The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  “It’s tamal,” the student said. “No con e.”

  Lisbeth, meanwhile, was babbling to me about what kinds of tamales she liked (“de pollo, de frijoles . . .”). For inexplicable reasons, the subject of tamales reminded Lisbeth of something else, and she got terribly excited and began giddily showing everybody around her images of something apparently unappetizing on her cell phone. Ksanet waved her away with an expression of disgust, and Methusella tried to adopt Mr. Williams’s stern demeanor to shoo her off. “Cangrejo!” Lisbeth sang to me. I had no idea what she meant until she showed me her phone, and then I saw a picture of a crawfish (comprehensible input). Ksanet spoke to Mr. DeRose of a thing known as teff, and I asked what that was, thinking they were discussing something in Tigrinya, but Mr. De-Rose said, unhelpfully, “Teff is teff” (no comprehensible input). I kept determinedly thinking “teff” might be a foreign word, but Mr. DeRose eventually convinced me that teff was just this thing called teff, even in English. Then I looked it up on Google and learned it is a grain from a species of love grass that grows in the highlands of Eritrea and Ethiopia (comprehensible input). It’s what is used to make injera, the spongy sourdough bread on which Ethiopian and Eritrean food is served.

  A few days later, Mr. Williams captured the unwavering attention of every student in the room with an electrifying handout about the practice of eating bugs. We talked about this at length. A Japanese-American woman named Yumino, perhaps the most faithful of all the Goodwill volunteers, stunned the students by admitting happily that she had eaten insects as a child. In rural Japan, where she had grown up, it was common to harvest a certain type of cricket and to consume it as food. The handout said that in many parts of the world, bugs represented the most viable source of protein. Ksanet did not understand the meaning of the lesson until Mr. Williams crouched down beside her and said, “Insects, insects,” and then he pointed to an illustration to show her what that meant (comprehensible input). Ksanet conferred with Yonatan in Tigrinya to confirm that Mr. Williams meant people were actually eating bugs, and then Ksanet taught her teacher the word for insect in Tigrinya.

  “Pashara?” said Mr. Williams in confusion.

  “Hasharat!” Ksanet and Yonatan said in unison, Ksanet laughing.

  Shani heard this word and perked up instantly.

  “Hasharat!” she cried, recognizing a word she knew.

  Then Mariam nodded, saying, “Hasharat.”

  That was how we all discovered that many languages in the Middle East and Africa all shared the same word for insect. While this was happening in one corner of Room 142, over on the other side of the classroom Lisbeth was trying to pantomime the actions of a scorpion, which involved her biting her own wrist. Nobody found this comprehensible, although many were entertained. Then she tried to shock Yonatan by showing him an image on a laptop computer of a green garden snake, as she hissed “culebra!” But Yonatan just announced “snake” in a matter-of-fact tone and walked away nonchalantly. Later, Shani found a picture of an innocent-looking freckle-faced girl with pigtails who had a large, hairy tarantula halfway in and halfway out of her mouth.

  “Oh no!” said Mr. Williams, when Shani succeeded in surprising him with this picture.

  Lisbeth scampered over to see what the teacher was reacting to so strongly.

  “Cómo se dice Photoshop? ” Mr. Williams asked Lisbeth, after he had recovered his equilibrium.

  “Foto falsa,” she told him.

  Then Saúl crossed the room going in one direction as Jakleen crossed the room going the other direction, and Saúl reached over to cup Jakleen’s cheek lovingly in his hand and she boxed him happily in the chest, and they went their separate ways.

  Jakleen picked up the English-Arabic dictionary that Mr. Williams kept on the bookshelf and looked up a word she wanted to explain to Lisbeth. The word was musabbib. I wasn’t sure what this had to do with the subject of food (nothing, as it turned out), but Lisbeth was fascinated simply by the backward-flowing script that Jakleen wrote down. Seeking my help to convey her meaning to Lisbeth, Jakleen showed me the meaning of musabbib in the dictionary. Could I translate this word into Spanish? One of its definitions was “traumatic.” To check if this was what she meant, I said, “Jakleen, Syria, Jaramana, car bombing—musabbib?”

