From the Heartland

Jenny had spent two months preparing presentations for her teaching job in China. She had bought a county atlas and spent the summer taking photos of back roads, covered bridges, corn fields, and unenthused cows. She captured old men fishing in their plaid shirts and stained John Deere hats. She discovered bake sales and lemonade stands run by tanned towheaded children. At night, she waited in fields for the lightning bugs to emerge with their glowing coded messages after the sky had changed from blood orange to royal blue.

For the one entitled “Family”, she inserted Christmases with all the cousins huddled under the tree, family reunion pot lucks with its overabundance of fried chicken and Swedish meatballs and lack of greens. Snowmen waved to the camera with their stick arms flanked on both sides by her sisters. The last photo was of her father, years before cancer paled and shrunk his body, on a pogo stick, having more fun than the children who surrounded him.

When she arrived on her first day at the primary school, she was impressed with the modern building and its landscaping of flowers and exotic plants. The floors gleamed and the corridors were eerily quiet. She glanced into one of the rooms and saw a sea of black hair as the students all had their heads of their desks. She was surprised to learn they were meditating as part of the break.

As she waited outside the room, the teacher spoke to them and with their hands clasped and resting on their desks, they watched and listened and nodded in unison. Jenny felt a rush of enthusiasm and said a little thank you to God for giving her such a well-behaved class. The teacher left the room, nodded to Jenny and without saying a word, walked on past.

Jenny entered, smiled, and harking back to her cheerleading days, shouted “Good Morning!” The students looked at one another and laughed and something shifted in the air. They unravelled as she connected her laptop to the projector. Boys began throwing bits of eraser at one another and girls whispered behind their hands and didn’t take their eyes off Jenny. She wondered if they’d ever seen a white person before.

Her first lesson about Introductions was designed to practice questions that people ask one another when meeting for the first time. She showed the map of the US, took a deep breath, and began. After a few minutes, Jenny felt relieved that the noise had subsided but soon realised from the glazed over eyes that they were bored. They asked questions. They asked where the mountains, the Hollywood sign and the Empire State Building were.  They wanted to see her parents’ big house with a pool and pet tiger. Did she have a boyfriend with a Ferrari? Glowing insects and farmland did not captivate them the way she expected. “Nobody wants countryside” as one confident student put it.

One picture that received a gasp was of her ice skating and holding a medal. They cheered when she said “champion” but their faces and shoulders sagged when she explained she stopped at age 14 due to a broken ankle. By the end of the class, she hated the Midwest too.

During the break she was horrified to discover she had to use the same toilets as the students; a squatting trough with no doors. A steady flow of water carried the waste below to a drain at the end of the room. As she squatted low, she tried not to cry and told herself the next class was older and would be better. After five more chaotic classes she left the building, trembling. After a month, she found a new job.

At the new equally shiny school in an equally concrete part of the city, Jenny quickly became popular as she told animated tales of her Beverly Hills life, most of the details stolen from The Real Housewives series. Students were silent and awestruck by her astronaut father and they swooned over her mother, the heiress. When she told them that her fiancée had been killed in Iraq, the girls cried and drew sad faces inside hearts on their homework. Selfies of her with students received hundreds of likes.

After living in the city for nearly a year, Jenny was elated to find out that her mother and aunt were coming to visit. They had begun saving after she left, foregoing taco Tuesday nights and Saturday matinees at the cinema. Neither of them had ever been further east than Washington D.C. or seen an Asian in person. As the time neared, their emails became more jubilant as they expressed their readiness to be shocked, to eat chicken feet, and to climb the Great Wall.

For a week Jenny, her mother, and aunt walked on walls, saw hutongs from the comfort of rickshaw bicycles, gazed at Yellow Mountain, wandered the old neighborhoods of Shanghai and gasped every other minute. They took photos of everything and everyone and their childlike joy was infectious.

During their last weekend, Jenny brought them to her city to show them where she lived and worked. As they walked the busy street near the school a large group of young teens suddenly surrounded them. Because they were wearing jeans and t-shirt and not their pressed trousers and white shirts, she didn’t immediately recognize them as her students.

She turned to introduce her mother and aunt and suddenly saw them as her students would: the overly permed hair cut too short, the discount khakis and the “Proud to be American” t-shirts from the local drugstore. Not the Beverly Hills heiress the students were expecting. As she mumbled, “This is some of my family,” she felt her face burning and worse, felt eyes searching for hers. When she looked up and into her mother’s eyes, she saw a hurt that was forever captured that day in a multitude of selfies, requested by the group of adoring teens.

