Refugee High

by Elly Fishman

  In August 2016, as Tobias looked around the massive airplane filled with refugee families, he thought the structure looked like a house. There was food and bathrooms—someone showed him how to use a flushing toilet—and blankets. Tobias buckled his seat-belt and settled into his seat. He hardly moved the entire flight. Looking out the window, Tobias watched the clouds float in the air. Behind them the sun rose, fell, and emerged again.

  5

  DECEMBER

  Sarah Quintenz

  Sarah stands outside of her office. She hugs a well-stuffed plastic garbage bag. She turns the bag upside down and a pile of clothes spills onto the table. Dozens of such bags have arrived at Sullivan High School after Sarah put out a call for donations for their Christmas drive for ELL students. Sarah surveys the room. Instead of books, a wall of shelves is now filled with sweatshirts, pants, plates, highball glasses, lotions, toy Santas, vases, and cooking utensils, which will fill her students’ kitchens next year. Sarah’s goal is to transform the library into an ad hoc storehouse where students and their families can choose from donations in the days leading up to the winter break. She calls it the “Q Mart.”

  Sarah started gathering donations her first year at Sullivan after she’d seen students skate across icy winter sidewalks in flip-flop sandals and others push against frigid winds in just thin sweatshirts. She started by asking her siblings, mother, and stepfather to contribute at their weekly Sunday dinners. She pressed them to give up old jackets or winter boots. From her family alone, Sarah managed to gather several bags’ worth of clothes. She expanded her network in the following years, emailing Sullivan staff and asking friends to post on Facebook. Sarah would spend much of December collecting and carting everything from cell phone chargers to jewelry boxes to baby clothes back to Sullivan. Sarah’s entreaty is now a holiday ritual of its own. And her family and friends somehow manage to dig up more stuff every year.

  A few minutes after the fifith period bell rings, a flood of students pour into the library. They are trailed by Dirk Casto, an ELL teacher, with his etched face and wicked humor, who instructs the students to station themselves around the library. One girl from the Central African Republic spots a box full of cosmetics. She whispers to her three friends and the girls make a beeline toward it. They dive in. One pulls out a lavender-scented lotion. She pumps a glob onto her hand, delighting as the product hits her skin. She sniffs and smiles. She pumps several more globs and begins to coat her arms in the lotion. Another girl pulls out bath soaps. The third finds a Revlon eyeshadow palette. She pops open the face and arrays the colors in swatches on her inner wrist. Her friend finds a perfume bottle and spritzes in the air. The girls lean in and enjoy the aromatic mist, debating the identity of the scent. They agree it is some kind of flower.

  Behind them, a group of boys gather around a small Bluetooth speaker. One of them syncs his phone and plays the Turkish pop megastar Yalin. One of the world’s top-selling pop stars, Yalin doesn’t have mainstream status in the United States, though in 2007, he had a successful collaboration with Jamaican singer Shaggy. Yalin’s songs are sung in Turkish and Arabic, and are odes to loves lost or out of reach. The boys, broad-shouldered and tall, drape their arms around each other and begin to dance in a circle. The circle grows as young men from the other side of the room run over to join in the dance. They sing along to the melody as they hop around, in an ever-expanding circle.

  Sarah doesn’t interrupt them. She’s cultivated a sociable atmosphere in the library. Many refugee teens find themselves in a strange middle space: At home, they often care for both their younger siblings and parents, many of whom suffer from deep trauma and struggle to adjust to their new lives, while at school they can shed those expectations and act like kids. Sarah knows several of the dancing boys go from school to eight-hour shifts at work. One of them manages the frying station at the McDonald’s a mile west of school. Another cooks on the line at a Palestinian-owned diner. Several deliver for Uber Eats, and a few work at a country club just north of the city.

