Yonsei Memory Project is proud to present new essays in a series called “Valley Writers Respond.” In early May, 2020, Yonsei Memory Project invited writers based in California’s San Joaquin Valley to reflect on the current moment, utilizing a single word as a prompt for writing. “Valley Writers Respond” was inspired by a strong desire to do something, to help tend to each other, to create understanding even through difficulty as we all find our ways through a pandemic. YMP has never shied away from deep truth-telling, and now, while so many are in duress, we turn to art and artists to hold space for us to process.
In “Valley Writers Respond” three Valley writers share their wisdom in short original essays. The project includes essays by Samina Najmi, Will Freeney, and Steven Church. Samina Najmi, a professor of English at California State University, Fresno, was invited to reflect on the word, “distance.”
DISTANCE LEARNING
BY SAMINA NAJMI
MAY 26, 2020
My mother’s email, with the subject heading “Cycle of Life,” sits in my inbox. The first line is visible without my clicking it open; it’s the curvy, right-to-left Urdu script—beautiful to look at in the Rumicode software my brother created, but a little slow-going for my now unaccustomed eyes. She often shares her meditative and eloquent micro-essays with me this way. I make a mental note to come back to the email at the end of my grading day.
Suraiya Jabeen writes every day. She has done so for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I’d see her fill big, lined notebooks that resembled the attendance registers in Meadow Secondary School, which she founded in Karachi in 1975, barely two months after we had moved back from England. Those handwritten records of her “sorting out” her life and loves fell casualty to the moves, fears, and distances of the past half-century. But still she writes.
Ammi has been sheltering with her younger sister, my Khalammi Talat, since mid-March. For the past five years Ammi’s home has been with her youngest child, Sadia, and her family, in San Diego’s University Heights. But immunocompromised as Ammi is, we all thought it safer for her, and less lonely for Khalammi, if the two sisters stayed together in my aunt’s Hillcrest condo, a short drive away. Days later, when I drove the five-plus hours to La Jolla to move my daughter out of UC San Diego housing--her academic term cut short by the pandemic—I did it as a day trip, without seeing Ammi and Khalammi, or any family, in San Diego. Already, love meant staying away.
Grading in May is always frenzied and exhausting, coming as it does not only at the end of the semester but at the end of a long academic year. This year, with teaching as we knew it suspended in mid-March by the threat of COVID-19, the depletion I feel seems self-indulgent. My students have lost jobs and livelihoods. One lost his father. In some cases, these young people have no choice but to brave the coronavirus threat and pick up hours as essential workers. At least one, whose family members have lost their incomes, is supporting his entire family on what he earns as a tutor at the Writing Center. Many find themselves physically displaced, in living situations that inhibit their ability to learn. For all of Fresno State’s offers of devices and hotspots, they have problems with access to online instruction. Some students are also parenting and schooling at home. With these hardships in mind, I opted to teach asynchronous classes, without Zoom meetings, so they could participate in online discussions and submit assignments in their own time. The effort to translate the dialectical mode of learning to the written word resulted in an exponential increase in class time for me. There was no absolute start or end time to classes, seldom a moment when I felt caught up. But two weeks into this online “transition”—a misnomer because there could be no transit time, only an abrupt launch into another dimension—my students responded to the survey I gave them with overwhelming preference for the asynchronous model as the least stressful in their new lives. And so I stayed the course until the end of classes in early May.
In the afternoon I take a break from grading and call Ammi. I ask her to read her emailed essay to me. I’m startled to hear her Urdu title for the piece, which translates to the paradoxical “Welcome, Departing Springs.” In brave and beautiful voice she articulates the reality that, though she’s still only in her seventies, mortality stares her down daily. The chronic pain of the past six months and her gradually diminishing physical abilities sound a friendly warning to savor what’s left of her time in an imperfect but still serviceable body.
