by Ioana Lee
This never happened. You might ask yourself why? The Japanese, usually, have opposite reactions than the rest of us. After hearing what I had said, he looked at me as if to say: “I didn’t expect a young, foreign woman like you to know anything about anyone…” Instead, Mr. X explained to me who John Grisham author was. He knew that he was a contemporary American author and wanted to read all of his books because he found them fascinating.
“What do you find fascinating about this author’s writings?”
“Excuse me but I don’t understand your question.”
I thought that my question was simple, yet I rephrased it so that I could find out what topics Grisham covered in his writings and what the message of his books was. I wanted to know more about the one who made me feel totally unprepared in front of my student.
“I see that you have a book with you. Is it written by him?”
“Yes, this book is written by John Grisham.”
“Did you read it?”
“I have a few more pages until I finish it. The teacher before you helped me to read it. He was an American man,” he added with a very misogynist attitude.
“Can you please give me a summary of the subject that this book covers?”
“You mean what the author is talking about?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s really hard for me to explain it to you in English.”
“I’ll help you out. Try it! Is it about people, business, and historical events? Is it a novel, science fiction, biography…?”
After a long conversation we both came to the same conclusion on the themes and writing style of John Grisham.
“Please tell me what exactly I can do for you now?”
“Unfortunately, our time together has come to an end. I learned a lot of new words today. Very interesting! Maybe next time, after I read the rest of the pages (when I heard him say next time I breathed peacefully because my student was thinking of coming back), you could help me translate those sentences and words that I don’t understand even after looking them up in the dictionary.”
He stood up, bowed politely and left the office, stopping at the front desk to talk to Michiko-san and then to my Japanese boss. I don’t know what they talked about, yet I know that he showed up next Saturday. He arrived for class precisely on time. During the week I did my research and found out exactly what the author wrote about and where he lived. I had to know everything about him, since he was then my enemy. John Grisham is best known for his popular legal thrillers. Upon researching his main topics and themes I was not surprised that my student liked his books. I knew everything a teacher could possibly know about the author and I was ready to answer any questions that my student might have.
He pulled out his book and opened it up at one of the last pages. He showed me, pointing with his pen as if I was blind and couldn’t see clearly, all the words and sentences that were circled in red. His body language and eyes were speaking to me saying, “Let’s see if you are capable of translating what none of the best Japanese – English dictionaries could translate for me.”
There were a few phrases that were challenging for a Japanese but which were simple for a foreigner with intermediate English studies. The first page wasn’t hard to translate at all. On the next page I encountered a word that I had never seen or heard before. I read the whole page in record time so that my student wouldn’t notice that I have to understand the context in order guess the meaning of the word… and just like most people who studied foreign languages without always using a dictionary, I identified the meaning of the word, which was inferable from the context. Later on I told Richard how exactly I was able to understand the word. I did it not to let him into my teaching secrets, but because I had to prepare weekly reports about my classes. He congratulated me for the accuracy. There were two other words that I didn’t know off the top of my head plus an extra one that I simply couldn’t understand based on the context. And since I’m one of those people who like to have fun with words, especially new ones, I told my student that that exact word doesn’t exist in English and that it is an invented one by the author, to give character and uniqueness to the book. I told Mr. X that it didn’t mean anything. In my report, I told Richard about my explanation and he approved of it.
My student and I finished translating all the sentences in about 20 minutes. The book ended and I saw that Mr. X didn’t know what to do next.
“We finished the translation early and… I understood everything. Yes… I’m very happy about it. Very happy!” he said out loud, as if talking to himself.
“What would you like to do for the remaining time?” I asked him.
“I have no idea. I only come here for this author’s books.”
“How would you feel if we used the rest of our time to work on your accent? Since we’re done with the translation we can have a dialogue now. This way you would learn how to read faster and also speak fluently and clearly, with an American accent. On top of this you’d remember the new words more easily.”
He agreed. We spent the rest of our time together talking. Upon departure he pulled out of his brief case two new books by John Grisham. He offered me one and kept one for himself so that we could study together. I kindly thanked him for the book. I naively thought that since we finished the first book we were going to move on to another author! I was mistaken. I read the book he gave me so that I could be ahead of him. It was a 500-page book, well written and very captivating. It contained a lot of idioms and slangs, as well as many invented words by the author. Many I was able to deduce from the context; the rest I wrote down in a notebook.
