Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  I have never lacked for persistence. I have been faulted for it. I have wasted much time in my life being persistent about things that ultimately do not matter. This time persistence led to my finding an out-of-print copy of Dolores Durkin’s 1966 book, Children Who Read Early. I had so many questions, among them: Why were there only forty-nine children who could read at the start of the first grade? Today it seems every two-year-old is capable of using a cell phone to send text messages. The answer was both simple and stupid: In the 1950s, parents were strongly advised to not let their children read before the first grade. Leave it to the experts to teach kids to read—that was the common wisdom. Those children who were taught early through incorrect methods might have difficulties when they were exposed to proper methods, and, as a result, those kids could wind up with permanent learning problems. The school districts sent this warning to parents when they enrolled their children in kindergarten. The kindergarten teachers reiterated the same warning to parents who came to school meetings. Compliance was high. The parents must have been scared into thinking their kids would become lifetime bed wetters if books were left lying around the house. Of those 5,003 children, the parents of 4,954 had obeyed, and it took the tenacity of Miss Durkin to ferret out 49 children whose parents had not adequately guarded against the joys of reading. The reason for Dolores Durkin’s study, however, had not been to police ambitious parents, but to discover whether early reading did in fact harm children, as educators had claimed it would. She wanted to know exactly what effect early reading had over the long term—say, by the time a child completed the fifth grade. Was it harmful, harmless, or beneficial? What she found in her landmark study changed the way early reading was viewed in schools across America. Early reading, in fact, did not harm kids at all. In a nutshell, it could help, especially among kids who were disadvantaged by IQ or socioeconomic circumstances. Her work overturned a lot of preconceptions about early reading. It placed the emphasis on reading readiness as indicated by a child’s curiosity in words and scribbling. I was proud that I had unintentionally played a part in her findings.

  As I read more about her study, my eyes hopscotched over data breakouts. I was somewhere in those columns. There was a tally of racial groups. Half of the 49 children were almost evenly divided between “Negro” and “Oriental.” The other half were Caucasian. Other columns showed the number of monolingual versus bilingual families; mine would have been in the latter category. If you counted arguments and gossip in Shanghainese, we were a trilingual family. Most of the families were in the lower-middle or upper-lower socioeconomic class. Seven families were considered to be upper middle class and they were Caucasian, which was not surprising, considering that only ten years earlier nonwhites could not rent or own a house above Shattuck Avenue. The nonwhites were in the flatlands of Oakland. I wondered how our family had been ranked? Clearly we were not upper middle. But were we considered poor? And the house we lived in—if not for the rats and cracked linoleum, would it have been seen as a decent place to live? Would my father’s education and profession have affected how Miss Durkin had designated our social status? My past lay within those columns of data breakouts on race, IQ, reading skill level, and social status. I was there, climbing up or down those ladders of numbers and percentages.

  I came across a section related to the interviews Miss Durkin had conducted with the parents of the 49 early readers. Here was the reason she had been in our living room. The parents had been asked to choose from a list the traits that applied to their kids. I felt as if I had found a time capsule of my past whose contents were still partially obscured by a code. How did my parents describe me? Did they say I was “affectionate”? Thirty-five parents described their child as “persistent.” My parents must have said that about me. I can imagine them bragging:

  “Once she starts reading, you can’t get her attention back for anything else. It’s really a problem.”

  Or, “Once she starts playing the piano, she can’t stop for at least an hour.”

  Or, “Once she learned five colors, she wanted to learn more, and that’s why we had to buy her a box of sixty-four crayons for her fourth birthday.”

  I went down the list of other characteristics, imagining how my parents might have described me, likely overestimating my positive qualities. Twenty parents had described their child as “perfectionistic,” sixteen as “high-strung,” fifteen as having a “good disposition,” fifteen as “serious,” thirteen as “neat,” and eleven as a “worrier.” Had my parents known I was a worrier? If they had, they would have probably taken that as a good trait. If you didn’t worry, that meant you did not care how well you did or how tired your mother might be or whether your little brother was missing. I wondered if they had described me as “eager to please adults.”

  In another chapter, Miss Durkin described in more detail the case studies of five families. I quickly glanced at the names of the students. I was not among them. I read the first two, and when I got to the third, the case of an Oriental female named Susan, I came across this sentence: The mother was especially interested in the musical education of her children, although she said she “learned early that children can’t be forced to like music.”