The first epidural shot of steroids did nothing to ease the pain. The second became a challenge to schedule during the lockdown. Besides logistical impediments to an in-person appointment at the clinic, Ammi had to choose between the risk of exposure to a potentially lethal virus and the certainty of immobilizing pain. As hope subdued fear, she went for the second epidural, in mask and gloves and wheelchair. Sadia could accompany her only so far; social distancing measures meant she had to wait in the car during the procedure.
Three weeks later, the pain still rages.
As a friend with greater experience of remote instruction puts it, there’s so much wandering and herding in online teaching. The metaphor lingers with me, though it obliterates the individuality and mindfulness of my students. I did indeed expend a lot of energy taking count—who appeared, who disappeared on the Canvas discussion board; how often, and for how long. It wasn’t to be punitive but to know who was still there, still hanging on. If they had wandered, from what? Towards what? Or does the verb by definition imply a lack of purpose in either direction? And what, then, is the role—the point, even—of the shepherd?
Meadow Secondary School flourished in Pakistan’s megacity of Karachi for thirty-three years. It began as a preschool in our two-bedroom home and grew with Sadia, one grade at a time. Ammi tells me I came up with the name as a twelve-year-old. You mean like a pasture? someone asked in disbelief. But Ammi loved its implications. When I enrolled in Karachi University, Meadow gave me my first, part-time position as an English teacher.
In 1975, Suraiya Jabeen had a vision to bring psychologically savvy teaching methods to the austere and outdated classrooms of our struggling-to-be-middle-class neighborhood, and to make that education affordable. Without much capital, success was slow but steady and, eventually, staggering, though Ammi never grew rich. Throughout those years, Madam Suraiya knew the name of every child who walked through Meadow’s gates, a vital bit of every child’s history. For the younger ones, she emphasized learning through play. She reasoned with the older ones, teaching them to question and persuade rather than simply obey. Fathers leaving for employment in Jeddah or Dubai trusted her to watch out for their sons and daughters. Madam Suraiya was known to waive tuition for the needy; to press with promise the hand of a dying mother and make it easier for her to go.
But Meadow Secondary School finally closed its doors in 2008. Ammi’s rheumatoid arthritis had gotten the better of her. The new owners, educators who had promised to continue the legacy, instead shut it down. Devoted alumni have posted Facebook images of the sad, empty building and grounds. It’s one thing to grow up with fond memories of the school you left behind. It’s another to have that physical space erased. But for students, staff, and principal alike, it’s a different kind of loss altogether when the physical site of memory still stands, weathered, worn, and crumbling. Like the aging body of a loved one—still beloved, still greeting each spring as though it might be the last.
I wasn’t able to see all my students through to the end of the semester. There were six I couldn’t get back after we moved online, though I tried and they tried. I had feared the darkness that would swallow them. But the shepherd’s vigilance proved futile, the proddings failed.
The morning I submitted course grades for the semester, my son walked in on my grief for the distances I couldn’t bridge. When I told him, through sobs, that I had lost six students, he thought I had lost them to COVID-19. And, in a way, I had.
Emergency remote instruction, we called it. Distance learning, we say.
It’s a hard thing to recognize, let alone accept, when remoteness becomes a receding—a wandering into meadows that lie beyond the sight and call and reach of love.
SAMINA NAJMI is a professor of English at California State University, Fresno. A scholar of race, gender, and war in American literature, she discovered the rewards of more personal kinds of writing in 2011 when she stumbled into a CSU Summer Arts course that taught her to see. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Warscapes, The Rumpus, Pilgrimage, The Progressive, Gargoyle, Chautauqua, and other publications. Her essay "Abdul" won Map Literary's 2012 nonfiction prize. Having lived in Karachi, London, and Boston, Samina now calls the San Joaquin Valley home. She watches and writes as her children, her students, and her citrus grow around her.
BREATHING
BY WILL FREENEY
MAY 26, 2020
You can gaze out the window,
Get madder and madder,
Throw your hands in the air,
Say what does it matter.
But it don’t do no good
To get angry, so help me I know.
