Cloudy
today. Not sure if that is
suggesting rain. We haven’t had a
nasty, polluted day in while, but they are sure to return. In other room, my wife is going through
her French vocabulary, before work.
I feel as though I am back in Madame De La Chaple’s class in my suburban
New York middle school, when I hear some of these words dislodged from my
memory bank. How little I cared
about any foreign language whatsoever at that time. I knew no one that spoke any another language. I suppose the man in the pizzeria had
an Italian accent. I
remember one kid there telling me his dad was from Lithuania, which should be a
country but wasn’t because Russia had conquered it. And I had no idea where that was or what that would mean,
other than the fact that he was big and had blond hair. Madame De La Chapelle had an accent,
and we made fun of it, mercilessly. [1]
I think of that America as lost forever, because of all I
have gone through. But it is still
what most Americans outside of cities know. Suburban communities in New York have almost necessarily
assimilated children, in schools, so that they only experience cultural
otherness in convenience stores as in some episode of the Simpsons, or with the
occasional parent from another land.
I see what I perceive to be more evidence of Latin Americans in suburban
New York. I notice when I see
people of Indian descent and of course, the presence of people from China, who
weren’t anywhere near so well represented, when we were young. That epoch had already absorbed waves
of Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Polish otherness and their offspring were
largely all assimilated, in the community I lived in. Cultural otherness was very important, but no one seemed
foreign to America among peers, in our homogenizing schools.
And that is certainly the case here. I am the rare foreigner my children’s
Chinese classmates would meet. Me
and perhaps the English teacher at school. And it was and it must be easy to think of the rest of the
world as a bit irrelevant or secondary, which it was for me. Though certainly the exposure of this
generation, at least the thin sliver that I experience, is utterly different
and worldly. My daughter’s friend
was over last weekend. I sat and
tried to ask her in Chinese, about her summer. I have to be brave because no matter how I try, my question
patterns aren’t natural. You can
tell the look in a child’s face, that raise of an eyebrow that says, “I would
strongly prefer going back to talking to your daughter, my friend, rather than
having to engage with you just now.”
In perky Chinese then: “So you were in the U.S. this
summer? That’s great! What was your favorite city? New York? Hey, great.
That’s where I’m from. What
was your favorite thing about the city?”
Till my daughter rescues her friend from the weird foreign parent and
says: “dad, we’re baking!” I am
the odd Lithuanian dad, the odd Korean dad, who was weird and foreign. If you were polite on a visit over to
that house, you’d humor the weirdo parent for a little while and then move on
as fast as you could. And maybe you’d discern some embarrassment on the part of
your friend for having such strange, unnatural force in their life. 洋腔洋调[2] may not be the ‘worst perfume,’ but it is rarely
something a young person finds attractive.
Incidentally, I have switched to headphones now. Vocabulary lists became implausible
Gallic dialogues with accordion interludes and I couldn’t think. Quelle dommage! And the mind is now considering this
fabulous album from 1961 by two gents whom I hadn’t been familiar with, Curtis
Amy and Frank Butler. The prior
was born in Houston Texas in 1929, and like so many jazz greats, learned to
play the tenor sax in the army.
Mssr. Butler was one year Mr. Amy’s senior, born in Kansas City, MO in
1928. Both of them moved to
California where they were associated with the west coast jazz scene. They both look so young and hopeful on
the cover of the album and there are now two new discographies to explore. This second tune "Annsome" has me wishing I could drop everything and learn to play the vibes like Bobby Hutcherson, who is featured on the song. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Amy;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Butler_(musician)
I won't have any vibes any time soon. But today may be the day that my daughter gets her trumpet,
which I’m kind of excited about. And
it may be the day that I get an alto sax as well, as the band teacher promised
to lend me one among the many that we’re lying around. Music is a language we can both feel
new, and weird in, together.
[1] I shudder to
think of what we might have done to the poor woman if we’d known that she was
also the namesake for an XX Chromosome disease which I came across looking up
how to spell her name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
[2] yángqiāngyángdiào: to speak with a foreign accent or using
words from a foreign language (usually derogatory) (idiom)
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