Somebody Somewhere by Donna Williams

Author:Donna Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-06-17T04:00:00+00:00

One of the most important pieces of ammunition people have for their own self-protection is the ability to ask and the ability to explain. I had gone into training but my training field was one of the most unlikely places to be found. It was with the three children of a Chinese family.

Nancy, the oldest child in the family, answered the door. I had arrived in answer to a request in very broken English on behalf of the businessman father-of-three. The job was to teach his three Chinese children English.

It seemed fairly straightforward. If anyone had analyzed language, I had. I had a huge vocabulary and knew all about sentence structure and phonetics. I had studied linguistics. I was thoroughly committed to learning languages and the value of language in general.

Nancy spoke no more than twenty words of English and her sister and brother spoke even less. This was great. There was no way that these children were going to find out that I had any difficulty with the use of language.

I made Nancy get up and touch the things we named. For every word there had to be a contrast. Floor contrasted with roof, windows with doors, handles with hooks, boxes with bottles.

We identified what everything was made of, tapping and touching everything as we went: wood, metal, plastic, rubber, and concrete. We went through adjectives—“rough” and “smooth,” “dull” and “shiny”—and moved from the names of the objects around us to their descriptions and uses.

We acted out every new verb, spinning and jumping, rolling and running. All learning was through our bodies, and the walls of the classroom extended beyond the house and into the wider community.

Language progressed to the visual, and the house became filled with books and posters. I relived my fetish for categories, exhausting every branch of each topic. We acted out every sentence. We became the moon and the stars, the stage of a theater, and the opera singers performing there.

We moved to invisible, yet audible nouns and adjectives: “noise,” “rhythm,” “loud,” and “soft.” We drew emotions and put them on scales.

Nancy went from twenty words to hundreds of words and complete sentences in the space of three months. Then she wanted to converse with me.

I was protected within the structure of being the language teacher. I knew how long each session would last. I knew I could say stop or change the topic. Nancy had such a thirst for knowledge and a hunger for company. She wanted me to converse with her not only on the topics we had covered but to talk with her about the changes she was experiencing as a fourteen-year-old going through puberty who had just arrived in a very different new country with a foreign language and culture. In a way, we had many things in common.

Nancy was deep-thinking and deep-feeling and probably the most insightful teenager I had ever met. It was like sitting with Confucius. Somehow I felt destiny had thrown me this job so that I could give Nancy the words so she could teach me their use.

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