—John Prine, “Chain of Sorrow”
The Davis Sutter Hospital ER on a Sunday morning resembled a ghost town. It was just me and my ride there, plus one doctor and one nurse. It took a lot to get me there, though. Not a lot of money (just a cab ride), not a lot of time (just a few miles). Just a whole lot of irrefutable inadequacy. For a week, I had been unable to breathe without coughing, unable to cough without doing so convulsively, to the point of dry heaves. Without a fever or any digestive symptoms, I was still the sickest I had ever been.
After having a few x-rays taken, the doctor and nurse came out to visit me in the waiting room. With wide, sincere eyes, they looked at me in tandem.
“We have bad news and worse news,” the doctor said without a grin.
“You have pneumonia,” the nurse informed me, deadpan.
“And emphysema,” the doctor continued.
“It shows up in the x-ray, but it’s not bad yet. If you quit smoking now, you could live many more years of enjoyable life. If you don’t, it’s going to be short and unpleasant - a steep downhill ride,” he concluded.
He turned to a nearby table, plopped down a blank pad of scrips, and wrote – scrawled really – “NEVER SMOKE AGAIN!” They both looked at me with those sincere, compassionate expressions. And I was moved to determine to follow that prescription. I had never witnessed that kind of simple, pragmatic compassion in a medical environment. I would have expected them to think, if not say, “Stupid fucking smoker! That’s what you get! Don’t waste our time with your self-induced malady!” But there was none of that.
That was in 2009. With a few one-off exceptions, I have followed that prescription. And I have hiked in the Sierras; ridden my bike everywhere, everywhere I went; run a few handfuls of 5ks; swum more than ever since my triathlon training in 1999. Life has been good, and its quality has been retroactively contingent on that dynamic duo in the Davis ED. I owe them more than my insurance could ever pay. I owe them more than the Medicare (that I have lived long enough to be eligible for) could ever pay.
I owe them my ability to breathe. I am indebted to their timely diagnosis, and to the strict compassion of their prescriptive prognosis.
Then, eleven years later, along comes coronavirus with its attendant game plan, COVID-19. Back in 2009, the doctors never assigned my pneumonia any microbial perpetrator, and the emphysema was, based on my admission of over 20 years of smoking, a foregone conclusion as to cause. Now in 2020, I am over 65 and diagnosed with a suppressive respiratory disease. I belong to an at-risk population. And if I develop a severe chronic cough now, despite my at-risk status, I may or may not be able to get testing and treatment, based on the number of available test kits and beds.
Yoga instructors call it prana, martial arts instructors call it chi; breath (breathing) and life force are close enough to synonymous for most of us.
“In through the nose, out through the mouth.”
“Breathe into that discomfort. Release that tension.”
“Follow your breath: in to a count of four, out to a count of four.”
“Use your ujayi breath. Engage the back of your throat.”
I have heard all of these commands and followed them – and experienced the intended effects. You can move through and beyond pain and stiffness as you activate conscious breathing while stretching. You can increase your focus with your breath.
But without those classes and the opportunity to consider breathing rather than take it for granted, I would not have witnessed, firsthand, the benefits. Experienced the benefits of daily respirations? Of course. Been mindful of or grateful for the profound power of breathing? Nah.
Back in the halcyon era of my career as a smokestack, during my enlistment in the Army, I succumbed to the beck and call of my sergeants: “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!” The alternative was watching everyone else smoke. Why suffer from secondhand smoke when I could enjoy the full experience firsthand? It seemed like an avocation I was naturally suited for, and by the time I was stationed in Germany, working graveyard shifts in a commo trailer, I was up to three packs a day. I’m not sure that I would have conceded that there was a shortness of breath involved, but I felt a heaviness in my chest like someone was sitting on it. A rather heavy someone. I determined to cut back and followed through on it – returning to my previous two-pack-a-day pace and feeling good about myself and my healthy life choice. I could walk and run again without that pesky constriction.
