I’ve had some very interesting and memorable conversations with students in my apartment this week. Just a few hours ago, Julia and two of her friends taught me how to play some card games, and while we played, one of the girls, Molly, told me about a novel she’d finished this weekend – a love story. I asked the girls if they like love stories.
Julia answered, “Yes, but not always, because sometimes they are unreal.”
“In American movies, the love stories are almost always the same,” I said. “There is a woman who is unhappy,” to which all three girls smiled and nodded, “and then the unhappy woman meets a man,” and they laughed, “and the man makes her completely happy. He makes her life perfect. I think this is unreal.”
They each nodded.
“There are some love stories that I think are real,” I said. “I will tell you one. The story is about a man who is very sad. He is always sad. He loves a woman, but she does not love him. She marries another man, and the sad man does not get angry. The sad man becomes friends with the woman’s new family – her husband and her children. One day, a war begins. The woman’s husband is taken by the war, and some men say that they will kill the husband. The sad man loves the woman so much, he decides to dress in her husband’s clothes, and go to the prison to play a trick on the men there. He makes the men believe that he is the husband, so the husband is set free, and the sad man dies in his place. Isn’t that a great love? He loved this woman, and he expected nothing from her. He asked nothing of her, but he died so that she could have a husband and her children could have a father.”
The girls were quiet. They had all listened so intently, which sort of surprised me. I had told them a slow-English version of A Tale of Two Cities. An American student would have been bored to tears.
“Yes,” Julia said. “It is great love.”
Later, I told the same story to my Monday afternoon class. I was encouraging them to use English to describe their favorite books. I asked them in the last few minutes of class if they wanted to hear the story of my favorite book. I immediately heard a unified seventeen voices shouting yes – they wanted to hear. It was the same sort of response I’d had from Julia and her friends. When I told my class the story, they listened just as intently. The bell rang, and when I told them I didn’t have enough time to finish, they all shouted, “stay, stay!” So I told them the rest of the story, and I don’t think there was a face in the room that wasn’t looking straight back at me.
It amazed me both times how much a simple story interested them. Now I’m glad I think I’ve found a way to their hearts.
The first time I tried to get a student to practice English by telling me the story of a favorite book, he was a very low-level student who had come to my room to make-up the midterm exam. His name was Chase, and he understood about one fourth of the things I was saying to him.
Finally, I began my last resort “do you like” questions. Somewhere after sports and food I finally got to books.
“Do you like to read?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like novels?”
“Yes.”
“What is your favorite book.”
A confused expression.
“The one you like the most.”
A smile…then another discouraged look.
“You don’t know the English name?” I said.
He nodded.
I leaned forward and annunciated each word: “Tell me what happens in the book. Tell me the story.”
He looked downcast, and before he could say the dreaded phrase, “My English is very poor,” I hastened to say,
“Is it about a man or a woman?”
At hearing such a simple question, he began to try. I saw in his face that he suddenly thought maybe he could tell me the story.
“It is… about… a man,” he said, ever so slowly. I tried as hard as I could not to look away for a second, to stare straight at his face the whole time he struggled to get the words out. I wanted to act as if it were taking him two seconds to say what really took him thirty.
He continued: “The man… he travels to… every place.” He stopped, scratched his head, and started again: “He travels to every place… look for… look for…”
I wrote on a piece of paper: “The story is about a man who travels to every country. He is searching for something. He is searching for ______.” I finished reading what I’d written and looked at Chase. “What is the man looking for?” I asked, and I could tell he was trying very hard to find a word for the thing.
He said a few other words. He tried to tell me that he related to the character in the story. “He is like me,” he kept saying.
But we couldn’t finish the sentence I’d written, and we kept staring at the blank dash on my paper.
Chase gave up and changed the subject. “I like story about a boy and a girl,” he said.
“Ah ha,” I replied. “You like romance.” I drew two stick figures with a heart between them, and said the word again, “romance.”
He smiled and nodded. “Long time ago… my heart was hurt. My heart…is still hurt.”
I imagined a high school girl laughing as she told Chase that she loved him. Chase continued to try to talk about love with me, and I wasn’t sure if the subject was chosen by him or forced on us by his limited vocabulary. As we continued looking at the heart on the paper and trying very hard to find the words to talk about love, a knock came at the door.
It was a Russian international student, the only one I’ve had in my class. He speaks a little Chinese and even less English. He sat on my couch with an English to Russian dictionary and looked at me.
I glanced from one to the other of their silent, uncomfortable faces. The level of “depth” I felt I had reached with Chase was suddenly gone – no more talking about love. We were back to likes and dislikes, hobbies, sports, and the number of siblings we had.
The Russian student did seem to understand more than Chase, but he would respond to my questions with even shorter answers. It was a hard game – asking him a simple question, then turning and asking Chase a simple question, then thinking of another simple question. The silent moments were long and there were a lot of them.
Finally, I asked the Russian if he liked Chinese food.
“No,” came a very decided answer.
“No?” I said. I was so used to reassuring all the students that I liked the food here, I’d never heard anyone so blatantly dislike it.
“I don’t like peeg,” he said.
“You don’t like…?”
“Peeg!”
“Oh, pig.”
“I am mooslim,” he said.
“You are… Muslim?”
He nodded.
“Oh, I see,” I said.
Chase looked confused, so we tried to help him understand.
“Religion?” I said.
“Buddha?” Said the Russian student, and unsuccessfully spoke a few Chinese words.
“Islam?” I said.
Chase’s eyes still darted from one to the other of us.
I wrote on a piece of paper:
Islam
Buddhism
Christianity
“Religion,” I said.
The Russian student eventually found the right Chinese word for Buddha. Somehow Chase began to understand, so I wrote some more words on my paper:
Islam –> Muslim
Buddhism –> Buddhist
Christianity –> Christian
I pointed to each line. “This one,” I said, “believes in Allah. This one believes in Buddha, this one believes in ‘Jesu’ – Jesus.” And then, on a sudden thought, I wrote on the paper,
Atheism –> Atheist
“This one,” I said, “believes in no God.”
Chase clapped his hands. “Me,” He said, and pointed with his thumb.
I suggested that many Chinese believe the last option, and the Russian student seemed upset by this. He kept pointing at Buddhism and Christianity, but Chase had nodded his head in agreement with me.
I tried to clear up the matter. “Maybe some Chinese people believe this,” and I pointed to Buddhism and Christianity. Then I pointed to Atheism: “Many Chinese people believe this.”
Both students seemed satisfied. We abandoned the conversation and for the next hour I taught them how to play Uno. The Russian student caught on quickly, but Chase had trouble understanding the rules. He kept trying to lay the wrong colors down, and one time he laid his last card down and made a triumphant chuckling sound. The Russian and I both pushed back the card and said, “No, it must be green.”
If someone could only have seen us – a Chinese, Russian, and American; an atheist, Muslim, and Christian – stretching a first grade vocabulary to express our views on love and religion before sitting down and playing cards for an hour and half. Neither student left until I told them I had class work to do.
I was only a substitute teacher for the Russian student’s class. The real teacher came that weekend, and I haven’t seen the Russian since. And though Chase sits in the front row every Monday, he has not come to visit me again.
