by Azadeh Amirsadri
I lived in Philadelphia in 1977 and would go to the Gallery mall on Market Street, a walking distance from our river front apartment. One day, around lunch, I decided to get Chinese food at the food court and looking for a place to sit, I asked two older ladies if I could sit at their table, since the place was packed. As I was picking through the food, separating the celery and water chestnuts, one of the old ladies said “It looks like you are digging for gold.” I not only didn’t understand what she meant,I wasn’t even sure she was talking to me. She pointed to her rings and then to my ring and enunciated “looking for gold” with a smile. I had a game I played when I wasn’t in the mood to speak English, so I said I didn’t understand, which was true in this case. She pointed to my ring and said “You are looking for gold” and again I smiled politely and went on separating the food and trying not to make eye contact and not to engage. She told her friend “I wonder where she is from” and later “I bet she is rich because she is wearing a lot of jewelry” and they went on talking about me and I went on pretending I didn’t understand what they were saying.
Another time, I was at the window seat of a domestic flight and didn’t want to speak to anyone. The couple next to me was anxious and they were catastrophizing about their luggage not arriving at their destination, about the drinks and snacks not being enough and were trying to reel me into their conversation. I looked at them, shook my head and smiled, and pretended I didn’t understand them. I was trying to sleep anyway, but when the flight attendants came with the drinks cart, the couple got agitated and woke me up saying Coke? Coke? Then they talked about how I will miss getting a drink, and returned to all the bad things that were about to happen.
Learning English was rather easy for me; perhaps because my mother had told me from an early age that I was good with languages. Also, speaking two other languages made it easier to learn a new language. I attended classes in Falls Church, VA in a trailer behind an elementary school with other adults who were new to the country. Our group was made up of a lot of Vietnamese people who had arrived as boat people, Central Americans running from civil wars, and of course Iranians. Our teacher was Mrs. B and I was amazed at how cool it was to just have a letter for a last name. Of course, I had no idea that ESL teachers do this to simplify their longer names for their students who are already struggling with learning a new language. The Iranians in class were mostly kind to each other, respecting our social norms, yet also very competitive. Since we couldn’t communicate with the other groups, we kept our dramas within our own.
One older man got in an argument with another one when he tried to show off and tell us he was doing extra homework by memorizing words in English. When the younger guy challenged him to teach the rest of us new words, the older man said the English word for river is Potomac. They got into an argument and the old guy’s feelings got hurt as we all aligned ourselves with the younger one and laughed at him, but as customs would have it, the younger guy apologized to the older one and they made up, although the rest of us knew that Potomac was the river near us, but not the name for all rivers. He also told us he knows the names of trees and flowers, so we all humored him since his feelings were hurt and wrote down those useless words that one doesn’t need when learning a new language, because survival English doesn’t involve knowledge of botany.
During lunch, some of us went to the elementary school by the trailer and ate at the cafeteria, after the kids had gone back to class. One day, the cafeteria ladies offered us some leftovers from lunch and I had my first taco that day. Everything about it both intrigued and slightly repulsed me; from the smell of the corn tortilla to the brown goopy mess covered in orange cheese. Back then, I ate everything with a knife and fork, and that was completely useless with the tacos.
As I was learning more and more English, and we moved to Philadelphia, I attended the ESL program at University of Pennsylvania. That group was much more serious and academically oriented than the students in my trailer classroom and the teachers had real names and not just a letter of the alphabet. I was an outsider because I was married and didn’t have the luxury of being a carefree college student, hanging out on weekends and partying. The other Iranian students didn’t like me because I was a naval officer’s wife, and they were all in anti-Shah movements. They didn’t trust me and would become quiet when I tried to hang out with them. They were friendly and polite on the surface and I felt they were just tolerating me. Except for one guy. Mohammad was happy to spend time with me in class, sharing his notes with me if I were absent and generally not treating me as ‘other’. One day, he invited me to his dorm room for tea and showed me pictures of his parents and sisters. There was some form of energy and tension between us and both of us were nervous. His roommate came in as I am sure we were pondering our next move and saved us from ourselves. Two years later, I was in a restaurant on Front Street with my husband and his uncle. The restaurant was dark, as that was so popular in the 1970’s. Mohammad was our waiter, and neither one of us acknowledged the other one, except for one brief look when we both knew.
At UPenn, I had different professors of English. One of them, Dr. S, who taught of listening and speaking English told us not to eat the toothpick in a club sandwich. We were insulted, as we groused in our own language about her, she defended herself by saying someone had done that in another class. Another one, taught me the F word after class one day by whispering it and writing it very lightly on the chalkboard. She made me promise never to use it which worked back then since I didn’t know how to use it in a sentence. I have not kept that promise to her.
I became friends with a Lebanese guy who constantly challenged Dr. S who was Jewish and lived in Israel most of the time. His political anger and lack of enough English made him sound like a childish madman who would say things like ‘my favorite game is when we play flag’ and couldn’t explain the rest of the game so he would say it in Arabic and get very agitated. Because he spoke French, we would hang out and go to lunch where he would explain the rest of the flag game to me. I wasn’t really interested in his flag game and he didn’t understand my lack of interest in the politics of the Middle East. I was 18 years old and trying to figure out my life. One time he said that I had happy eyes when I came to class but by the end of the day, when I had to go home, I had sad eyes. Of course, I got defensive and said I was very happy to be married and he didn’t know what he was talking about. Eventually, I stopped hanging out with him in school and cocooned myself in what I knew I had to do to survive.
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