Stories are compasses…
“Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.” –Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
At my presentation last night at WWU, I met a young, Vietnamese student who, when I had finished, stayed after to talk. She liked my ideas, writing in short bursts, writing every day, making one change, imitating other writers to warm up, and so forth, but for her last paper, she patiently explained, she had worked from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m., and still wasn’t happy with the results. At the Writing Center, she told me and the resident advisors who had also hung around after, the tutors corrected her grammar, but didn’t seem able to help her write more efficiently, or communicate her ideas in the way she hoped to.
I was thrown back to my days working with International students, to debates about global versus local editing, to the mandate given us to keep our pens off the students’ papers. I remembered how frustrated students would get, trying to explain, in English, what they were thinking–and how they were thinking–in another language altogether. This young woman had two years of college in Vietnam, after all. (And I remembered my first International student, years ago, who had been a pediatrician in China and now had to endure English 98, which didn’t even count toward her degree.)
What do you do? I never quite figured this one out. But I know that the struggle to try to connect, to hear, is worth it.
So I tried to listen and to hear what the student was really saying. I tried to value the cultural story of frustration and displacement and homesickness between the lines. Then, feeling a little homesick for the land of college teaching, I leaned back and let the RAs (my daughter and her capable boss) take over.
Sigh.
“Slowly, slowly, I am learning to listen to the book, in the same way I try to listen in prayer. If the book tells me to do something completely unexpected, I heed it; the book is usually right. If a book like this present one, a strange kind of book for a storyteller, pushes me to write it, I have no choice at all except to pay attention. All I can do, as far as activism is concerned, is to write daily, read as much as possible, and keep my vocabulary alive and changing so that I will have an instrument on which to play the book if it does me the honor of coming to me and asking to be written. I have never yet fully served a book. But it is my present joy to try.” –Madeleine L’Engle
asking is, in essence, how one avoids paying really close attention to anything. It’s right up there with other forms of self-anesthetization.
Thursday, February 25, 2016 at 12:02AM
My friend Carolynne makes the best book recommendations. So when she said, “Everyone should read God’s Hotel,” way last summer, I ordered a copy. I read the first half or so, and I did like it, but I found myself bogging down in the descriptions of the patients — it was too close to home for me — and I soon mislaid it. At Christmas I gave it to a good friend who works with the elderly.