13 o' clock
Dec. 30th, 2011 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
The week between Christmas and New Years always has that 13 o’clock feel to it, doesn’t it?
Did a one on one ESL tutorial with Tenzing yesterday at her home where she lives with her husband and four children, subsidized housing near Route 13. She’s a very plucky woman, I must say. Owned a retail business in India, had a comfortable middle class life. Here she does food service and house cleaning.
“I come for the children,” she tells me. “Here they have more – I don’t know how to say –“
“Opportunities?” I suggest.
“I don’t know that word.”
“When you can have a better life, you have opportunities.”
“Yes, yes. Opportunities.”
Tenzing first studied English at the Dalai Lama’s Dharamsala compound, so she speaks with a rather charming British colonial accent. She doesn’t speak badly within the limits of her vocabulary and inexpert command of verb tenses. But she doesn’t understand more than 30 percent of what’s said to her, possibly because American English sounds so very different from what she’s used to. So she actually has the opposite problem of most people who are learning a foreign language whose comprehension is much better than their speech.
It is true, isn’t it? The U.S. and Canada present opportunities that aren’t available in the rest of the world. They’re not for the immigrants who come over. They’re for their children, their grandchildren. If you have the humility to view yourself as a throwaway generation, your DNA has a chance. Hard work may net them the gold ring. May. A hundred thousand contingencies ride on that “may.” But, of course, in India, there was no chance at all.
Three inches of snow on the ground. Trying to psych myself into being domestic so that I start 2012 with a clean house. But it’s hard to jumpstart myself. I begin the credit union tax training shortly after the New Year, and start working with clients in three weeks.
“You live so much inside your head,” B told me last time I had a full frontal psychological breakdown that required motivational sermons. I’d never thought of myself as a cerebral person particularly. But I suppose it’s true, I am.