  Jakleen flashed me a big smile and gave me a thumb’s-up. Yes, that’s right, she was saying. I had given input she could comprehend. Then I tried explaining the concept of musabbib to Lisbeth in Spanish. In our own ways, all over the room, each of us was trying to bridge some sort of difference, even if we had gotten a little off subject. Not long afterward, Jakleen started wandering around the room with a baggie of cookies like the ones she and her family had given to me when I first visited, the ones filled with dates. Noticing he had lost some of them, Mr. Williams said in a sharp tone, “Shani, Jakleen, I am looking for participation here.” Jakleen saucily offered a cookie to Mr. Williams, but he declined to participate, saying, “No thanks, I am great.” Lisbeth, on the other hand, accepted a cookie gratefully. Then they all got back to the lesson, which involved writing down an English term for food and drawing a picture of that item.

  Shani announced that her favorite food was soup, then drew a beautiful fried egg. Methusella wanted to talk only about cheese. If you said the word “cheese” to him, he would reply in a singsong voice, “Very, very nice!” All the other kids thought this phrase was funny, and over the next several days they began saying a whole lot of things were “very, very nice.” Mr. Williams spent several more class periods grilling the kids on English vocabulary words for food (“pepper,” “radish,” “garlic,” “lemon,” “strawberries,” “grapefruit”—“Mister! What?” “Grapefruit, grapefruit”) using flash cards. We all learned that Shani could not say either “banana” or “potato” without dissolving into laughter, while Yonatan went around the room for a long time holding up the flash card for “celery” and listening to everybody say that word over and over, because for some reason this made him grin happily.

  On the back of Yonatan’s flash card, I saw that celery was the same in English, French (céleri), and German (Sellerie), but not in Spanish (apio). Oh, right, I thought—der Sellerie! I knew a lot of Spanish, and in the past I had known a fair amount of French, much of which was coming back to me as I tried to converse with Plamedi. But I had entirely forgotten that once upon a time, I also had known a little German. When I was seven years old, our family had moved to Austria, and we had lived in Vienna for one year. I had taken some German lessons. I remembered getting grilled by the adult, a rigid teacher with no sense of humor, on the basic rules of German. That language had some strictures that struck me as fanciful; for example, Germans capitalize all their nouns. (In a Rush, it came back, being grilled by the Adult, a rigid Teacher with no Sense of Humor.) Also, Germans make stupendous compound words, an activity known as Wortbildung (word formation). Some common compound words are Jugendsünde (youthful folly) and Friedensabkommen (peace agreement). Germans are also famous for making insanely long compound words, such as Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften (insurance companies providing legal protection).

  * * *

  More German came back to me over spring break, when I traveled with my son to Europe. I had forgotten how many cognates German and English shared. As we flew on Lufthansa, I saw that there was a Schwimmweste unter meinem Sitz. We were going to Spain to visit my sister and her husband (a Spaniard), who were living with their English-and-Spanish-speaking children in a sleepy little beach town about one hour south of Barcelona. An Irish cousin and her German husband joined us, along with their English-and-German-speaking boys. For one week, we played board games in German, ordered food in Spanish, and spoke over meals in English and Spanish and German.

  I learned all kinds of new terms in the process, such as—because my son is a picky eater—the Spanish phrase tikis-mikis, also spelled tiquismiquis, which . . . well, there is no literal translation. Basically, tikis-mikis connotes “disc
erning,” as opposed to “picky.” It means someone who can be a little kvetchy but you admire him because he is impressively meticulous. It is one of those untranslatable terms, like the Japanese word komorebi, which means the dappled kind of light found on the floor of a forest when sun has been shining through tree leaves. Or the Swedish gökotta, to wake early wanting to hear birdsong. Or the German idea of Fernweh, a feeling of homesickness for a place to which you have never been.