  When Sarah had her own classroom on the first floor, she approached the space in a similar way. She would begin every class with music and often share her favorite singers—Dave Matthews, Justin Bieber, G. Love, the Clancy Brothers—and sometimes play songs from the radio. But she’d also encourage students to bring their own music to class, which they’d play for one another on their phones. Sarah also decorated her room so it felt like a place where playfulness could thrive. She covered nearly every inch of wall with flags. She hung plastic globes from the lights. Sarah, who got pregnant the first week of her first year of teaching—a fact that makes her groanlaugh when it comes up—also put up posters of her young son with accompanying classroom rules. An image that depicted her toddler covered in ice cream, for example, said: “Clean up after yourself, your mother doesn’t work here!” Another, which showed the boy floating in a swimming pool, read, “Don’t be afraid to swim in the deep end.”

  The posters also prompted students to ask Sarah about her home life. She joked that she hated football because her ex-husband loved it. She told them her son knew all the words to the Johnny Cash song “Walk the Line” before he could read. Sometimes Sarah would write down quotes from her son—“Grammie and Grumpa want to know if you want to sleepover?” for example—and ask her students to infer his meaning and fix the grammar. One year, Sarah transcribed a birthday message from her mother that detailed the story of Sarah’s birth. It went like this: You were born during The Quiet Man. I went in during the fight scene and you were born during the love scene. She then assigned her students the task of writing their own birth stories from their mothers’ perspectives. The results left Sarah in stitches.

  When students expressed concern about attending college, she told them about her older brother who never went and still paid his bills. He had his own business, she said. And a career in the military. But she also liked to use her brother to offer lessons in what not to do. For example: When you first get your license, don’t take your parents’ Ford Aerostar van and speed through leaf piles because they might billow up and set the car engine on fire. This is why Sarah plans to one day write a book titled 794 Lessons My Brother Never Learned.

  Back in the library, the song ends. Sarah steps in. “Okay, guys,” she says motioning the boys to turn down the music. “The queen is talking. When the queen is talking, you listen, and I need everyone to start folding these clothes.”

  “It looks like Macy’s in here right now,” adds Dirk Casto as he folds a pile of clothes, “but it better look like Nordstrom’s when we’re done.” He laughs to himself. The joke wasn’t meant for the students.

  As students scatter to different piles of clothes, a tall junior boy manages to shimmy his way over to the Bluetooth speaker. He brings up a YouTube playlist for Tanzanian pop singer Lava Lava. He decides on the hit single “Teja,” a love song with an auto-tuned melody over a syncopated beat. The boy drapes a lavender coat over his shoulders and starts to bounce his knees and move his shoulders to the beat. Soon, he’s dancing, his feet moving in an intricate line step. His friends recognize the steps and form a line around him. A sophomore boy films the scene for his Snapchat story. The Swahili song has a popular Arabic cover version. The kids connect in surprising ways, from a Turkish singer’s performing in Arabic, or a Tanzanian star who’s caught on in the Arab world.

  “You’re so beautiful,” says the boy who’s filming, teasing, but without mocking.

  “Thank you,” the dancing boy says as he spins in place, his lavender coat whipping against the air.

  Across the room, a Rohingya boy has started his own fashion show. The sophomore has put on a bra over his shirt and traded his sneakers for pumps. He struts back and forth across the room, swiveling his hips from side to side and dipping his shoulder from left to right. Shahina and Aishah trail behind him. They giggle and shriek.

  “You’re crazy,” laughs Shahina as the boy throws his head back and cackles. When he reaches
the bookshelves, he stops and poses. Shahina trails the boy with her phone, documenting every moment. Within minutes, her friends across the city, Midwest, Myanmar, and Malaysia will get a taste of her hybrid world, where old and new traditions weave together inside Sullivan’s walls. Shahina often uses her own platform to test the boundaries between the two. Her Instagram selfies showcase long, loose, dyed hair, which dusts her face as she purses her lips and pretends to kiss the camera. Her followers are used to these kinds of images.

  But frolicking in Chicago can be incendiary back in the Muslim Southeast and South Asia, through which refugee families have passed. Traditional tolerance for cross-dressing is losing ground there, and in some places such as Malaysia and some provinces of Indonesia it is punishable under newly strict Sharia-based law. When girls from Myanmar, a country relatively tolerant to cross-dressing, pass around a video of a playful classmate, the borderless show broadcasts everywhere and who knows how the hijinks register where they’re seen out of context. But for now, the laughter continues. After Shahina posts the video of her friend, she turns the camera on herself, layering her hairline with floppy, spotted dog ears.