When my subsequent wife became pregnant with my two subsequent children, she naturally, wisely, and apparently easily put down her cigarette habit, so I followed her example. There was a lapse for both of us between children, but quitting for my daughter’s gestation was the gateway to a permanent cessation for my wife and one that outlasted our marriage for me – lasting until I became romantically involved with a smoker again. It’s a common story, I am told. It’s one that I have enacted twice in this lifetime. But that vacillation is over, for this lifetime, because relapse equals death – a consequence I am not willing to bear in pursuit of a nicotine fix or an oral fixation.
And that is why I have no problem with wearing a mask and gloves or standing 6-feet away from any and all people in my environment or limiting that environment, as much as possible, to my own solo habitat.
I miss John Prine. His music and lyrics brightened my world, my life experience, my perspective on just about everything. Now, despite the best efforts and equipment available, he has succumbed to a virus. Not the insidious, ubiquitous, inexplicable vagaries of cancer; not the insular horrors of depression; but a contagious disease whose microbial agent works with a vengeance on overtime – hiding when it feels like it and sucking the capacity to breathe right out of the lungs when it is ready to wreak havoc.
I have read and watched enough now to know that COVID-19 ultimately destroys lung tissue to the point that those lungs are unusable, needing to be “replaced” in the task of respiration with a ventilator. Until this health crisis, the term ventilator didn’t sound that threatening to me, a non-medical lay person. Ventilation is a good thing, right? Freshen the air, clean out toxins in the room – good things. To be sure, the ventilator accomplishes “good things” when it can – keeping the patient alive while medical staff try to restore their health, including the ability to breathe independently.
Then, an online article on DIY ventilators left the impression of something that looked like a cross between a bedpan and a car muffler. I didn’t need that kind of discouragement. I had already read the statistics, detailing how patients assigned to a ventilator due to COVID-19 had a minority chance of survival and a likelihood of serious long-term consequences if they did survive.
So, I am not smoking ever again in this lifetime (hopefully I remember that vow in the next) in order to live a well respirated life – full of breath for talking, singing, cycling, running, walking, hiking, lovemaking ... and simple daily conscious living. It only seems like the reasonable thing to do – since I don’t want to lose my ability to breathe before I lose my life. That just doesn’t sound like a pleasant way to go. So, I think that giving up public gatherings and direct physical contact for a few months is an easy choice – a doubly easy one because I don’t want to be responsible for passing that kind of damage along to someone else without either of us being aware.
Just breathe. And chill.
WILL FREENEY is a writer currently residing in Fresno, California, where he is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Fresno State University. Since his retirement from the State of California (2008), where he ended his career in civil service as a legislative analyst, he has acquired an MA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing at Sacramento State University (2008), written for the Eureka Times-Standard (2010-2011), and written for various websites and newsletters for Strategic eMarketing (2010-present). He is currently a regular contributor to the Fresno Flyer (2017-present), a monthly alternative newspaper. His primary recreational activity is riding his bicycle around town, getting to know the community that he now calls home.
UNDERSTANDING THE FOX
BY STEVEN CHURCH
MAY 26, 2020
The other day my mother came to visit. She stood on the porch six-feet-away and we talked through awkward cotton masks and I realized that I haven’t touched or held her now in almost 60 days. She lives a mile away. She lives six feet away. She lives six feet of miles away.
Six feet is significant, it seems. With that semblance of safety, we forget it is the depth we bury our dead.
Six feet is also, roughly, the length of a fathom, that ancient unit of measurement used to gauge the depth of a body of water. A fathom was the length of the leadsman’s outstretched arms. He’d drop a weighted line off the side of the boat until it dragged bottom. Then he’d reel it up, one fathom at a time, calling out the numbers as he pulled the rope from one fist to the other, his body making a T with each count.
To fathom is also to understand, often expressed in the negative, as in, “I can’t fathom how our lives will be different after this,” or “I can’t fathom how difficult it must be for others with less privilege,” or “I can’t fathom how quickly some seem to accept 2000 dead each day as a new normal.”