  While we were there, I remembered that when you change countries, everything is different. The language is different, of course, but so are the trees, the birds, and the insects. Cars look odd and so do trains and buses. Money is different and the television shows are not the same and the supermarkets are organized in completely novel ways. We visited over Easter. There was no Easter Bunny; our children were visited by Ratoncito Pérez (an Easter Mouse!).

  The newspapers in Spain were filled with stories about refugees flocking in huge numbers to Europe. In response to the epic migration, nationalist movements were building in various European countries. The changing climate could be summed up by the evolution in significance of the phrase “wir schaffen das,” which literally means “we make it” or “we create it” but connotes the idea “we can do this.” It’s what parents say to children when things are scary—it’s a lullaby. Chancellor Angela Merkel had begun using the phrase the previous fall, speaking about the incoming Syrian refugees. “Germany is a strong country,” she had said. “The motive with which we approach these things must be: We have done so much—we can do it!” By now, however, the phrase was taking on the opposite meaning—Merkel’s opponents had changed it into the negative: das schaffen wir nicht—we cannot do this.

  During our trilingual family gathering, we achieved a high level of gezelligheid, a Danish word (often used as the prime example of untranslatability) that means “a convivial, warm atmosphere achieved in the company of loved ones, or a special feeling of togetherness.” Our sense of gezelligheid was so memorable, in fact, that in the months that followed, as the United States began to turn away from the concept of openness, toward the idea of closing its borders more tightly, dismaying everybody I knew in Europe, my cousin’s German husband would reach out to me and my sister by email. He asked us: Did we want to send our children to him? And he would send his boys to us. That way, all of our children could become more open to the world; they could learn that other cultures were not to be feared. Maybe they could even learn some things there were no words for in English.

  4

  * * *

  Silly One

  Because Hsar Htoo had expressed a desire for privacy around what had befallen his father, when I sought a way to learn more about the Burmese community (or, I should say, the community of ethnic minorities who had fled Burma), I chose to ask Kaee Reh if I could visit his home. Kaee Reh politely supplied a phone number for his father. With the help of a Karenni-speaking interpreter, I made an appointment to visit the family. Kaee Reh and his three siblings and their parents lived in a blond brick building on the other side of Colfax Avenue, not far from where I lived. Inside the building, I walked along a hallway with a chipped linoleum floor, punctuated by battered-looking doors. From behind the door to Kaee Reh’s apartment, I could hear what sounded like rhythmic blows. When we stepped inside, I saw Kaee Reh’s father, Peh Reh, using a large knife to chop a hunk of red meat into fine pieces. He worked at Cargill, a meatpacking plant in Fort Morgan, an hour-and-a-half drive north of Denver, and I imagined that he might have brought the meat home from work. His shift ended at midnight, and he typically got home close to 2 A.M. We were visiting on a weekend, which was the only time he was free to talk. “It’s hard to find a job when you don’t speak English,” he said through the interpreter. “I applied many places, but they didn’t hire me. The last place I applied was Cargill.”

  Peh Reh wore a long-sleeved green sweater and charcoal-gray trousers. He was kneeling on the living room floor, on top of a large straw mat, helping prepare the family’s evening meal. There was no table, nor any other furniture anywhere in the room—except, in one corner, a narrow twin bed and a wooden dresser. Kaee Reh’s mother, Taw Meh—thin, hauntingly pretty—wore a T-shirt and a piece of patterned green fabric tied at her waist to make a skirt. She stood in the kitchen, grinding chili peppers with a mortar and pestle. Her face was startlingly similar to Kaee Reh’s, with dramatic cheekbones and a wide crooked mouth, and when I saw her, I thought, She has Kaee Reh’s mouth! (though really it was the other way around). So pungent was the chili oil that both the interpreter and I began to cough. Soon my throat started to burn from the fumes and my eyes began to water. Kaee Reh’s parents appeared oblivious to the effects of the oil.

