by Helen Thorpe
The social worker asked Christina if there was anybody she trusted, anybody she wanted to call. Christina answered, “Martha and Steve.” The couple had been visiting their apartment all year, bringing over used toys and hand-me-down clothing. They had also invited the three Karen-speaking girls to their home on many occasions, to play with their own children. After the social worker called Martha (who was listed on the roster of people permitted to pick up Christina and her sisters), Martha appeared within minutes, in Christina’s recollection—to this day, she marvels at how quickly Martha got to the school. Martha accompanied the three girls to the child welfare division of Denver Human Services, where an employee told the frightened girls they were about to go into foster care.
Martha said immediately, “They are not going anywhere but home with me.”
The city official looked appraisingly at Martha, and said, “I can make that happen.”
* * *
Growing accustomed to living with her adoptive parents was as momentous as a second resettlement for Christina. She wrote in her Autobiography: “Learning to live in an American family was very hard especially because I didn’t speak much English.” Martha and Steve went to extraordinary lengths to care for the Karen girls; Steve moved out of the master bedroom for a while, and the couple put up a set of bunk beds there, so that Christina’s sisters would have a place to sleep. Christina was offered a bed, too, but insisted on sleeping on the living room couch. She had gotten used to sleeping on couches while she had been trying to duck her grandmother’s wishes, and somehow the couch was more comforting than an actual bed. Eventually Martha and Steve built an addition onto the house so that there would be enough bedrooms for all seven of their children. Then Christina surrendered the couch and moved into her own room.
Still, she found it peculiar that Martha and Steve wanted to do strange things like hug and ask how she was doing. In Christina’s experience, Karen people did not embrace routinely and did not talk about their emotional states. “They are starting to creep me out,” Christina told her sisters. About that period in her life, which coincided with the second half of her eighth-grade school year and her start as a ninth grader attending South, she wrote:
When I started my first year in high school I had lived with my new family for about eight months. It was a really confusing and hard time for me at home. Whenever I came back from school I would stay in my room the whole time. I did whatever I wanted to do on the weekends . . . I wasn’t used to parents that expected to know where I was going and what I was doing. Being with two different cultures was really confusing, especially at first. Sometimes I needed help with my schoolwork and I was scared to tell my parents because I thought they would start yelling at me. But they don’t yell, they just always tell me if I need help tell them. Still, I was scared.
At the same time, Christina grappled with being ostracized by the Karen community. Her former neighbors in the old apartment building spread rumors that Martha and Steve had turned the children against their grandmother, which led many in the tight-knit refugee community to shun Christina. “People think that my American family stole me, and it’s not true,” Christina said. “I want people to know that. I was about to die if I ended up with a man I didn’t want to be with. I probably would have gotten raped, and I probably would have ended up having children with him. I’m very thankful to my parents.”
Learning English had proved as problematic for Christina as it was proving to be for Kaee Reh and Hsar Htoo. At first Christina stubbornly persisted in indicating changes in time by adding on other words—she would state something in the present tense and then throw in the word “yesterday.” The whole concept of a language that was not tonal perplexed her, and she struggled especially with words that ended in consonants. The sound of spoken Karen is blunt consonants at the outset of a given word, followed by musical vowels; generally, there are no hard consonants at the end of words. For a while, Christina could not distinguish between two words like “scarf” and “scar”—to her, they both sounded like “skah.” At South, however, Christina found teachers who helped her academically and socially.
My teachers Ms. Todd, Ms. Lingler, and Ms. Aldrich were the best teachers I had my first year at South. They always helped me when I needed help . . . I was always happy when I saw their faces. I can tell you that they are the best teachers ever and I love them so much.