To say “I can’t fathom,” is to say my arms are not long enough to embrace this idea. My arms cannot measure or contain it.
In some cities today, bodies are not being buried. We don’t have the people to process their deaths. We don’t have the space for what remains. We cannot hold their loss. They are stacked, wrapped in plastic, piling up in refrigerated trailers in a parking garage. And in New Jersey, a morgue worker buys yellow daffodils and, each morning as she counts the dead, she places a single flower on each body. Sometimes she uses other flowers if the shop is out of daffodils. “But they have to be yellow,” she says.
The first week of the shelter in place order in Fresno, my seventeen-year-old son came down with a respiratory illness. Dry cough, body aches, stuff that wouldn’t normally worry us too much. But things were different now. He was staying at his mom’s house when the symptoms started so that’s where he stayed, along with his twelve-year-old sister, for the first ten days or so. When I visited them, I’d stand on the porch of their mother’s rental house—just a block away from the house we lost to foreclosure in the market crash of 2008—and I’d talk to him through old single-pane glass. I pressed my fingertips to the window and asked how they were doing, how their day was going, how they’d been spending their time; and I’d watch their distorted faces make muffled words, but I could barely listen. It was almost too much to take. I blew kisses that bounced off the glass. It felt like I was visiting them in some kind of bizarre living museum vitrine—Contemporary Broken Home, circa 2020, Covid19 Pandemic—and I didn’t know when I’d ever get to touch or hold them again.
On my walk one morning during our sheltering, I noticed a freshly cut tree stump sticking out of a neighbor’s yard and I stopped to count the rings, dark for winter, light for summer, until I lost track as the years blurred together or were interrupted by scars. My father used to joke that even a stopped clock was right twice a day; but I didn’t know if this stopped clock, this arrested development, would ever be right again. How do we move forward? How do we develop thick bark, that woody armor necessary for survival?
To stand six feet from someone is also to put a fathom between you, to put an understanding between us. It is to say, “I see you. I love you. I understand this distance is necessary. I understand this distance is temporary.”
The other day as I drove to pick up my children from their mother’s house, I crested the hill where three lines—Palm Ave, the Santa Fe tracks, and a man-made irrigation canal—intersect. Just above the trees a large raptor circled slowly and ominously—probably a red-tailed hawk, the apex urban raptor around here. And I wondered what it was hunting there above that tangle of lines. I doubted it was fishing the canals, which, in the Spring, are fast-moving, dangerous and polluted irrigation ditches. And there was nothing for the bird to hunt on the street or the tracks, no fields nearby or ground-squirrel burrows that I could see. As I came up the small rise, I gazed over the bridge railing there and saw in the water a pair of geese and their two goslings huddled against the concrete canal bank. As the raptor circled closer, its shadow whirling over the asphalt, one of the geese raised her wings in the air, shielding the goslings and trying to appear bigger and more intimidating, trying to say, “Leave us be. Our children are not expendable.”
It was 2pm on a weekday. I don’t remember what day it was for sure because right now, during the Great Weirdness of 2020, time seems to slip and slide away from me. I forget what day it is, how far we all are into this practice of self-isolation and social distancing from other humans, how long we’ve seen other people, even family members, as virus vectors. It’s such a strange mix of fear and boredom, of stagnancy and angst.
But I remember it was 2 pm and I remember this: Andrea stood next to me at the dining room table. Perhaps we were sorting mail or wiping down groceries with a bleach-soaked “wipe.” It’s funny how some things fall away and other moments rise up, imprinting themselves on your consciousness forever. It’s funny how the eyes play tricks. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. Sleek body, four legs, brownish red, big poofy tail.
“Holy shit. There’s a fox!” I barked.
“No way,” Andrea said, smacking me on the arm. “You’re lying.” But I wouldn’t lie about something like that.