  Alejandro

  Alejandro has been on edge for months. Slumped in his seat in the fifth row of the school auditorium, the senior, who hasn’t removed his backpack, pulls out his phone. He’s not particularly interested in the winter holiday concert, or what Sarah calls “mandatory fun.” On stage, a Rwandan boy beats on the drums while a Syrian sophomore accompanies him on flute as a group of singers belt out Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.” Students across the auditorium film the show with their phones while staff, most of whom lean against the southern wall, sway slightly in place. Next up, a second group sings “Feliz Navidad.” Alejandro looks up; he knows this one. The program continues with “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Auld Lang Syne.” When Lauren steps up to the microphone, the room cheers. She may feel apart from her peers, but she is not without fans. The rest of the Sullivan rock band shuffle in behind her. Hardly a beat passes before the first notes of No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” sizzle across the space. The senior singer is backed by the Burmese bassist and together their swells of sounds bring dozens of students to their feet. With each verse, Lauren seems to lean deeper into Gwen Stefani’s righteous anger. It’s a sharp contrast to her general soft demeanor, but the edge suits her. By the time she reaches the first chorus, she crescendos into a full belt. A handful of students shout-sing along with her. Alejandro, however, isn’t so moved. He’s back on his phone, absorbed by a FIFA highlight reel.

  It’s hard for the eighteen-year-old to lose himself in a school concert while he lives in limbo and waits to make his final appeal for asylum. Unlike refugees, who arrive in the United States with protected status and who are given green cards and a path to American citizenship after five years in the country, those like Alejandro, who seek asylum after reaching the U.S. border, must plead their case to an immigration judge. The judge, in turn, decides whether to grant the individual asylum or deport them back to their home country. For the last five years Alejandro’s immigration status has been litigated repeatedly and there’s another hearing at the end of the school year. The new Trump administration policies, which include increasing the number of ICE officers, prioritizing prosecution of immigrant offenses, and limiting privacy for unauthorized immigrants seeking status, put Alejandro on tenuous ground and anything he’s involved in just might work against him.

  A few days later, when Alejandro walks into the ELL library office looking for respite from the hallway and the noise in his head, the room is already full. In one corner, Mariah sits flanked by two boys. These two stick to the Iraqi sophomore like shark suckers. Next to Mariah, Josh encourages two Congolese girls to sign up for after-school activities. He walks them through a long list of options: guitar club, soccer, band, poetry club, volleyball. No matter what he suggests, the girls shake their heads no. The girls frustrate one of the social worker’s chief missions, which is to get the refugee kids engaged outside of class. Socialization is key, the school believes, to the kids’ successful integration and to their happiness over time. Josh can usually persuade everyone to do something, but the girls at the school can be a challenge. The boys play soccer and the team has made the school a kind of star. In 2016, a filmmaker produced a documentary about the immigrant team and their Albanian coach, himself a refugee. It offers a model for the kind of socialization Josh pushes for. “Life here is easier,” says one player in the film. “People go to work, get money, but in Rwanda it’s very tough to get a job … The way soccer helped me out is it connected me to people … It introduced me to people who will help me have a better future.”

  If Josh gets kids into the right activities, they can succeed at something they care about. That builds confidence and networks. Migert Baburi, the Albanian coach, believes that soccer, for instance, gives kids a way to win in a world that conspires against them. “That’s a war on that field,” he says in the film. “It’s you against me … There aren’t any tanks against these kids. There is no airplane throwing bombs at them. It’s a way they can win, and they can win by will.”

  As for the two girls, their families often prefer that their extracurriculars center around their churches. At first. Josh will get them into choir, or other musical groups, but it may be in their second or third years. For now, the pair are steadfast and insist none of the offers interest them.