At the same time, Martha and Steve provided Christina and her sisters with an alternative model of how to be parented. Steve took the girls hiking and taught them how to talk through disagreements. Martha offered unconditional love and physical affirmation and emotional sanctuary. She let Christina tell her story, little by little, and slowly, as all that Christina had survived was revealed, Martha showed Christina how to grieve. “My mom, she cries and cries!” Christina said, delighted to have found such a mother. Shortly after Christina turned eighteen, Steve and Martha formally adopted all three Karen girls. It cost $180 to adopt Christina, because she was an adult; her sisters cost even more.
“Mom, we are so expensive!” Christina said to Martha.
Martha told her, “Money is nothing. We have the money. Life is more important.”
Martha and Steve had a tradition in their family, which they generously extended to the three new children they had suddenly acquired (which in reality had cost them much more than just the adoption fee, both in actual dollars and in terms of the emotional toll it took to parent three traumatized children who spoke little to no English). The tradition was this: When their children turned sixteen, they could take a trip anywhere they wanted to go in the world. It might not happen exactly when they were sixteen, because when the trip occurred would depend upon the family finances, but it would happen. Christina asked to go back to Thailand. She wanted to see the refugee camp where she had grown up, she wanted to see her mother, and she wanted to see her old friends.
Steve took Christina to Thailand shortly after she turned twenty-one. They traveled there in December 2015 (halfway through the school year I spent at South). Whenever she spoke of the journey, Christina kept saying that everything had gotten smaller. Roads seemed narrower and a river that meandered through the refugee camp appeared to have shrunk. “That river—I used to think it was so huge,” she said. “And it’s a trickle!” When she walked into her former school, her old teacher had taken one look at her face and cried, “Silly One!” He remembered: She was the girl who would not write the right way in Burmese.
* * *
It had taken Christina eight years to get to the point where she could talk about all this. She could not possibly have recounted her story back when she had only just arrived and was still trying to figure out how to stick a consonant on the end of a word, how to make nouns plural, and how to indicate that an event had happened in the past. She had fled her home village during warfare, watched an uncle die in a land mine explosion, moved into a refugee settlement, almost died of malaria, been separated from both of her parents, resettled in the United States, experienced domestic abuse, and almost been given away as a child bride. Those were the kinds of extreme experiences some of the newcomers had endured. I had sensed that some of the kids in Mr. Williams’s room needed to stay well taped, just like the boxes they had made with Miss Pauline, but I hadn’t fully appreciated exactly what some of the newcomers might have survived until Christina enlightened me. Getting to know her gave me a new level of respect for everyone in Room 142.
5
* * *
Qalb
At one point, when he was about to head back downstairs to his students after enjoying a momentary respite, Mr. Williams said to a colleague who was sitting at a table in the copy room, “All right, I think I’m ready for this. I’ve gone to the bathroom, I’ve put cold water on my face, I’ve played the Rocky theme music on my cell phone—here we go.” It was early April, and the city’s flowering trees had sprung into color, all the crab apple trees in Washington Park topped with clouds of pale pink. The
students were in full bloom, too—socially and academically. Managing all of them at once was consuming a fair amount of the teacher’s energy. The kids had been competing for several weeks in what Mr. Williams called the Newcomer Olympics, a heated contest that had begun at the end of March and resumed at the start of April, right after spring break. There were a series of events. First, the kids vied to compose grammatical sentences using parts of speech supplied by Mr. Williams. For example, he asked them to use the words “we,” “and,” and “big” in a sentence. They could earn up to four points.
Lisbeth’s team wrote, “We visited to big city and village.” Mr. Williams gave her group two points.
Plamedi’s team wrote, “We see my mother every Sunday and my brother big car.” That earned two points also.
Solomon’s team wrote, “We like to go to South High School because it is so fun and so big.” That one got three points. Solomon’s team had exhibited better “language control,” as Mr. Williams called it—not only had they gotten their meaning across, but they had also used each word appropriately.
And Grace’s team wrote, “We have a big book and pencils.” That was worth three points also.
Bachan’s team wrote, “We and so big.” One point for effort.
