Another City

When I was 18, I worked with inner city youth in Boston. There I met a girl by the name of Ming; she had immigrated to America two years earlier when she was 12. Previously, she lived in a rural province of China where she and her family were agricultural workers. Ming stepped into her 6th grade class in Chinatown, Boston an illiterate. At the time we met, she was repeating 6th grade for the third time.

I soon discovered that Ming could not read or even string together a complete sentence in English. Not only that, but she was not fluent in her native Cantonese. I was determined to help. If I willed her to read, she would. I took notes as she read out loud from her 2nd grade reading level book. I furiously marked each fumbled word. The next day I returned to reading group armed with a neat stack of flash cards.

First up was a card that read C-L-E-A-R-L-Y. She studied the letters and proudly announced,

“Car.” Her pronunciation sounded more like call, but I chose to pick my battles.

I said, “Listen. Clearly,” sounding out every letter as I ran my finger beneath it. Ming repeated some semblance of the correct sounds and we moved on.

By the end of the week we had regressed back to flash cards of the alphabet. I continued to drill her and while there was improvement it was never a fluid internalized recognition. There were pauses and occasional mistakes. After a few weeks she grew tired of our game, I had begun bribing her to focus by offering mini candy bars. When she decided sugar was no longer enough motivation, I was forced to abandon my plan. She took to reading comic books and I went back to making my rounds helping students with an occasional unfamiliar word or phrase.

The summer after, Ming ran away from home and moved in with her 19 year-old boyfriend. In the fall she entered a school for children with behavioral problems and on her sixteenth birthday she withdrew taking a job in one of the greasy cramped kitchens that are only visible if you venture down the back alleys of Chinatown. I too went back to school that fall, floundering in the decision of what to study. I could be anything I wanted to be and that knowledge invoked guilt.