  Miss Durkin had masked the names of all the kids and their parents. Of course she had. She was a professional. I was Susan, whose family she had categorized as “lower middle class.” My reading level did not seem that high for an early reader, barely past first grade. And then I discovered Miss Durkin chose to include only five interviews out of the forty-nine based on those cases representing the highest and lowest in reading achievement. I was one of the lowest. I felt the shame of a child seeing she had received a D− on her report card. I had barely been literate enough to be part of the study. I wasn’t reading Shakespeare at age six. It was probably more on the order of: “Ducky go quack-quack.” I found some solace, however, when I saw that my reading level at the end of the study was among the highest. I definitely qualified for “most improved.” When I saw the IQ score, I was again stunned. It was not a bad score, but it would not have set off casino bells ringing to announce, “Folks, we have a sure winner here—neurosurgeon!” It was actually lower than the score I received on a later IQ test. So which was correct? Neither. All the tests I have ever taken in childhood had proven meaningless. I was a poor test taker. I never chose what appeared to be the obvious answer. That was a trick. They all said I excelled in math. They recommended a career in science. Not one recommended I choose a career that might depend on my facility with the English language.

  As I started to read the interview, I felt as if I were in that living room from fifty-nine years ago, watching and listening, as both an innocent six-year-old child and an adult fortified with hindsight. I pictured my parents sitting stiffly on the sofa leaning forward. Miss Durkin would have been sitting erect in the armchair taking notes. My father did almost all the talking, her report said. She informed them right away that she was interested in finding out how I had learned to read. But first she needed some background on my parents. My father said he was “just beginning a year of postgraduate studies at a divinity school” and that he was “a Protestant minister, and had taken the year off for further study.” I reread those sentences several times. My father had been a minister—until my mother’s complaints of poverty led him to resign in 1954 so that he could earn more money working as an engineer, his former occupation in China. But there was no way that he could have taken a year off. My mother’s income would not have been enough to support us. Why had he lied? There was no shame in saying that he had a B.S. in physics and a B.A. in theology. He had turned in his master’s thesis in theology and was waiting for it to be accepted. But he did not need to take time off from work to wait for the mail to arrive with good news. What’s more, being an electrical engineer was hardly a tumble down in status from being the minister of a small church in Fresno. I knew my father’s future better than he did when he gave his answers in that interview: He would
always work full-time as an engineer. He would carry that desire for more advanced degrees by studying for his master’s degree in Engineering. He would be one semester short of completing it when he died.

  The rest of the interview was just as puzzling to me. From the start Miss Durkin was stymied in getting information about me from my parents. To nearly every question, my parents sidestepped the questions and bragged instead about Peter. They praised the experts for advising they not teach their kids to read. Even though Peter was curious about words and knew the alphabet, they did not encourage him. Sure enough, when he started the first grade, he easily learned to read the proper way. Peter, they bragged, was “a very precocious child.” Whenever she tried to redirect the questions back to my reading abilities, my father continued to extoll Peter’s intelligence. I read with both a child’s heart and an adult one, as the fullness of his love for me diminished with each boast about my brother. I fought hard to hang on to the belief that I had been his favorite. I recalled his story of being pulled over by a policeman because he had been weaving down the freeway, marveling over my newborn face. I remembered how much he liked to take photos of me. We used to do word games together. We had many special moments together, just the two of us. Didn’t we? What were they? But then I also recalled what I found when I read his diaries recently, searching for mention of me. He recorded that I had been born. He included my weight: 9 lbs. 11 ounces. He recorded my length: “22-1/2.” On future birthdays, the page was blank.

  My father continued to assure Miss Durkin that he and my mother had done nothing to encourage me to read. I could have vouched that he was telling the truth. We did not own children’s books. Our bookshelves were limited to Bibles, books on theology, favorite sermons of Billy Graham, nursing books, and the like. Fortunately, my father’s boasts about Peter eventually gave Miss Durkin the information she sought. When Peter started the first grade, he brought home his schoolwork—words he had printed on lined paper. I was four and fascinated with what he had done on the paper. So I would copy the words he had written then ask him, “What do these say?” He did not mind. We often played together. And one of our games was to play school. When I made a mistake, Peter corrected me. My father said that [Amy] “did not seem to mind the chastisement”—because I had always respected my brother.

  My father mentioned that Peter had also taught his cousins from China how to read by setting up a classroom in the living room. I was allowed to watch. I remembered that. I had tried to teach the cousin closest to me in age how to say Chinese words in English. When he made a mistake, I slapped his hand with a slipper. Miss Durkin’s summary of the interview ended with this observation: Here again, he mentioned that he always kept in mind what [Peter’s] kindergarten teacher had said about the inadvisability of parents teaching their children to read, and that he did not want to be the cause of any “school problems” for [Amy]. Methinks he doth protest too much. Why had he been concerned enough to mention that three times?

  There had been other reading lessons, I later realized, which no one had considered. They were the piano lessons that started when I was five. I had learned that the letters C, D, E, F, G, A, B on a page stood for specific piano keys on a scale and that these corresponded to the sounds those keys made. Those keys were written as musical notes that looked like tadpoles on a sheet of paper. I had learned the symbols for treble and bass clefs, sharps and flats. I could read numbers over the notes—1, 2, 3, 4, 5—that corresponded to the fingering—where my thumb and fingers went as I played. The piano lessons, like my brother’s instruction, had clearly figured into how I had learned to read.

  But all along there had been another reason I was motivated to read. My father stated what it was and didn’t even know it.

