Rebecca Henderson

Teaching English as a Second Language is not new to me, but the class I’m starting this week kind of has me scared to death. In a good way.

I began teaching and tutoring ESL my last year of college, and my first student was a Taiwanese lady who owned the Taste of China buffet in Waco. It was a volunteer job that I got through the literacy center on campus at Baylor, and every week after our class at the restaurant I came back to the dorm with a take-out box stuffed full of enough dinner for both me and my roommate.

Later, I taught a volunteer class at UT Arlington and had students from several Asian countries, most of them working on advanced degrees or research in science or engineering and in need of help with conversational English. Two nursing students from Thailand and Beijing talked me into having a separate class for them on another night each week, so I then found myself answering questions like, “What’s a better way to say the word $#!+ when we’re talking to patients?” That wasn’t something they prepared me for in my graduate classes at UTA — how to explain the subtle differences in usage of the words bowel movement, feces, poop, and number two. (Side note: In another food-for-English exchange similar to the one in Waco, these nurses took me to a sushi bar in Dallas as a thank you, and also because they wanted to help me improve my poor chopstick skills before I moved to Asia.)

Fast forward several years worth of experience — teaching English camps in China, Thailand, and India, a year of high school English at a minority school in China, business English for hotel workers, and countless hours of conversational practice with friends. And now here I am in Washington, about to start a new class with Somali women who came here as refugees.

This class scares me because, for the most part, I’ve only ever taught conversational English to people with a high school education or higher. From what I’ve been told, none of the ladies in my class has any formal education. In addition to not speaking English, they don’t read in any language. They will be starting with the very basics — how to hold a pencil, how to write the alphabet, how to make the sounds for each letter. Very different from teaching a mechanical engineering post-doctoral researcher from Shanghai how to have a meaningful conversation with his American coworkers.

But I’m up for the challenge and very excited. Excited to be teaching a new level of content, as well as teaching students from Africa for the first time. Wish me luck!

I recently had a conversation with a supervisor about the peculiarities of interviewing villagers for ethnographic studies. So often the questions that we’re asking people are about things in their culture or religion or even their daily life that they have never really consciously thought about and aren’t quite sure how to express. Sometimes the areas that we as outsiders view as important in the culture aren’t a big deal to those who live it every day, and sometimes there are things going on beneath the surface that just might be the key to our understanding this group of people—if only we knew the right questions to ask to draw that information out.

Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself: I need to find the right questions to ask, and then I’ll start getting all these really informative answers. “Tell me about your culture” isn’t going to cut it. If someone said that to me, where on earth would I begin? And how vastly different would my answer be from that of my sister or my neighbor or anyone else in America?

So I keep asking questions and making notes and trying to put the pieces together into something that makes sense. In that conversation with the supervisor, he warned me about getting answers that just make too much sense, when one person suddenly has the mysterious answer to what has been puzzling you and every other person who has ever tried to learn about this culture.

Basically, people can make stuff up. Sometimes it’s because they are too embarrassed to admit that they don’t know what you’re talking about—seeing your zeal for the research, they figure (wrongly) that an invented answer is more helpful than no answer. There’s always the possibility, too, that you’ve stumbled across an informant who sees this interview as their chance to shine in the realm of fiction. Or, all too often in Yunnan, the suddenly pat answer is a result of Communist redefinition of a minority group, learned by the interviewee in school or while working for a government tourism bureau.

Not a week after I received that warning, I found out that a story a lady had told us about the use of flowers in young girls’ hats at festival time was fabricated. I had really loved that story, and I enjoyed sharing it here on my blog—I was so proud of my Poe allusion in the title, too. But alas, good story that it is, it’s not truly representative of the village culture we’re trying to understand. It doesn’t make the story less entertaining. It just moves it out of the category of ethnographic description.

An example of what the earring holes look like after years of being stretched…

For the story of how the ears are stretched, click here.

A while back a village lady about my same age explained to me the significance of earrings for women in her culture. When a girl is in her teens and starting to think about getting married, she adorns her ears with long, flashy, stylish earrings, not unlike what a girl in town would also wear. After she’s married, she tones it down a bit, but still wears whatever is trendy in current earring fashion.

After she begins having children and moves into the matronly category of women in the village, she switches to wearing large traditional silver pieces as a symbol of her family’s prosperity. By the time she is a grandmother, the weight of the earrings has stretched out the holes in her ear lobes to be big enough to poke a finger through. She no longer wears the family silver at this point, the holes in her ears now a sign that she has passed down her wealth to the next generation.

A couple of weeks ago, Fidi and I were at Adam’s house in MN village, getting ready to talk to a village musician later in the afternoon. Adam’s mom passed the time with us, comparing her skirt fabric and ours, admiring Fidi’s carved silver bracelet from Thailand.

“I have silver jewelry too—would you like for me to show you?” she asked.

She has a sweet and welcoming demeanor, but is always busy with some cooking or cleaning task around their wooden stilt house. I was glad for her to take the time to sit down and talk with us.

