialism is becoming fashionable among conservative academics, some of them in power. They forget the lesson of British experience, which is that when a people will no longer accept it, foreign domination is almost impossible to maintain. Kinzer begins his book with an apt quote from President Truman: “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”

  • Independence Day

    You’d think that seven years of marriage would have done the trick. Or the five years of mortgage payments. Nope. It wasn’t until last night at about 7:30 that I finally became a real adult. What did it was the fifty or sixty pairs of eyeballs all fixated on me, waiting expectantly for their 4th of July burgers and dogs. Somehow I had been entrusted with grill duty.

    There were additional pressures. I was tending the grill for a gathering of English as a Second Language students — a community of students, refugees, and wanderers from China, Ethiopia, Korea, Belgium, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Poland, Morocco, and all parts in between. For most, this would be their first and perhaps only experience of an American Independence Day celebration. I did my best, and everyone seemed delighted, which is the best you can ask for, I guess.

    I’ll admit that I haven’t been feeling particularly patriotic lately. But there was something indescribably beautiful about sharing this particularly American experience with this particular group of friends. Near the end of the evening — after the eating and the frisbee-tossing and the boat trip down Lake Loudon — one of the Americans, a missionary home on sabbatical, grabbed her guitar and began singing “This Land is Your Land.” Always the cynic, I chuckled to myself. Woody Guthrie. Unbelievable.

    But then the song ended and another one began. And the group closed in around this woman with her guitar, and when they knew the words they began to sing along. She worked through an impressive repertoire, including songs in Spanish and Arabic, building gradually the chorus of voices around her. She regretted only that she knew no songs from China. But our students from China were having too much fun. They circled up, argued and laughed among themselves, then turned toward the rest of us and broke into a song whose origins I can only imagine.

    I was startled by one woman’s face in particular. She looked, in a word, ecstatic. When the first Chinese song ended, she began another, sailing into one of those lilting melodic lines that so mesmerized Debussy a century ago. We in the West would probably classify it as “atonal” because it doesn’t conform to our strict harmonic structures. It was so natural for my Chinese friends, though. They listened silently for a few seconds as the ecstatic woman sang solo, then they joined in. Just beautiful. Woody would’ve loved it.

  • Different Perspectives

    Last night I gathered with my English as a Second Language students for our final class of the semester. Before digging into another dry reading comprehension exercise, we just sat and talked, which, to be honest, is the main reason that Thursday night is often the highlight of my week. At various points over the last few months, I’ve learned that: my friend from Turkey is a Kurd whose parents live just north of the Syrian border (I learned this on the day that Turkey gave the U.S. permission to do fly-overs); my friend from the Sudan, a refugee, spent several weeks circumnavigating the civil war in the south, much of his trip on foot, before finally receiving his papers in Khartoum and heading north to Cairo, where he spent several more weeks waiting for asylum; and my friend from Ethiopia, a person who now works in “food service,” was once a speaker in the Upper House of her country’s Parliament. Unbelievable. I need to get out more.