The next week at 9 a.m. sharp my “student” came in, more enlightened and confident in my abilities as a teacher. That was a good sign! It’s really hard to gain the trust of Japanese men as a young woman English teacher, especially if you are not American. It’s even harder to get them to genuinely like you. If you pass all their tests though, you gain their hearts forever and they’d be capable of doing anything for you. Unlike our first class together, I was very relaxed that time since I had read the entire book, knew the author’s writing style and got to know Mr. X a lot better.
“How many pages did you read?” he asked curiously.
“I read the entire book. It’s really interesting!”
“You read the entire book in just one week?!”
He looked at me in disbelief, somehow feeling insulted by what I had said. I didn’t feel like pushing the envelope by telling him that I read the book in a day, that I didn’t need the entire week for just 500 pages and that my fast reading training started during my student years in Romania, when my colleagues and I had to read two books per day plus a few studies for our seminars. It didn’t feel right at that moment to tell him that most Romanians are fast readers.
“I meant to say… you read the whole book in a week and it’s not even in your native language,” he added in a much lower, less indignant tone.
“Yes, I did. As an English teacher my duty is to continue to study the language intensely, so it made sense to finish it by now.”
“I only read three pages,” he said, feeling embarrassed “and didn’t understand much.”
“That’s all right. That’s why you are here, so that I can help you out and we can study together.”
I knew that he was going to like this word together, as it made the distance between me as the teacher and him as the student seem much more bearable. For him, the whole conjuncture was awkward from the beginning: to learn from me, considering that he was a 65-year-old Japanese man, who had lived in American for two years. Studying is one thing, yet the gender, nationality, age and experience are a whole different one.
We went rapidly through all the words and sentences that he didn’t understand and came to dissect the following sentence: “Rick stole money from the bank where he worked.” The sentence was crystal clear to me, yet he said:
“I don’t understand this.”
I tried to
explain to him that Rick worked in a bank and that he stole money from there, from his workplace.
“I don’t understand,” he answered, evidently confused.
I tried to explain it to him again, still in English because Richard forbade me to use a word of Japanese. I told Mr. X that Richard took money from the bank and the money wasn’t his, which meant that he stole. I spoke slower and clearer.
“I still don’t understand,” he insisted, looking straight into my eyes.
I swallowed nervously…
“Ok Mr. X. Let’s start from the beginning. Rick is a person and this is his first name. Money… is cash, which you use to buy things from the store. A bank is the place where people deposit money, open accounts and use the ATM. To steal is a verb and it means that a person takes something from someone else that thing doesn’t belong to him. In our case, Rick stole money. The word stole is the past tense for the verb to steal, which means that Rick took the money a while ago, not today…”
“I don’t understand anything!”
“Rick, the main character of the book, stole money that didn’t belong to him, money that belonged to other people who were keeping it at the bank…”
“I’m sorry but I still don’t understand!”
I thought that I was going to have a nervous breakdown. I simply didn’t know what my student couldn’t understand, since he was familiar with all the words and also knew the past tense for most verbs. I got angry at myself and at him. I remember thinking, “if he has challenges understanding this simple sentence, how in the world was he able to read and understand the previous book, let alone to say that he liked it.” I dug my feet in finding a solution to the situation, to I avoid being fired—fired because of my student, Mr. X and fired because Rick, the thief. I decided to go against the rules and started speaking in Japanese.
“Rick stole the money from the bank where he worked.”
“Wakarimasen!”[xxviii] He said on a stubborn tone.
I finally realized it! This 65-year-old Japanese businessman, born and raised in Japan, guided by the Bushido spirit, used to living by strict Japanese rules and laws, didn’t have challenges understanding English. He had a moral challenge! I immediately started explaining to him in Japanese that sometimes, in other countries, some people who are not familiar with the ethics and moral code of Japanese society (harmony, responsibility, dedication, honesty, etc.) don’t understand that it’s unfair to steal from their workplace.
I continued by telling him that those people don’t honor their jobs the same way the Japanese do and don’t always try to do their best; that they don’t have the same respect for their job through which they provide for their families and put bread on the table. I told Mr. X that some people don’t respect their employer who, most importantly, offered them their job in the first place, putting all their trust in them to do their job honestly…
“Are the Americans the only ones who are doing this? Or the same thing is done by the Europeans as well?”
I wasn’t hired to teach ethics, philosophy, religion nor political science or economy, yet in front of Mr. X I was representing all countries, traditions and things non-Japanese. With this thought in mind, I answered:
“No, stealing is not accepted in any of the other countries of the world. I believe that in some of these countries, just like in many countries in Asia, people can sometimes have a different opinion on what’s good or bad. Those people aren’t thinking and behaving the way we do.”
He paused and stared at me for a few seconds.
