It Is Okay

[mallorys_camera]

For a while I was playing Monopoly with the Tibetans. You need a context for the English language, right?

The Tompkins County Learning Partnership recommends role playing as the best method for teaching English. Pretend you’re in the Social Services office applying for food stamps. Please sir, I would like to request an application for the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program. Pretend you’re at the doctor’s office: Please sir, clear secretions come out of my nose when I breathe in the air that contains microscopic plant particles.

These scenarios did not appeal to me.

We played Monopoly twice a week in Baalorma’s living room instead. Baalorma has two living rooms. There’s the everyday living room, right off the kitchen, where the family eats and where Baalorma watches her Chinese soap operas and then there’s the special occasion living room with its tapestries and cedar altar, kept in reserve behind closed doors in case the Dalai Lama ever decides to pay a visit.

The Tibetans got Monopoly’s basic acquisitions strategy right away, but they found the fact that you couldn’t build houses or hotels on railroads or utilities confusing. “Well, railroads and utilities don’t have houses and hotels in real life, do they?” I would say heartily. But the Monopoly board was an abstraction that had nothing whatsoever to do with real life, so far as the Tibetans were concerned.

“Is this useful?” I asked Baalorma after we’d been playing Monopoly for a month. “Is it fun?”

“It is okay,” Baalorma told me. It is okay, is Baalorma’s all-purpose answer to everything. I have no idea what it means. The Red Chinese could show up on her doorstep carrying gasoline cannisters, matches and a helpful ten-point instruction manual, The People’s Guide To Self-Immolation, and as she was setting fire to herself, Baalorma would reply, “It is okay.”

So then I decided Monopoly wasn’t working, that the context it was providing was a necessary but insufficient condition. We’d watch videos instead. Much as I longed to introduce the Tibetans to the cinematic oeuvre of Federico Fellini and Werner Hertzog, I went with back episodes of Little House On the Prairie.

Did they like it? Again, I couldn’t tell. Baalorma cried real tears as Royal Wilder expired in Shannon Doherty’s arms and they recoiled in horror at the malevolent antics of Nancy Oleson. Our vocabulary list grew longer as it incorporated clichés masquerading as 19th century slang. But I had to admit to myself that there weren’t too many places in Ithaca where the Tibetans were going to get to use the word varmint.

“Is this useful?” I asked Baalorma. “Are you enjoying it?

“It is okay,” she said.

So now we’re back to English conversation. This puts a greater strain on me since I have to think up a lesson plan beforehand. Without a chalkboard, it’s hard to reinforce the difference between nouns and verbs, past and present tense. I’m not really sure that their English has improved at all in the year I’ve been working with them. I mean, I enjoy hanging out with them. But I think they are no less marginalized now than they were then. Baalorma in particular is very bright, so in a sense I feel as though I’ve failed her.