 

 

Lost and Found

The driver watched as the foreign woman crossed the road, a half dozen plastic bags digging into her pale, sweaty arms. He had considered helping her but didn’t trust leaving the tuk-tuk on the side of the busy road. So he carried on, beeping and pausing, half-heartedly looking for fares. It was that calm part of the afternoon when students were still in school and it was too hot for anyone else to be out, save foreigners who seemed to follow their own agendas. He bought a bag of pineapple and parked beneath a cluster of trees in one of the parking lots near the beach.

As he climbed in the back for a short nap, he noticed the brightly coloured backpack. Though he couldn’t say how, he knew it was expensive and immediately recalled the farang he had dropped off nearly an hour ago. He considered going back but had no idea which building she had been heading for.

As if opening a ribbon on an ornate gift, he gingerly opened the zippers that neatly met at the top of the bag and feeling the anxiety of childhood curiosity, peered inside.

The first thing he noticed was a shiny metal container. Pulling it out, he recognized it from many American movies where men kept it in their cars and drank deeply from it when particularly stressed or sad. He unscrewed the cap and smelled the contents which reminded him of earth and smoke. He did not take a drink.

Also inside were several books, some of which appeared to be for children. He felt a sharp pang of fear, thinking of a little boy or girl who may not be read a story this night. But there was something about the woman that made him think she did not have a child.

At the bottom of the bag was a small plastic folder which contained several photographs. He quickly flipped through them, occasionally glancing out the window to make sure no one was watching. He feared he looked like a strange man who peered through windows to watch women sleep. Dropping the objects back into the bag and zipping it shut, he decided the best thing to do was to pick up dinner for the family and go home early.

When he walked in the door, he had the plastic bags of food slung over his right arm and the backpack over his left shoulder. He briefly imagined that this is what the women would have done if she hadn’t left behind her bag. His daughter, Nit, came running from the back room where cartoons screeched and honked.

“Papa! What did you bring me?”

“All your favourites, Little Mouse. Snake liver, duck knees, and water buffalo brains!!”

“Papaaaaa!!” She yelled, pouting and giggling the way only a seven year old can do.

That night, as he put her to bed, he showed her the children’s books with the strange animal in a giant red and white hat. Inside one of the books was a lone creature the size of a child who was visiting strange lands of bright colours, balloons, and fantastical vistas.

“Papa, this book is English. Is this what England is like? Or is it America?”

“I don’t know, Little Mouse. Maybe it’s wherever you want it to be.”

Over the next few weeks, both the driver and his daughter spent hours looking at the books, saving the best for last. The photo album. Here were not drawings or make believe. And though they knew they were real, they might as well have been from a cartoon book. They spent hours discussing the possibilities of the secret kingdoms the photos revealed. A family made of clouds stood before a garden, their white hair, white skin, and bright white smiles glowing amid a blue sky. Nit loved the picture of eight teenagers standing on a hill, a setting sun illuminating the women’s long gowns and the armour of the men’s suits. She imagined a land where children become princesses and princes when they turned 16, so much better than just moving onto a bigger school, with uglier uniforms like here. Other pictures showed hills made of cotton with children in astronaut suits sliding on picnic mats. Perhaps they were in space. And next, a military camp or ghost town, brick houses lined up next to each other square and neatly symmetrical. These dynasties must love playing with blocks. But the fact that there were no shops, no motorbikes, no people around—just smoke coming from the tops of the houses saddened the young girl. “Papa, do you think all the people left because the houses were burning?”

Each night, the girl visited dreamscapes of stone temples with coloured glass, where people made shrines above fires in their homes, where giant chickens were sacred birds on feast days, and kitchens sparkled like silver and diamonds. Before she awoke, she waved good-bye to a prince standing on a hill in the fading sunlight.

Perhaps sensing the power of his daughter’s imagination, he had hidden the other books from the teacher’s bag that he recognized as textbooks of English. If Nit learned English, she could become a CEO in New York, an actress in Hollywood, or a doctor in Australia. Though his selfishness shamed him, he could not shake the premonition that if given a chance, she would flee to the lands of castles and giant houses. This home and this life would become too small.

But just as he often encountered more traffic by trying to take a shortcut, this decision could not bend the line drawn by fate.

“Papa!! You’re not going to believe what happened at school!”

“An elephant taught mathematics.”

“No, silly! SHE is my teacher! She has come for me!!”

“Who, Little Mouse?”

“The woman in the photos. She’s here.”

The next day as his daughter raced towards the school, colourful backpack over her shoulder, he waited for a glance and a smile that never came.