She brought out several bracelets, thick and weighty. One was a broad, carved wrist band; the others were snake-like coils for the upper arm. We passed them around and tried them on, and then she handed me something I wasn’t quite sure of. Two long, thin strips of silver wound loosely in a spiral. “My earrings from when I was younger,” she explained.

So this is how they did it, how they expanded the holes in their ears. The spiral is wound tightly to begin with and gradually loosened, causing the hole to grow. Eventually the silver strips are removed, but the skin is permanently stretched. I tried winding the strips as tight as I could, just to see what the smallest size of earring would be—even at their tightest, it would take a great deal of effort and a period of time to get them inside your ear lobes.

Adam’s mom assured me it didn’t hurt, though I’ve had enough ear and nose piercings (we’re talking double digits) to question her honesty. The price of beauty and status in the village—not so far off from the price I’ve been willing to pay.

I can understand why the census taker was surprised when I opened the door. I’m sure he wasn’t expecting to see a white woman wearing a Dai ethnic skirt.

The electricity was off in the apartment complex that morning, and I was fiddling around trying to pack up last minute items for a village trip when he pounded on the door.

I don’t like it when people pound on the door. It’s very KGB, and very unnecessary. I told him as much as he stammered at me through the three inches I cracked the door. “The doorbell doesn’t work,” he tried to explain.

“The doorbell works when the electricity works,” I replied.

He recovered enough to show me the registration form he needed me to fill out—very similar to one that I filled out just a few months ago. I decided he was shaken up enough by my whiteness and my lecture on proper door knocking techniques, so I spared him further argument and compliantly answered his questions. Name, age, occupation, number of years lived in this town.

“ID card number?” he asked.

“I’m American. I don’t have a Chinese ID card.”

He nodded and gave me a look that conveyed, “Right, of course, I know that, but I have to ask.” Scribbling something on the form, he continued, “And which ethnic minority group do you belong to?”

“I’m American,” I repeated. “I don’t belong to a Chinese minority group.”

This time he glanced down at my Dai minority skirt before marking his form—and I’m pretty sure he officially registered my ethnic nationality as “Confused.”

I had barely finished brushing my teeth when Fidi and her artist friend arrived.  Early Saturday morning is the only time during the week she doesn’t teach dance lessons, and though neither Fidi nor I relished giving up a morning to sleep in, we were willing to do it to accommodate her schedule.

You would be hard pressed to find someone more similar in appearance to a stereotypical dancer than YZY.  Slender frame, delicate facial features, long hair sleekly pulled into a high bun.  “A true beauty,” Fidi described her before the first time we met.  Her dance training is evident in her poise; she makes the act of merely sitting on a low stool in my living room appear elegant.  Seated next to her, I was intensely conscious of how wildly my hair was behaving and of the need to improve my posture.

Fidi had prepared a list of ethnographic questions to go over with her, and I began the process of orally translating both questions and answers between the two of them.  For two hours we worked, making notes and recordings of YZY’s stories and observations on growing up in a B village as a budding musician.  She has a sincere interest in preserving her people’s musical traditions, many of which will be lost forever if not recorded soon.  Because villages now have electricity, young people have more interest in watching TV in the evenings than in gathering to play and sing music in a friends’ home.

During the interview, she told several stories from her childhood, mostly related to memories of her favorite holidays.  She told of how things in the village change so quickly, even from the time she was a little girl until she was a teen.  She remembered when she was 7 or 8 years old watching with fascination how the young men and women courted at Water Splashing Festival.

On a certain day of the holiday the guys set out into the forest to find the most beautiful and rare of flowers to pick for the girls.  Before giving the flowers to the girl who most caught his eye, a young man would trim the leaves in a certain way so that he could recognize it again as his own.  Throughout the day, a girl would collect flowers from several suitors, arranging them in her hat according to which of the young men she preferred.  The flowers of the boy who captured her heart were displayed prominently in the front of her hat.  Flowers of good friends were placed along both sides, and those of boys she didn’t like much were stuck in the back.  If there were anyone she couldn’t stand—well, his flowers were just thrown aside.

The rest of the day, as friends mingled and ate and visited from house to house for the holiday, the girls’ hats became objects of great concern and observation.  Which girls had the most flowers?  Who had the rarest flowers?  Which girls had obviously picked their own common flowers from the side of the road?

And the young men—they were all angling for a glimpse of the floral arrangement positioned on their lady love’s head, hoping to find that their own gift was the one just above her brow.

At the end of YZY’s animated description of this process, Fidi prompted her to tell of her own experience as an eligible young lady in the village.  “You’re so beautiful, I’m sure you had many, many flowers given to you at that time.”

Rather anti-climactically she replied, “By the time I was a teenager, the boys had stopped doing this, and our parents bought us hats with plastic flowers.”

How quickly the romance dies.  I’m blaming the loss of that tradition on television, too.

(Pictured above is an example of a modern head dress with plastic flowers and, incidentally, a TV in the background.)