“Have you ever met anyone who stole?” he asked me, still in Japanese as if he forgot that we had an English class.
“No…” I lied to him, thinking that I, myself, stole when I was a kid. I stole chewing gum from my older sister. Along my life journey, people have also stolen things from me, therefore I wasn’t unaware of the heavy subject that my 65-year-old Japanese student was interested in. He asked these questions with such astonishing innocence…
“Ok, so this is not something that people do a lot in other countries…” he concluded, somewhat happy of his own discovery.
“No, they don’t!” I answered diplomatically as if I was the minister of foreign affairs representing all those other countries.
He paused and then exclaimed, in a very loud tone:
“Aha!”
I thought that my heart was going to stop when I heard him yelling. “Now what?” I thought to myself.
“Yes, Mr. X?” I asked with fear of what could have come next. I expected the most challenging linguistic, moral or intercultural question to come out of his mouth, considering Mr. X’s previous revelations about the world.
“You speak Japanese?!”
“Yes. Yes, I do. I… I speak very little Japanese, but not when I’m at work, not when I’m teaching English,” I said to him stuttering, trying to hide the fact that I had already broken one of the most important rules of the University.
“Your Japanese is wonderful. Had you explained that sentence to me in Japanese, we would have finished much sooner. When did you learn Japanese?”
That’s where I learned English as well. Moving to Japan helped me to improve my Japanese.”
“I don’t understand this.”
I jumped out of my skin when I heard my student saying those words. I would have wanted him to say anything else but Wakarimasen (I don’t understand).
“What don’t you understand?”
“How is possible for a foreigner to learn two languages that are so hard. This isn’t normal, is it?”
I explained to him with modesty that those were the only things that I had learned and knew well and that there were so many other interesting things that I should have known in life but didn’t at my age… and how embarrassing that was. I also told him that it was quite common in Europe ,Romania especially, for people to speak several languages.
He finally left. He stopped in the hallway and talked to my boss for half an hour. Shortly after their conversation my boss came into my office and asked what I had done to Mr. X…
My eyes innocently answered to him.
Apparently, Mr. X said that he has never had a better teacher in his entire life; a teacher whose class he left with all his questions answered. He said that he never conceived that he’d be taught English by a young, foreign woman and that he was very proud to have chosen that school, where the teachers were chosen among the best… and that he was going to recommend the school and me to everyone. He still wasn’t sure how I was able read an entire book in a week and how I was able to speak Japanese at such a high level. He wasn’t sure how I even existed. He told Richard about my rich vocabulary in Japanese and asked him if that wasn’t somehow abnormal… When he has been told that my last name was Kurosawa he shook his head and said that he felt proud to have me as a teacher and that he wished I would have taught more classes. It all made sense to him when he heard my last name.
Very soon other students came to have a trial lesson with me and I am very proud to say that many of them decided to sign up the same day. They signed up with Teacher Ioana, which is how I wanted to be known at the school. I didn’t want my Japanese last name involved in any of it, as all the merit would have then belonged to Ken’s family and not to me.
I liked my life that way! It was a simple yet diverse way to be. I finally re-became serious and started to live within reason again. I rediscovered myself and it felt great. Yes, indeed, I was a model but I was also a teacher, a teacher whose salary was raised with 10 $ an hour because of all the praise from my students. I remember having among my students a 43-year-old woman who was a music teacher, a 46-year-old businessman, and many others.
I decided to increase my workload and started teaching more hours, not at the same school but at a school that allowed teachers to do their work at home. For that position I had to pass different tests. Only after the test was I able to go through their 3-hour training to be taught some aspects about the prescribed teaching style
at home. While I was a student in Romania I used to teach private lessons to a Japanese family that resided in Romania. I had done it for about four years so I was somewhat familiar with the process.
Shortly after I got certified to teach at home, a few women students signed up for my classes. I reserved the right to refuse to work with men to avoid any challenges in my marriage. I started being able to support a part of my luxurious and costly lifestyle. I was busy doing the things that I enjoyed doing. I was also reading a lot. Despite all of this, my marriage wasn’t going in the right direction. Our relationship “got a cold” and was “coughing frequently and badly.” I didn’t understand why… I suspect that Ken was very unsatisfied with me making my own money because it meant being independent of him. For him this also meant embarrassment in front of his family. As a part of their family, it was considered shameful for me to have to work for money… I believe that these were some of the reasons that my marriage went downhill. It was also very bothersome for Ken to see me leave the house to go to work. He only felt comfortable when he accompanied me. I didn’t know exactly what the source of our unhappy marriage was, yet I knew that things weren’t right. It was just a matter of time…