“Right there!” I say as the fox loped across the street, behind my car, and disappeared into the neighbor’s yard.
I didn’t appreciate the CGI fox in the film, Wild. But I understood it. Because if you can’t capture serendipity, you have to manufacture it. But part of me just wanted to hear Cheryl Strayed’s voice, her words at least, telling me about the fox, the blessing, the omen—just enough for me to imagine it and nothing more. I wanted to see it with my mind’s eye and let it exist in that realm of mystery, where it seems foxes always exist—at the edges of your peripheral vision, in the penumbral regions of experience. Andrea says that foxes are magical, but of course they’re not. They’re perfectly natural, highly adaptable creatures who thrive in urban environments, often in the shadows. It’s true, though, that to see one always feels as if you’ve been visited by a ghost or some other ambassador from the other side. It always feels magical, like the fox has been watching you all along, waiting to reveal itself—as if it has chosen you, at this particular moment, to receive its blessing. And I’ll tell you, dear Reader, I did feel blessed by this long-bodied fox with his pointy nose, short ears and that wild reddish-brown blast of a tail. Its coloring wasn’t CGI-red but greyer or mottled like a tree-trunk, perfectly suited to its urban environment. And I felt suddenly and seriously lucky. Foxes are solitary and fiercely territorial; so, in a city, their home range may be quite small, and chances are that if you see a fox in your neighborhood it is a resident fox who lives nearby, probably in a hidden backyard burrow. It is your wild neighbor. And if you see another fox, chances are you’re seeing the same fox twice. Wildlife sightings are up all over the world now. Friends and family have also reported fox sightings in Fresno. They seem to be everywhere. The experts say that there aren’t necessarily more animals roaming free now in the Age of Pandemic. They haven’t suddenly decided to emerge from the shadows because they think we’re not looking. They haven’t actually chosen us. It’s just that we’re paying more attention. We’re finally looking. We’re taking the time to stop and stare out the window or to look up at the sky. We’re choosing to allow space for wonder[1] in our lives. We’re allowing space for the fox. And this may be the most important survival skill we can cultivate.
[1] Writing Activity: “Wonder” as a word is, well, quite wonderful. It is a verb (to wonder), a state of mind, and a “thing” in our collective consciousness. Ask yourself what it is like to feel “wonder” and when was the last time you felt it? Think, if you will, of the 7 Wonders of the World. List as many as you can come up with off the top of your head. What do they have in common? How are they different? Are there only seven? What makes something a “Wonder of the World”? What makes something a Wonder of YOUR world? What would be your list of the 7 Wonders of the Coronavirus Pandemic? How would that list be different if there wasn’t the pandemic?
STEVEN CHURCH is the author of 6 books of nonfiction, most recently the collection of essays, I'm Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear, and Fatherhood. He is a founding editor of the literary magazine, The Normal School and he Coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.
As part of YMP’s June newsletter, we continue to lift up voices from the Valley’s community of writers. The following story, by Anjali Kapoor-Davis (a Storytelling for Change Fellow), is a brave sharing of a memory from kindergarten, sparked by a single seemingly mundane moment. What is revealed is both painful and powerful.
KINDERGARTEN
BY ANJALI KAPOOR-DAVIS
My neighbors' daughters started Kindergarten this school year. It's an exciting time for them and it reminds me of when my son started school. Ajay had a great teacher, a gem, someone he still goes back to visit even though he towers over her in height. Mrs. Winter could have been called Mrs. Spring or Summer, she was warm, caring, and had more energy than I ever thought possible. I loved seeing her in action during my weekly visits to the classroom as a parent helper.
Mrs. Winter asked us to talk with our kids about our own family traditions and school memories as we approached the holidays. My family is originally from India and I was born and raised here. My husband is a 5th generation Californian and his roots go back to Ireland. So many rich traditions with Diwali, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Holi, and Easter to name a few. Our multicultural family has something to celebrate every month! I wondered what the other parents would share with their kids. Ajay's class was so diverse. A family recently settled here, originally from Africa, a Sikh family with their son wearing a patka. I could see every shade in the crayon box. It felt good knowing that my son would fit in here, better than I ever did in Kindergarten.
