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.