Meanwhile, Methusella’s team lagged behind; he had been elsewhere in the building and had returned to find his teammates mired in last place.
“Methusella, help your team out!” Mr. Williams urged.
“I was not here,” Methusella objected haughtily.
The entire room had gotten caught up in the competition. Even Jakleen was wearing a broad smile. When Mr. Williams asked the students to use the words “she,” “great,” and “South High School” in a sentence, Jakleen wrote, “Is the great school she is a student and she likes South High School.” I noticed that she had written the sentence using the Arabic construction: verb first. This was deemed a two-point sentence, but Mr. Williams thought the most important thing was that she was present and participating. Meanwhile Saúl was balancing an oblong pink eraser on his right shoulder while working on constructing another sentence, and then he forgot that the eraser was there and turned abruptly to ask for some help from Mr. DeRose. The eraser tumbled to the carpet, which set Hsar Htoo laughing. The room was livelier than I’d ever seen it.
The next activity was a listening exercise. Saúl and Yonatan went head-to-head to see who could be the first to come up with the right answer to the following question: “I have one quarter, one dime, and one nickel,” said Mr. Williams. “How much money do I have?”
“Thirty-five cents!” Saúl shouted swiftly. “Oh, forty! Forty cents!”
Saúl won, which meant that he advanced to the next round. His new opponent was Jakleen. Mr. Williams asked if I would like to pose a question.
“This is a kind of food,” I said. “The ingredients are bread, lettuce, and meat. What is it called?”
“Sandwich!” Jakleen announced immediately.
“Oh!” cried Mr. Williams. “Jakleen! Jakleen wins!”
That particular victory pushed her team into the lead. When she went home from school, Jakleen bragged to her mother that she had helped her team win the day’s competition. Excited that her daughter was enjoying school at last, Ebtisam gave Jakleen money to buy a new cell phone cover. Pink leather with sequins. Right in the middle of the Newcomer Olympics—which Mr. Williams introduced each day by playing the instantly recognizable “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” by John Williams—Jakleen arrived at school one day without a hijab. Her hair was dyed auburn and she had spent time blow-drying it and ironing it perfectly straight. I was not sure how to interpret this statement, and she never cared to enlighten me, but she never wore the hijab again. When I asked her directly about her transformation, all she said was, “Everybody changes their mind about things.” I imagined that taking off the hijab was a reflection of her comfort with the idea of residing in the United States, which appeared to have grown significantly. To take off the head scarf, I believed, she must have felt more at home.
* * *
The most entertaining event in the Olympics, which stretched over several weeks, was an elaborate scavenger hunt. Mr. Williams handed out a sheet detailing the degrees of angles involved in each turn, the cardinal directions to head toward (he had taped the points of the compass on the walls), and other highly specific instructions for how to find ten unnamed objects. The students were told to turn left or right, to make a 90-degree turn or a 180-degree turn, to head north or south, and to go around or under or behind certain pieces of furniture. If the students followed all of the directions correctly, they would find the object of their quest.
Mr. Williams, Mr. DeRose, and I fanned out across the room to advise students who looked bewildered. Methusella led his group confidently to one destination after another, and needed little guidance. I was still helping other groups with early clues when I noticed Methusella’s group tackling the challenge question at the end of the exercise. (Methusella was sailing into near fluency in English faster than any other student, and during that month Mr. Williams gave him more and more advanced reading assignments. Among the words that Methusella would ask me to explain to him in that time frame were “racism,” “compromise,” “exploit,” and “prodigious”—which I thought his learning was.) Shani appeared mystified by what was happening, but she obediently tagged along with her group anyway, and they bumbled their way around the room with minimal error, albeit not as swiftly. Bachan got separated from his group and wandered around aimlessly, wearing a confused look. At one point, Jakleen’s group reached a large round table, and one student after another bent down to crawl under it, as the instructions demanded, but Jakleen was too proud to crawl. She circled the table instead. They were all stumped by one word in the directions: “cabinet.” I stationed myself beside the tall gray filing cabinet that stood in a corner of the room, so that I could wave at confused parties as they approached. When Yonatan got as far as that part of the room, he leapt up to hit an object on the wall.
