Second chances

America was built on immigrants. It is still building on immigrants. So the immigrant story is our story

‘Easy’ was one of a dozen vocabulary words pasted on the whiteboard, and someone in the back of the Brooklyn classroom in the Butler Library offered it in a sentence: “To learn English is easy.”

Amid rueful laughter from 35 adults who knew better, the teacher asked my illiterate father to express the same idea, starting with “It is”.

“It is learn English,” he stumbled, visibly wilting from a 6-hour shift in the laundromat where he has been volunteering five days a week for several months, ever since he arrived at The Big Apple.

A confusing murmur arose in the accents of Haiti, Guatemala, Russia, Taiwan, Indonesia, El Salvador and Panama, above the bass line of an air-conditioner with more clank than cool.

Manuel Chavarria, 39, whose schooling in El Salvador stopped at the sixth grade, took up his pen with hands that had painted hallways and mopped floors all day.

Elvia Villacis, 46, whose college degree from Ecuador had left her struggling as a house cleaner to support a teenage son in New York, stared at other words on the list — “terrible, impossible, important, and necessary” — as though decoding a secret that could change both her life and America.

To learn English is not easy, but more immigrants than ever are trying.

All over the city, my wife Jillian said they crowd the free or low-cost English programmes offered at public libraries, schools and community organisations like this one, the Church Avenue Merchants Block Association, better known as Camba.

“What can we do, turn them away?”, asked Jude Pierre, manager of adult literacy programmes at the association, which started to improve the commercial area 27 years ago but later branched into an array of social services in a new version of American cultural adjustment.

Like most such programmes, Camba does not advertise the free English classes it offers morning, noon and night.
But word of mouth alone brings so many applicants, Pierre said, that students who do not progress to the next level are asked to withdraw for at least a trimester to let someone else have a chance.

Chavarria, for example, had waited six months for his turn.

In the classroom where my parents struggled, the teacher, Jovy De La Paz, seized the moment. With an energetic pantomime to match his words, he coaxed my father into a new start, stopped him short with a chopping motion and pointed to the vocabulary list again.

Pouncing on the halting words that emerged from the student’s lips, the teacher used an extravagant pulling gesture to draw out a repetition and offered a hearty handshake when, at last, my father said the words again: “It is easy to learn English.”

The class burst into applause.

“You get to be an artist, a kind of magician,” De La Paz said later.

Some of the Camba teachers, too, are immigrants. Beginners in a predominantly Haitian afternoon class, for example, were learning polite commands like “Please give me my change” from a Goldman Sachs investment banker Irina Logrivinova, 37, who said she was in an English class for foreigners herself only ten years ago, when she arrived from Russia.

“Been there, done that,” she shrugged with idiomatic nonchalance, noting that she had gone on to graduate from college and earn a master’s degree in Economics together from Columbia University.

Perhaps French and Creole speakers, who tend to lack the ‘h’ sound in English, would pick up a somewhat guttural, Slavic way of saying “home sweet home”. But would it matter? Not in the view of De La Paz, who is from the Philippines and works in an administrative job at the association during the day, placing and tracking students.

Only communication counts in New York’s Babel of accents, said De La Paz, whose teaching experience ranges from an elite boys’ school in Manila to a camp for Vietnamese refugees. Besides his evening class at Camba, he teaches an all-day English class at the library every Saturday and is urging his church to offer English lessons to its increasingly diverse congregation.

“You have to use all your creativity,” he said of helping people move from embarrassed silence and illiteracy to self-expression.

The goals and potential of immigrants striving to learn English are not easily pigeonholed. The students in De La Paz’s evening class were of all ages and levels of education and had widely varying abilities to speak English, despite not all having tested orally as ‘Level 3’, the most advanced.

Yvrose Souffrant, 50, a home health care aide born in Haiti, has lived in New York for 26 years, raising three children and becoming a naturalised citizen, she said. Now she wants to communicate better with her elderly patients and increase her earning power.

Jose Juarez, 24, who keeps a baseball cap low over his eyes, has been working at day labor — construction, cleaning gutters, hauling debris — since he came from Guatemala at 16 but has not given up the hope of college.

Both know much more English than my parents, or Villacis, who watched her middle-class life and her son’s prospects of education implode when the currency in Ecuador collapsed, taking her job and bank account with it.

“Without English, I can’t defend myself,” she told my mother fiercely in Spanish before class. Jillian, as always, translated the words.

Later, she added another: “I write my book.” It was a reference to the stories of the women she met at home during the currency crisis, where she won a $1,500 prize for an essay on her experience that a small publisher translated from Spanish.

The following afternoon, at a sweltering laundromat that stays open 24 hours, my father was folding clothes, making change and troubleshooting rows of coin-operated machines for customers from many lands.

From a phone in his back pocket, he had already made his call to my mother, to hear about their 3-year-old grandchildren Mises. He had been on duty since 7.30 am.

“Too much tired,” he shouted above the roar, a direct translation from Bidayuh.

But back in class, there was the chance to vent, to laugh, to hope.

“To volunteer in a laundry is terrible,” he offered with glee.

“To become a U.S citizen is excellent,” a dressmaker from Haiti said.

And when De La Paz introduced the idea of a verb that needed to be completed — to change — the answers flew.

“To change the oil,” one said. Another declared, “To change my life!”

The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.