Frivolous Post: Spectra and I went to Vietnam last week and it was such an astonishing experience that I’m struggling to find an approach to write about it. I’m working on it but in the meantime here’s a silly little ditty.
I had a new student. I'm going to call him William but that's not his name. He's a high school junior in the United States, was home for spring break, and all he wanted to work on with me was his accent. William is Thai and went to Thai schools (as opposed to international baccalaureate schools) before going to America. As such, he has an accent, but I could understand virtually everything he said, and he understood virtually everything I said. Our occasional communication gaps were due to vocabulary and culture, so as far as I was concerned there wasn't anything for him to worry about. Time would narrow those gaps if he minded them.
William didn't buy it. He blamed his original English teacher for having a weird accent that messed up his accent and wished he could unlearn English to start over with a better teacher. I told him that was categorically mad. That his accent wasn't bad, and that the reason he has an accent is because he grew up speaking Thai. I pointed out his accent, such as it is, lies almost exclusively in the sounds that bedevil all Thai ESL speakers: TH, CH, V, and the dread R. I thought this would reassure him by making him feel normal. I was wrong.
William did something no other student has ever done to me, either in the United States or in Thailand: he lashed out. Not physically but verbally. In a curt, heated tone William informed that his accent most certainly is not of the variety common to Thai people. He knew that because he also speaks Chinese with no detectable accent.
Okay. William was radically more sensitive about his accent than any of the other Thai people, much less kids, I’d talked to. I assured him I believed his Chinese was perfect and then did what I always do to help Thai people feel like their accents are nothing to be embarrassed about; demonstrated the lamentable state of my ridiculously tone deaf, thick-tongued Thai. That calmed him down, and we spent the next hour saying words with the bedeviling English allophones with intermittent sidebar conversations about our lives.
Through these sidebar conversations I slowly came to understand that William’s family must be properly rich. All of the kids I tutor are at a minimum upper-middle-class because, well, that’s who can afford to pay for tutoring (I am an excellent, top-notch, perhaps world class, tutor… obviously), but over the course of two hours it became clear that William was a socioeconomic notch or two above the others. Like his sister goes to university in perhaps the world’s most expensive city, so his family bought a condo there. And if William opts to attend university in the same city, he won’t live with his sister, he’d get his own condo. Sure, he could have been lying, but it didn’t seem like he was lying.
With 15-minutes left in our two hours William called it quits. He declared he was too frustrated to continue and just wanted to chat for our remaining time. I’m sure I laughed before saying I’d love to.
“Are you looking forward to going back to America,” was his first question.
“Oof,” I said, “That’s complicated. Yes and no. No, because I have a few friends here I’ll sorely miss, and saying goodbye to my students will be heartbreaking. Yes, because, obviously, I have friends and family back home. But the biggest reason I’ll welcome going home is being in Thailand has taught me just how American I am: I’m loud, I’m deliberatively provocative (in the annoying, angering sense), and I generally go out of my way to make people feel uncomfortable specifically so they’ll appreciate it when I turn around and embrace them… unless they hate me by that point, but what are you going to do about those kinds of people?”
William needed an example of my American-ness, which I provided by making him uncomfortable about his political beliefs through lots of slamming my fist on the table and leaning toward him to emphasize the unassailability of my point (and the fact that I’m, perhaps, 5-inches taller than he is). He quickly understood what I meant and agreed that I wasn’t Thai.
I finished the thought by telling him that while it would probably sound ridiculous, and definitely immature, what I missed about America was my popularity. Not that back home people were burning up my mobile minutes, or clogging my various internet communication nodes with offers of dates or hang outs; I meant when I went to the grocery store or coffee shop or work people were often happy to see me. I put a lot of effort into fostering that reaction. I remember facts about people (although rarely their names, which is something I unfortunately struggle with), keep tabs on past topics of conversation, and generally act like I’m happy to see them. So they look up, see me, and think something along the lines of “Sawyer!” or perhaps “That Guy!” I derive a considerable degree of my satisfaction with life in that moment, seeing that look on peoples’ faces. I get none of that in Thailand.
This perked William up, "I know exactly what you mean."
So this was the source of William's accent sensitivity. Sort of but not really. He went on.
"In Thailand all that matters is money. My family is rich so I'm very popular here, but in the US nobody cares. Here I could do anything I wanted and if I got in trouble I could just bribe someone. Money is everything here but it's not like that in America. I'm so popular here but I'm nobody there. It's really frustrating. You know what I mean?"
This was a hidden camera moment. Was my abject horror evident? Or did I manage to conceal it through lots of head nodding and affirmative-sounding mmm's. And how long did my "moment" of response calibration actually last? There was a lot to weigh.
Should I assure him that, while there isn't a lot of naked bribery in the US—although there is some—there is a correlation between wealth and, shall we say, the impartiality of the law. That despite his experience, Americans most definitely do worship at the altar of money, we just like to pretend to pretend like we don't. And that the American demographic most likely to act as though art and attitude is more important than money are people ages 16-24. In other words, that if he just hangs in there for a few years the tide will turn and his wealth will make him popular in America. Perhaps not quite like in Thailand, but still.
That should sound ridiculous because of course I wouldn’t tell him something so abhorrent... even though it’s true. But you weren't there. I'm telling you, William was in pain and visibly relieved to find someone who understood him. I took the middle road and sidestepped the money-as-basis-of-sense-of-self and the pesky social inequality issues.
“I feel your pain, dude. We were popular once and, spirits willing, we will be again.”
William returned to America and I never saw him again. I couldn’t tell if he was comforted, exactly, but he was definitely rich.
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