  The couple’s four children were not at home, although I could see evidence of their presence in the pile of shoes clumped by the front door. I believe the children may have shared the apartment’s one bedroom, while their parents slept on the twin bed in the main room. I figured that Kaee Reh was probably playing soccer in a park somewhere nearby, as I knew him to be an avid soccer player. Solomon and Methusella lived only a few blocks away, and they sometimes battled with or against Kaee Reh in the neighborhood’s impromptu street-style soccer matches.

  Peh Reh told us that he was grateful to have any kind of job, because it was hard to find work in a country like the United States if you had no formal work history, did not speak English, and could not read or write. The only kind of work he had done previously was farming, and he had been unable to work at all while living as a refugee in Thailand. His job at the meatpacking plant was to trim fat off meat. I could see that his right hand was visibly swollen. Working second shift meant that he was asleep in the mornings when his children left for school, and they were asleep when he returned. “I see them on the weekends,” he said.

  Kaee Reh’s parents had met in a refugee camp on the western side of Thailand called Ban Mai Nai Soi in 1996. They spent nineteen years living in the camp, and all their children were born there. Like Hsar Htoo, Kaee Reh had never lived outside the confines of a refugee enclosure before. I knew Mr. Williams thought Kaee Reh possessed great intelligence and was learning quickly, even though correct pronunciation of English words remained a struggle. I had also seen the quality of Kaee Reh’s drawings, and heard how well he could sing. I thought of him as an artistic soul. When I asked his father what kind of future he envisioned for his children, now that he had brought them to America, he said that he hoped they could stay in school. After he had started working at the meatpacking plant, and began earning enough money ($500 a week) that he no longer qualified for benefits such as TANF, however, money had gotten very tight. The one-bedroom apartment cost $900 a month, and he was spending half his earnings on housing. “We want them to continue their education for as long as they can,” Peh Reh said. “But if we can’t afford it, then they will probably have to work.” He thought he might have to ask the children to leave school sooner rather than later. I found it dismaying to imagine what kind of work Kaee Reh would end up doing if he did not finish high school.

  Peh Reh shared that he had a brother living in Denver, who also worked in the meatpacking industry, and many friends in the city as well. “There is a Karenni family upstairs,” he told us. “We lived close to each other in the refugee camp, and now we live in the same apartment building here.” Because of the comfort these social ties brought to Kaee Reh’s parents, they preferred living in Denver, despite the high rent. The loneliness that Kaee Reh experienced in the classroom, where nobody spoke his home language (and even Google Translate could not help him communicate, as it did not include either Karen or Karenni), was mitigated, because the family had a few key friendships. And it appeared obvious—as Peh Reh handed his wife the chopped meat and she proferred some red and yellow peppers to cut up next—that Kaee Reh had the good fortune to be growing up inside a stable, loving household, with two parents who cared deeply for one another.

  That was not necessarily true
for all of the newcomers.

  * * *

  I genuinely did not understand (because I had led too easy a middle-class American life) what some of the students at South were grappling with on the home front until I spent time with Christina, the young woman who had acted as an informal interpreter during my conversations with Hsar Htoo. Both Kaee Reh’s and Hsar Htoo’s families were originally from Burma, but in the end I did not establish a strong connection with either of those students. I liked both boys a lot, but they were brand-new to the English-speaking world, they had previously lived only inside of camps, and, with me, they were quite reluctant to say much about themselves. Christina, on the other hand, was voluble about her background. As I sought to understand what the thousands of refugees who had escaped from Burma had experienced, she helped me the most.

  Christina lived with her adoptive parents in a large, comfortable two-story house in the southern part of Denver. South had been her neighborhood high school, back when she had entered the ninth grade. After we had gotten to know each other a little, Christina invited me over for lunch so that I could meet her parents. She had already given me a brief outline of her past. I knew that she was twenty-one years old, that she had been born in Burma but had spent most of her childhood living in a refugee camp in Thailand, and that after resettling in the United States her grandmother had tried unsuccessfully to marry her off to a much older man when she was only thirteen. Subsequently, she and her two siblings had been adopted by a white American family. “I love my family!” Christina gushed when speaking of her adoptive parents. “I have the best parents in the whole world!”