Immigrant Voices, Volume 2 by Gordon Hutner

Author:Gordon Hutner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I didn’t realize the trouble I’d created until I heard a loud banging on the door. I was with Kate in her room. Kate got up and opened her door. It was Takisha, and she was visibly upset. She refused to step in when Kate invited her. Takisha leaned against the doorframe and said to me, “What are you doing here, Miss Anchee? Let me remind you that you have your own room and your own roommate.”

I smiled and said, “I am hanging out with Kate.”

“I can see that,” Takisha said.

“I am practicing English,” I told Takisha.

“It’s time to return to your own room,” Takisha responded.

I said good-bye to Kate and followed Takisha back to our room. Locking the door, Takisha motioned for me to sit down on my bed. “We have to talk,” she said. She went to sit on her bed facing me.

“Thank you for coming back with me,” Takisha began.

“You are welcome.”

“May I have your attention?” Takisha asked. “Full attention, understand? I want you to listen.”

“Attention, yes. You talk, me listen.”

“I am going to share with you a piece of American history, which I don’t think you are aware of,” Takisha said. “Know what I mean?”

I nodded. “Know what you mean.”

Takisha wrote down the word slave for me to look up in my dictionary. She waited patiently until I located the word.

“I’d like you to understand that we, the black people of America, used to be slaves.”

“My dictionary says slave means proletarians,” I responded.

“That’s right! Slaves are proletarians!”

“Unite the world’s proletarians!” I recited. “It’s Mao’s slogan.”

“Mao who?”

“Mao Zedong, the founding father of the Communist Party of China.”

I was shocked that Takisha had no idea who Mao was. I asked if she knew a famous African black who claimed to be the leader of the black slaves of the world, and who came to China in the late 1960s to study guerrilla warfare. Takisha shook her head.

I got busy with my dictionary. It took a long time to find the words I needed. Takisha looked restless. “The black slave leader wanted to meet Mao in person but was refused,” I finally told Takisha. “In China, Mao was God. Mao was ‘the reddest sun in the universe.’ We worshipped Mao. A quarter of the population on earth. See what I mean? Over a billion people! How could anybody, like that African black, schedule a meeting with God?”

“So what happened?”

“Well, the black slave leader took the initiative,” I continued. “To demonstrate his affection for Mao, he pinned a Mao button on his bare chest, took a picture of his bleeding chest and sent the picture to China’s authorities.”

“Did it work?”

“You bet!”

“But it’s terrible!” Takisha cried.

“I couldn’t pin a Mao button on my bare chest,” I said, “although I loved Mao, too! Anyway, the Communist Party officials liked the story so much that they insisted it be told at schools across the nation. That was how I learned about it. The story convinced us that our leader Chairman Mao was popular in the world.

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