Classy
Hello, gentle creatures of the forest. I’ve been silent on my site for a while. Inevitably my excuse is that we’ve been really busy, but it’s true! We have! We return to the United States in three weeks, so we’re venturing to squeeze as much adventure as possible into our final moments here. We have lots of pictures to show you, but they will have to go up incrementally or you will never be able to slog through all of them. Expect pictures of our private kids class soon.
The following bit of writing is part of something larger that I have high hopes for. The main character is not myself, even though it is written from the first-person perspective. The experiences, however, are largely gleaned from Holly’s and my own. Please enjoy?
Five minutes into the lesson and already the overhead air filter is deafening. It doesn’t do its job very well, since almost every classroom has the familiar stale scent of the Mild Seven cigarettes the staff ladies smoke. I resist the urge to look up. I need to focus. My mind’s wandering.
Six eyes, belonging to three ancient Japanese women, are watching me expectantly. They must be ancient. Japanese women tend to look ten years younger than they really are, making these three ladies ninety-nine, one hundred and seven, and two hundred years old, respectively.
My mind’s wandering again. How long has it been since I asked my question? Have I let the silence drag on too long? It’s always too warm in these damn cubicles. I make a show of checking my notes and then look up, eyebrows raised.
“Anything else?” I say, enunciating slowly and looking at each of them in turn. They continue to stare at me. If they know I’ve just spoken then they aren’t showing it.
“Alright, well, please open your books to – “
“Flamenco dancing,” says Mitsuko, on the left.
“Oh,” I say, not sure how to respond to this development. “Do you…enjoy flamenco dancing?”
“Yes, flamenco dancing,” she says, grinning smugly. Across from her, Ritsuko’s hand twitches a little. She looks like she wants to say something.
“Ahhh,” she says, then mutters something to herself in Japanese, “Eto, she…ehh, ano, no no, sorry sorry, gomen ne…aaah, nandake…”
I give Ritsuko a moment to compose herself, but it looks like she’s lost her nerve now. Natsuko, sitting in the middle, is starting to look seriously concerned about something, her eyes darting back and forth between her two classmates. My own eyes are starting to water from a combination of the heat, the heavy scent of mothballs, and sheer, deadly boredom. I stifle my fourth yawn of the last ten minutes and try again.
“Oookay, well, please open your books to page sixty. Today’s lesson is about food.”
I open my own book to demonstrate, and the three ladies do the same. I sense more nervous rustling. Mitsuko’s opened her book to page sixteen. The other two ladies are on the correct page but are suddenly unsure in the face of Mitsuko’s unfailing, though misplaced, confidence. I hold up my book and slowly repeat the page number. Mitsuko laughs and flips to page sixty. Crisis averted.
“Now, like I said before, what is your favorite food?”
“Flamenco dancing,” says Mitsuko with entirely too much conviction. She hasn’t even looked at her open book, which features numerous color illustrations of food. I point at the page with my pen.
“Yes, great, but…food,” I said. “What’s your favorite food?”
“Sushi,” says Natsuko. “I like sushi.”
A correct answer and a full sentence – Natsuko has just become my best friend for this class. Focusing on her, I try to maintain the momentum.
“What kind of sushi do you like?”
“Eto…tuna,” she says, smiling widely. Too widely. Her top teeth are like inverted stalactites, thin at the top and wide at the bottom. Dear god, she could floss with pipe cleaners. I have to stop staring at her teeth.
“Oh, me too,” I hear myself say. Do they hurt? Those damn teeth. “I love tuna sashimi.”
All three ladies gasp.
“You…like sushi?” Ritsuko says, her hands shaking even more with the effort. They’re all looking at me as if I’d just set my hair on fire.
“Yeah, sushi’s great,” I say, suddenly unnerved by their reactions. “I ate it in America all the time.”
This elicits another round of surprised exclamations. Mitsuko is looking around, smiling, as if searching for the hidden camera. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I should probably stop this cycle of amazing revelations before someone combusts. Ritsuko’s hands are vibrating like a Chihuahua. Time to get down to business.
“Well, right, okay. Please look at the pictures,” I say, gesturing at my book, “and please repeat after me: spaghetti…pork chops…chicken kiev…”
I’m really starting to dread these low-level classes. The old ladies are all really sweet. They smile a lot and laugh at their mistakes, and most of them are so good-natured that it hurts to correct them. However, the mental strain of reducing my vocabulary and grammar to something a seventy-three-year-old first-time English speaker would understand is debilitating. Sometimes I can physically sense every second of my life ticking away in these lessons. After an hour of painful enunciation and frequent repetition, I hastily say goodbye and retreat to the relative sanity of the teacher’s room.
February 2nd, 2007 at 12:15 am
Amen!
February 3rd, 2007 at 12:13 am
I look forward to reading the rest to come!! :D “Vibrating like a chihuaha” = CLASSIC ;) hehe. Can’t wait to see you guys back over stateside!
February 11th, 2007 at 5:48 am
This is my life. Not only do I get to experience my soul folding in, seconds passing like a snail in glue, my cells dying, passion evaporating, but I can actually feel myself getting stupider. Dumbing down my language, “what word can I use instead of “who”?”! It’s like every forty minutes is the longest forty minutes of my life, and my life is now measured in forty minute increments. I don’t know what I hate worse, low levels or high levels. Those high level lessons are SO excrutiating, the best one is “How to throw yourself from a moving car (or a nova classroom)”. I taught one on rights yesterday and the listening questions were worded wrong, so I looked like a total tardo. The question was, “Why does the man tell the woman not to buy the lotion?” The listening was about a woman telling a man not to buy shampoo. As if the language isn’t confusing enough to them. Luckily I was teaching a 13 year old returnee from California, we both looked at each other after I finished and I was like, “Well that question was definately wrong.”