Like stories from a page they spill
I have no stories to tell. My words are blunt and incapable of denting sentiment. My ideas are echoes of issues past relevance or beyond interest. The 29 years behind me are chaste, peaceful and bloodless.
In other words, the opposite of trendy or “Game of Thrones.”
Five years ago, I accepted a job offer that brought me to a country with a language I couldn’t speak, a culture I couldn’t understand, and people I didn’t know; but I am not the kind of person who gets chosen for a daring adventure with a company of warrior dwarves.
I have seen a friend and a parent wither to skin and bones before death finally granted them relief, but my experiences are not the kind that will ever be featured on a Saturday evening TV drama.
There is nothing about me worth putting in a song or a column in a newspaper, but the thing about being an English conversation teacher in Japan is that you become a sort of librarian. If you know anything about librarians, then you would know that they have free access to books. If you know anything about books, then you would know that within them are some of the most interesting stories ever told.
The books, in my case, are my students. Most of them arrive in the classroom with thick plastic sheet clinging to their polite exterior. Six months is the minimum amount of time it takes for me to peel away that plastic without ruffling their pages or breaking their spine. Sometimes it takes a year or two or three, but the reward is always worth it. I become privy to the flashbacks, the conflicts, the comedies and the tragedies in their lives; and sometimes their stories are so fascinating that I cannot help but share.
There is one story, for example, about a family of four living in a cookie-cutter house in a peaceful Japanese commuter town. Dinners are eaten with everybody at the table, New Year’s Day is celebrated at the grandparents’ house, and conversations are exchanged in the living room. It sounds like a typical Japanese family, except for the very atypical fact that no one in the family speaks to the father.
Meals are eaten together, but the man of the house might as well be a centerpiece because he is ignored the entire time. New Year’s Day is celebrated separately: The daughters and the mother go on a trip to her hometown, and the father heads back to his parents’ home alone.
When my 17-year-old student is unlucky enough to find herself with her father in their living room, she is forced to answer his questions about school or her weekend plans. It unsettles her, those momentary exchanges, because she’s not used to them. For as long as she can remember, she’s never had a real conversation with her father.
Normality in her home is her father going around his own house like a ghost. Normality is her not knowing anything about him and not caring enough to want to know.
Carelessness is the maker of tragedy in her home, but its opposite is the cause of sadness in another. In this home of another family of four, the 15-year-old daughter has three pairs of watchful eyes trained on her so she can be corrected when she steps out of line.
She gets silenced when she hums or sings, because she is forbidden to do those until she does better in school. When she was a young child, she was kicked by her father when she didn’t use more “beautiful” words when speaking.
“That is not out of the ordinary,” said one of my adult students when I told her about it, and she might be right. That teenager and I might be overthinking her situation, but that teenager also cries as she sings herself “Happy Birthday” every year, because the rest of her family has retreated to their rooms and left her alone with her cake.
That teenager cried during her class while she was telling me stories about her life at home.It could simply be a phase, but that doesn’t make it less important; and giving importance to my students’ experiences has always been the final tug that loosens the cover they’ve put around themselves and reveals their stories no one else has heard before.
Another such story is about a woman who was born and raised in Japan and has a Japanese name, a Japanese husband, a Japanese passport, a Japanese viewpoint and Japanese inclinations — and Korean ancestry.
You would think that everything but the last item on that list would matter more to people in her home country, but that isn’t the case; and that is why the last item on that list is a secret to her coworkers, her boss, her neighbors and even her friends.
She assured me that the people in her life wouldn’t abandon her if they ever found out, but she also admitted that they would think of her and treat her differently. It wouldn’t matter that they would have known her for years, because she wouldn’t be like them. She wouldn’t be Japanese.
My classroom is the only place where she can truly be herself and talk about it without fear of judgment or interrogation, and she’s not the only one. I have had students whose opinions never mattered, so they keep silent until they forget how to express themselves and cannot even look other people in the eye. I have met an 11-year-old girl whose teacher called her “dull” for asking questions out of curiosity in her senior high school level math class.
My students are like books sitting still and passively, until someone gives them a listening ear and they fall to their side in great surprise. It is not easy to see the human within the pages, but they are there and they have many tales of indifference, loneliness, neglect, carelessness and chauvinism. They might not be the kind that would make an Arabian king postpone the execution of a woman, but they carry truths about us and how we treat each other.
I have no stories of mine to tell, but I know a few about other people that might intrigue you enough to listen.
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Laarni Odsey, 29, works as an English conversation teacher in Japan.
