Some Thoughts: 3

I taught another teacher’s classes in the Bronx for five days. Luckily, I got to teach many of the same students I had just taught during my last five week class. I was very happy to see them again. Even better, most of them were very excited to see me again. Of course, there were fresh faces as well, which is a huge part of the fun. Everyone has a unique smile.
We had a great week together. I taught them conditionals and noun clauses, vocabulary and expressions, and sometimes put them in pairs or groups and made them speak to each other. I learned their opinions on a variety of subjects, the most gripping of which was the debate about the value of marriage versus being single. I don’t know anything about the former from personal experience, so I could take their word for it, whether they were for or against. Then I said good bye yet again on Friday afternoon. I still had one more day at the branch though.

On Saturday morning I taught a class that meets once a week. I hadn’t met any of the students before, but it was a good class of people. At the end of our four hours together I said good bye to the NYLC Bronx branch that has made it possible for me to live in New York City again, while simultaneously improving my English, communication, speaking, listening, cultural understanding and overall people skills. Almost all of the students were from countries I had never been to, and many of them were the first representatives of their people to encounter me on the path through this dream world. I didn’t know the depth of the cultural exchange I was moving toward when I read that e-mail in the front seat of my car one morning at a rest area in western New York State this past October, having just driven through the heartland of the United States in six days and woken up in that same driver’s seat ten minutes earlier at a parking area down the road. I was used to that front seat by then, but I wasn’t used to teaching people from many of the places I would soon meet. I had already planned to meet a different English school for an interview, but it was fitting this place should respond to my resume on the final day of my journey from life in California to a newer, hopefully richer life in my home state of New York. I had spent much of four years traveling and residing in places very far away, sometimes as far as places my students came from. I had seen plenty enough to ensure that my imagination will be sharing stories in the written and spoken form for years to come. And of course, the rest of the world would still be there. Any time I thought it felt right, I could always explore some more. I felt very confident after all of the wonders I’d enjoyed and hardships I’d endured.

Then again, despite all of my travels, regardless of how much I’d relatively roughed it, many of these people came from places that truly knew the meaning of overcoming adversity. The people from Kosovo had survived a war, if not necessarily fought in it, as had those from West Africa and southern central Africa. Students from Yemen are from the country with the most drone strikes but you wouldn't know it from their smiles. Many Latin American students were from countries with the highest murder rates in the world, but some of them weren't even aware of it. South American students were sometimes from countries with extreme drug trafficking, but it's not like that was part of their everyday lives. Then again, who knows? Many Mexicans told me of fleeing the drug violence in their hometowns and cities. One of them even knew my hometown well because he traveled up to farms for his job on several occasions. He said he stood out and even overheard a few racist remarks while eating in a diner near one of our rival towns which I've always put down, even though they're basically the same place in the world. Puerto Ricans told me of relatives being murdered, and Dominicans told me of crazy players shooting everyone at nearby basketball courts in the Bronx. One of my students was even named Amadou Diallo, who shares his name with the poor victim of police ineptitude that resulted in him being shot 40 times by four police officers simply because he didn’t speak English and understand that they were telling him to keep his hands out of his pockets because they thought he had a gun, when really he couldn’t understand that they were saying police, making him think they were robbers and that he should give them his wallet, or at least prove that he had the right to be in the country by showing his ID. So maybe this English teaching thing is somewhat important after all. Meanwhile, there were a few western European and East Asian students who livened up the classes, but they were in the minority.

A few of them would commute from Harlem and Washington Heights in Manhattan, but for the most part they all live in the county from my home state which happens to be ranked last in just about every measurable quality of life. The Bronx is ranked 62/62 in per capita income, and 62/62 in health. That doesn’t mean their lives are less quality or that their days are necessarily less enjoyable than anyone else’s. They’re all individuals living unique stories. And the people I spend most of my time with may all happen to be together in the same classroom, or even share a neighborhood, but most of their life stories have been lived in their incredibly varied, rich and deep cultures in their native countries spread across the globe flying through space around and around the sun, shining light for everyone. Even so, learning English will help them get better jobs, increase their standards of living and enjoy more of what this world has to offer.

I don’t know what the world offers everyone else, regardless of how much I ask, but the world has offered the state of New York to me as my native homeland since I entered this land of humans almost thirty years ago.

I lived the beginning of my life in the crowded but fairly normal suburbs of Long Island, a reasonably diverse area of people, with many cultures represented during day to day life at elementary school.

My ancestors who gave me my surname have been living on Long Island for almost four hundred years. When I was growing up we lived an hour from the most influential, famous and multicultural city in the world, on an island that acted as the entryway to the Atlantic Ocean and the rest of the world. When we swam at the beach we imagined looking at the other side of the sea where we could see the origins of our family, the linguistically, scientifically, literary and musically accomplished and influential island nation of England. This place provided the language that gave me jobs in Japan, California, the Bronx and Manhattan.