  The father said his daughter had always been a “scribbler, and that even before the age of four she had enjoyed drawing pictures and making up stories about them … Her imagination was amazing.”

  I cried when I read that. I read it repeatedly as balm over the earlier wound. If he knew this about me, that meant he had looked at my drawings and had listened to my stories, enough to believe my imagination was amazing. I marveled over these facts of me as a child.

  I liked to draw pictures and make up stories about them. Or maybe it was the other way around. I made up stories in my head and then drew pictures of them. No one taught me to do this. Before the age of four, when pictures and stories are inseparable, I drew stories. That was the nature of my imagination.

  I opened a box of memorabilia that contained my parents’ documents. I found my parents’ proof of college degrees, their student visas, references attesting to good characters, admission letters from colleges, the results of tuberculosis tests, and frequent exchanges between my father and a man named A. Kuckein, chief of the Entry and Departure Section of the Immigration and Naturalization Service with the United States Department of Justice. The letters between them began in 1951 and concerned the extension of his and my mother’s student visas, the expiration of the same, the cancellation of passports, their illegal status, the temporary suspension of deportation, my father’s inquiry on how to meet the requirements to avoid deportation and enter the path to naturalization as an American citizen, and Mr. Kuckein’s cool response that matters pertaining to illegal residency had to first be addressed before any consideration of citizenship should even be considered. I saw another document my father had prepared and signed on June 5, 1958, not long before his meeting with Miss Durkin. Next to it was an Application to Adjust Immigration Status Under Section 6 of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. The address my father indicated was that of our apartment on Fifty-First Street. On that same sheet of onionskin paper, my father had detailed his education, starting with his B.S. in physics in 1939 and then a B.A. in theology in 1951, followed by a B.D. in theology in 1952, which had led to his being ordained as a minister. And then I saw it: his postgraduate work, the master’s in Theology, which he said he would receive when he turned in his thesis in September 1958. His reason to remain longer was based on his obtaining a master’s degree. His student visa had become invalid because he was no longer a student.

  1952: One letter of a dozen concerning my parents’ illegal status.

  These exchanges with A. Kuckein were a history of terror, desperation, and ingenuity. I had discovered the reason why my father had lied to Miss Durkin about his year off from work as a minister, and why he had deflected questions pertaining to my learning to read. They were illegal aliens, in jeopardy of being deported. And they had broken the rules by failing to stop me from reading. Miss Durkin had come to the house, sat in their living room, and asked questions that she thought would be informative. And even though she had promised that the interview was strictly confidential, she could not have known that my parents would be wary of saying anything that might give A. Kuckein evidence that they were the kind of people who disobeyed the law. That was why my father had repeated three times that they knew the rule and had adhered to it. That’s why they avoided talking about me and my ability to read.

  My persistence took me one step further. I wanted to reach Miss Durkin to express my gratitude that her interview had given me a window into my parents’ hopes for me and our family. I also wanted to tell her I had become a writer. My search led to the obituary notices of many women named Dolores Durkin. They had been housewives, devoted mothers and grandmothers, but not educators with a Ph.D. I searched through articles about Miss Durkin and there were many, but no mention of her personal life or where she lived or whether she had died. I looked into ancestry records and found a Mary Dolores Durkin who was from Illinois. She would be eighty-six. I found that someone named Mary Dolores Durkin had received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. She had also been on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 1958. I searched through address records for Dolores Durkin in suburbs of Chicago. I eliminated many because the age did not correspond. I found some that were possible, but no one named
Dolores Durkin lived there now. I contacted her former colleagues who had presented papers on her and wrote to students who had written biographies on her. I looked for people named Durkin on Facebook. I put out a notice on my Facebook page that I wanted to contact Dolores Durkin, an educator. And when I thought I had exhausted all possibilities, I stopped looking.

  Months later, after I had abandoned my search, I spotted a message on my Facebook page. Dolores Durkin, she said, was alive and still as sharp as a tack. She gave me information on how I might reach her.

  The image of Miss Durkin was before me. I had put together the pieces of my childhood after chasing down so many half-truths, and I had a vague anxiety that I would learn something unexpected that would again put my understanding of my childhood into havoc. It took me two weeks before I had the nerve to call.

  A woman answered in a voice that was surprisingly young-sounding. There was no wobble in her vocal cords, as there often is with older people, no uneven pitches or weakness in volume, no whistling or lisping sounds typical of dentures. Her voice was clear, although slightly impatient with my stumbling explanation. “Dr. Durkin,” I began. “My name is Amy Tan, and I’m calling because I was one of the original forty-nine students in 1958. I read your landmark study and I know how important your work has been.”

  When I stopped babbling, she said, “I remember the study, of course, but I don’t remember you. I’ve worked with so many students over the years.” But I was one of the first forty-nine, I wanted to say. I told her I was proud to have been part of her study and that I had become a writer. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “You were an early reader.”