  “You guys don’t want to do nothing,” Mariah says, watching the exchange as she eats a fatayer, or triangular breaded pie, stuffed with spinach and feta. The two girls look back at Mariah, confused, wondering, perhaps, why she cares. But there’s little at Sullivan Mariah doesn’t care about or weigh in on. If it galls her that the girls don’t want to mix in with other students after school, she says so. That’s her school spirit. She wants the school to work for everyone, and at the same time rebels against the rules herself. But she’s a force and charismatic, too, so while she’ll upbraid others, no students correct her.

  Alejandro looks at Mariah as she speaks. His main goal during his free period is to be quiet and fnd quiet. He mostly keeps to himself. Growing up in Guatemala City, Alejandro learned that visibility never worked in his favor. MS-13 ran his neighborhood. Violence and death were endemic. The best way to survive was to remain inside, or, if he had to leave home, in the shadows.

  In 2013, Alejandro arrived in Chicago to meet his father, who too had come to the United States a decade earlier. Though he had put twenty-eight hundred miles between those who hunted him in Guatemala City and himself, Alejandro has never felt totally at ease. Not only were the killings and other violent memories impossible to shake, gangs seemed to be everywhere in Chicago, too. When he started as a freshman at Mather High School, a modernist white brick building that housed more than 1,650 students, Alejandro felt invisible. He liked that. But when he came upon a group of boys smoking a joint in the bathroom, Alejandro was awakened to a world inside Mather. He started to see drugs all over the school. He noticed gang symbols on lockers and coded handshakes between boys in the hall. Though the gangs were new, he recognized the modes of communication. After just a few weeks at Mather, Alejandro told his father he wanted to transfer to another school.

  Mariah’s brashness intrigues Alejandro, but she’s also a threat to his invisibility. The two often sit across from one another in the ELL office, but they rarely speak to each other. Every time Mariah comes in, she’s fueled by a grievance she wants to air. Whether it’s a friend who has wronged her or a teacher who annoys her, she always fills the room. Alejandro observes. He watches soccer on his phone. He is certain Mariah doesn’t know his name. The fact doesn’t bother him.

  “What is that?” one of Mariah’s admirers asks as she takes a second bite from the spinach pie.

  “It’s Middle Eastern food,” Mariah responds, a little dismissively.

  “It needs sauce. Is that wasabi?” he says, pointing to a bottle on the table. “I had wasabi once and I w
as in the bathroom for weeks.” The boy sticks out his tongue.

  Mariah offers the boy a forkful of pie. Alejandro looks down at his bag of Doritos. It’s nothing to get excited about, but it fits his budget and fills him enough. He’s never had Middle Eastern food. He tried takeout Chinese food for the first time after arriving in the United States, and he likes kung pao chicken. He’s tried matzo ball soup and bagels. Alejandro’s father works as a handyman at assisted living housing for religious Jews. Sometimes, when he helps out his father on the weekends, Alejandro eats lunch in their cafeteria. Not his favorite cuisine. He prefers Mexican food. Ever since his girlfriend, who is Mexican American, introduced him to spicy salsa roja and salsa verde, Alejandro has eaten tamales and tacos almost every day after school.

  Watching Mariah eat her spinach pie, Alejandro wonders what it tastes like. But he doesn’t like to ask women for favors. One of the first lessons Alejandro’s father, Sergio, taught him when they reconnected four years ago was never let a woman pay for a meal. Alejandro doesn’t ask for a bite.

  At Sullivan, Alejandro landed in Sarah’s English class. At first, he disliked Sarah. Her acerbic style doesn’t work for everyone. She pushed her students by repeatedly asking them: Are you dumb or are you learning English? A refrain that Sarah first used when pointing to a poster of her toddler son. She said: “You are not dumb. He’s dumb and he’s learning English.” And added, “You all know how to wipe your own butts, I hope.”

  Her point was that no one should mistake the student for slow because they didn’t speak English. But while students’ English proficiency was not a measure of their intelligence, they still had to speak the language in Chicago to be taken seriously. The expression became a classroom catchphrase. But Alejandro didn’t buy it. He found Sarah’s haranguing humiliating. She got under his skin. And one day Alejandro, who had managed to temper his anger, burst wide open.