The ancestors who gave me (1346) the rest of who I am have been here for more than 130 years. When there wasn't enough food to eat, they left that other English-speaking island, Ireland, which is even closer than their bitter rival England. They journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean, past Long Island, and moved to the northern tip of New York State, near the border with our northern neighboring country, Canada. They eventually found an area across a lake from our northeastern neighbor, the state of Vermont ("Green Mountain"). During summers we enjoyed the privilege of car rides that took us through Queens, the Bronx, Westchester, past the state capital of Albany and the summer horse racing town of Saratoga, up through the majestic Adirondack Mountains, the biggest range in the state, and the home of the 1980 Miracle on Ice Olympics at Lake Placid, all the way up to the wondrous waters of the longest largest lake in eastern New York, Lake Champlain. 11 miles across and two hundred miles tall, extending from southern Vermont and middle New York up beyond the border with Canada, the lake provided a stellar view of the Green Mountains surrounding Burlington, Vermont while we stayed for several weeks, every summer, in the cabin my grandfather built after returning from World War II. The nearest towns around there are all very small, comprising a rural area named "the north country." I spent a lot of time in the woods and my grandparents’ house on a hill overlooking the countryside, including the lake in the distance. Sometimes my grandfather even took us into the evergreen forests where he tended large lots of woods to run his lumber mill, where he employed many men. He knew everything about planting trees, raising them, growing them, making sure they lived to be strong, healthy and productive members of the ecosystem that keeps all life alive, especially through cleaning our air, because when we breathe out, they breathe in. And then, yes, eventually he would cut them down, but so that they could be handled by masters who knew how to transform them into new service of life, making houses, beds, tables for eating and working, chairs for the same, boats and paper so that words could survive lifetimes and spread the life force eternally for all we know.

When I was eleven I didn't know too much yet, although I did know that I was in for a big life change when we moved to a small town farm country area named Cambridge, which is midway up the eastern border of the state, about half of the six hour drive that connects the seemingly opposite worlds of Lake Champlain and New York City. It’s named Washington County, after the first president and leader of the rebel army of the United States, which freed us from my ancestors, the English.

I attended university in the center of the state, in the Finger Lakes region in one of the most progressive voting cities in America, Ithaca. I was in a very privileged hilly area above the town and the lake, and spent four years working hard to understand the world through various lenses of comprehension. It's funny how I look back to realize the sheer depth of just how privileged we all were to be there, and how privileged I had already been, because I wasn't always happy.

After graduation I moved to the borough of Brooklyn in an African-American and Latino neighborhood named Bushwick. I lived there for one year while working in midtown Manhattan. Then I moved to not only the most diverse borough of New York City, but the most diverse area of humans per capita in the entire world, Queens. I stayed for two years while working in various parts of Manhattan, and then returned to Cambridge for eight months to experience small town America, explore the Adirondack Mountains, and reconnect with Lake Champlain before setting off on a journey around the world that continues every day.

I began in India, a place that people had told me would be the most different and perhaps most difficult place to understand in the world, that is, for someone like me who was from the state of New York. After having my mind thoroughly blown and then kindly reassembled through mysterious compassion from the unknown, I continued the journey through the Southeast Asian countries, most of which had been involved in American wars during the 1960’s and 1970’s. I saw Thailand, a gorgeous jungle Buddhist nation with beatific beaches. It also happens to be a leader in human sex trafficking. Then I explored Cambodia, home to Angkor Wat, the largest center of spirituality in the world. I also saw the jungle where the Khmer Rouge hid before taking over the government and presiding over a genocide of its own people caused by paranoia and mistrust taken to their unthinkable extremes. Vietnam was and for some still is an American nightmare, just as America was and still is a Vietnamese nightmare. It is also the source of entertainment and jokes years later. I have enjoyed both. I completed with Laos, the least overwrought with tourists, the most relaxed and playful, and also the recipient of the most bomb attacks in the world because of their unfortunate scenario of being next to Vietnam. They were all beautiful places to be, filled with friendly, fun and hard-working humanity. Well, maybe Lao was a little more laid back than most, but they’d been through enough to earn the mentality. After a few months of those I got to know the country that everyone said was now our main rival in world power, ideology and economy, the evil empire, supposedly, that was not free despite its overflowing wealth of wisdom, culture and ancient history. Taste the tea and you’ll see the truth inside you named Chung Fu. These words were born in China, on the other side of the world from me, to describe a sensation that exists beyond everything we could agree this world should be, because it represents infinity. After two months more of my journey to the East, I learned more about this beautiful source of magical force in Egypt, one of the cradles of civilization and the home to the most enduring expressions of art in the known universe, the pyramids.
Afterward I was fortunate to visit my sister in the European landlocked nation of Germany, home to some of the most brilliant, spiritual, rational, efficient, violent and friendly manifestations of humanity, and also home to many of the ancestors in my family tree. Some time over one hundred years ago they moved to the center of New York, near that university town, to meet with some of the English who had come to our eastern neighbors, Massachusetts, over four hundred years earlier. They made my grandmother, who met my grandfather, a man descended from the Irish settlers in northeast New York. They made my mother, who met my father at the same university I went to in Ithaca. He was able to meet her because his father--a man born from the English who had been on Long Island for four hundred years--met my grandmother, whose father came from British ancestors and whose mother came from Poland, Germany’s eastern neighbor. So many stories that had to be timed just perfectly for me to be me and helping you and me see just how free we can possibly be. I was able to understand all of that a little more thanks to my visit to Germany, a previous visit to England with the family when I was sixteen, and the final stop of my first exploratory tour of the world, the Emerald Isle of Ireland.

Since then I’ve explored all but four states in my home country (Hawaii, Alaska, Arkansas and Iowa). I've also lived in Japan, that influential, artistic and accomplished island on the opposite side of England on the island of Eurasia. As if I I hadn't had enough adventures already, I drove around the country, hiking and camping, and then lived in Sonoma County, San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland, California, on the opposite side of my home country.
I decided I was ready to come back to my people after a year in California, but now that I look back, I wasn't just finding my people who I already knew. I was about to meet many more members of the family humans like to refer to as "my people."
May 31 marked a successful seven month mission teaching in the Bronx, the home to most people who want to make a new start in my country, the United States of America, and do so by taking part in the many opportunities offered by the international circus known as New York City.