“What is this?” he cried.
“That is a bulletin board,” I told him.
“Bulletin?” he asked, unfamiliar with the concept.
“I’ll write it down for you,” I told him.
Then I showed him what a cabinet was.
At another point, Mr. Williams’s directions were a little vague, and each team wound up in a slightly different location. They were supposed to find an object hidden inside a wooden cupboard, but the wall opposite the big windows was lined with cupboards, and each team opened a different door. A women’s studies class that used the same room at a different hour had labeled one cabinet with the words “perpetuate,” “acquiesce,” “patriarchy,” and “subordinate,” and Nadia’s team chose that door. Behind it they found a book. Solomon’s team, on the other hand, chose a door that was labeled “subject—object—possessive,” with a list of pronouns in their various forms, and inside that cupboard they found a box of chocolate. It was Lisbeth’s team who won the scavenger hunt, but they did not score high enough to take the lead overall. Jakleen’s team—which consisted of Ksanet, Grace, and herself—edged into the lead. “My team won,” Grace said to me shyly as she left the room.
For the rest of that week, Methusella’s team vied with Jakleen’s for first place, and the competition between those two students grew intense. I had never seen Jakleen so involved with school before. Once Mr. Williams had captured her full attention, she could even go toe-to-toe with Methusella. Her sister Mariam did not get quite so caught up in the competition. At one stage, Mr. Williams caught Mariam and Shani (the two of them were now inseparable, while Jakleen was spending more and more time with Lisbeth) over by the pencil sharpener, whispering, giggling, and sharpening an inordinate number of pencils. “Ladies! Ladies! You don’t need pencils now!” he admonished. After that, he caught Mariam talking surreptitiously to her boyfriend on the phone. “I’ll have to take that cell phone, Mimi,” he warned. Both o
f the Iraqi sisters had acquired new nicknames—Jakleen had become Gigi, a longtime family endearment that had crept into the classroom, and Mr. Williams had started calling her older sister Mimi, because it rhymed. In general, though, most of the students (with the intermittent exception of Lisbeth, Mariam, and Shani) remained pretty much on task throughout the multiweek competition. And Jakleen was like a different person: animated, confident, spectacularly fast.
* * *
Throughout April, each week brought more life to Room 142. The lessons grew more fun, the students worked harder, and the interactions between them grew more frequent and more complex. During the lunch hour, I hardly ever saw a single student sitting alone and isolated anymore; instead, happy clumps of kids would form, break up, and re-form, as they wandered from table to table, interacting across regions and languages. The degree of affection bestowed around the room increased palpably, and the students even started showering me and Mr. Williams with demonstrations of fondness. Lisbeth would cry, “Hi, Miss!” and then slam herself against me with both of her arms locked so tightly around my neck that she could grasp her own elbows, thus immobilizing me in a very friendly sort of headlock, until I could extricate myself. Shani lit up when she saw me and gave me little waves or quick hugs. Saúl sang to me almost every day, and Jakleen began happily bossing me around, which was her main form of expressing affection. “Miss, you sit here!” she commanded one day, pointing at the seat next to hers.
Meanwhile, during one stretch when I did not visit the Congolese family often enough, Solomon sent me a message on Facebook, saying, “I miss you.” The following weekend, the city was blanketed with yet more snow, even though the lilac bush in my yard had slid into a fragrant lavender haze and my two redbuds had reached full purple-red glory. I was busy doing laundry when my phone dinged. At this stage, the students sometimes felt lonely for us on Saturdays and Sundays, and I saw that Methusella had messaged me to say hello. It was a sweet, inconsequential Facebook type of conversation, but I found it noteworthy in terms of how well he could communicate: