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A woman came into my class
today. 'I'm going to live with my husband in America in a
month,' she told me.
'I want to practise my english.'
I thought her husband was
Chinese at first, but he wasn't. He was a 52 year old
policeman from Arizona. With a 15 year old son.
She's the second middle aged
Chinese woman I've met, on the other side of the mail order
marriage.
The last one didn't speak any English. A friend
got me to translate for her husband. He was from somewhere
mid-west and bad-tempered.
'Who are you,' he demanded.
'Tell my wife I'm not happy with the way she is
treating me. I don't think she is treating me very well.'
I told his wife. She was
in her fourties. Neat, but not pretty.
'When she took me to the airport
she sat in the back with another man and they were talking in
Chinese and laughing,' he said and I found him starting to warm to
me.
'Is she serious about marrying
me?' he asked.
'She says yes,' I told him.
'Well,' he said, and didn't know
where to go from there.
'She wants to know if you will
be at the airport to meet her when she lands?' I told him.
This all came back to me, from
seven years ago, as I taught a lesson on Chinese American
literature.
How Chinese americans often feel
'outsiders' in both cultures.
Reading,
I ask my mother to sing,
a poem of Li Young Lee's, it strikes me that the China they miss and
the Chinese culture they feel they belong to no longer exists.
Li
Young Lee's
For A New Citizen Of These United States: I ask he
students if they know the song his mother hums, Nights in Shanghai,
and they say they do - but when i ask one of them to sing, they
quickly stumble on the words and da-da-da their way to the end.
And i decide i will find someone who knows this song and record it.
Seeing a
video of
Li Young Lee, he tells the same jokes about the the 20th Century
that he told us in at Cuirt last year. I do the same, but
there is something tragic about writers, pale from the lack of
exposure, clinging to the same lines that the last audience laughed
at.
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