One day when I picked Ajay up from school he said he need to use the bathroom and I waited outside. The older kids were also heading into the bathroom before recess. He rushed back out and looked concerned. It looked like the big kids were crowding him in the bathroom and he didn't like it. Suddenly I felt an odd sensation of déjà vu. I shook it off, gathered up his backpack and went out to the car. I asked him if he was okay, did he want to tell me something? "No", was his response so we went home. The next morning I suggested going into the bathroom with a friend, buddy system, someone to have his back. "Okay", he nodded as he went into the classroom.
Before going home I dropped by my brothers' house a few miles away; it was our childhood home and it held so many memories. He was out of town for a few days and I wanted to check up on the house. I parked the car in the driveway and walked by the enormous Cyprus trees framing the front windows. They looked like they could touch the sky. I could hear the schoolyard bell echo across the neighborhood as I looked through the chain link fence to see the kids scurrying to line up for class. I wondered if my brother just ignored the sound or learned to live with it since our childhood grade school was right next door.
I turned my gaze to my keys to find the right one. I remembered being a "latch key" kid; it was so long ago. As I pushed the key into the lock I felt a chill, I let go and the keys dropped to the floor. Shaking my head I picked them up and reinserted the key. There it was again, déjà vu. Of course I had been here before, but this was different. I closed my eyes trying to search the recesses of my brain for a clue. Suddenly I felt it, warm and wet running down my legs. I opened my eyes quickly, what was that? There was nothing on my legs. I closed my eyes again and could hear the sound of children's laughter and a weird squishing sound. Looking down I noticed that a little water had collected under the doormat. Still perplexed by the feeling of something familiar and yet distant, my mouth fell open as I was flooded with the memory.
I had fumbled with the key before, panicked that I wouldn't be able to get the door open in time. Panicked because I had to pee, really, really bad. I dropped the key before too, and then it happened, the flood of urine running down my leg. I peed my pants more than once at this door. "Oh you poor kid!" I wish I could have gone back to give her a hug. "Why didn't she use the bathroom at school?" Why Didn't I use the bathroom at school?
I made my way inside and walked into my old bed room. I sat on the floor and closed my eyes again. I wish I could ask her what happened. I thought about Michael and Jonathan, my only friends. Michael stuck out because he was too white with freckles and red hair . Jon stuck out because he was black. Me? I was the only brown girl. The other kids called Jon and I, the "N" word. He told me what it meant. How many times had he heard it? I was five and I was dealing with this level of racism. How could five year olds know what that meant and use it so effectively? Five year olds can't be racists, right? This was taught to them by their parents and grandparents. Wow, that's a hell of a family tradition, a Heritage of Hate.
Why didn't the teachers stop it? I couldn't answer that question but I knew that my Mom would have more pieces to the puzzle so I headed to my parents' house next. "What do you remember about my Kindergarten teacher?" I asked her over a cup of chai. "I remember when she called me and said that you needed to be in a different class, that you were slow, retarded was the word they used back then. She jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions." My Mom went on to tell how the teacher had been asking students about different animals, "Where do you see a dog? Where do you see a monkey?" I answered the one about the monkeys with "in the garden", which led to a lot of laughter from the class. But monkeys were in the garden, in my home for the past few years in India. I also said that the camel brought the milk to our house, which it did, with the guy riding it, in India. So for those reasons she thought I had a mental deficit. Hmm, with that mindset my teacher wasn't going to be of any help on the playground either. My Mom gave the teacher a piece of her mind on the phone and after a "reeducation" by my Mother, the teacher did invite her to come to the classroom for a show and tell about India. My Mom brought clothes, cooking utensils, and handicrafts, as well as a map to show where India was located. Smart lady, my Mom. I realized I had some work to do myself.
Over the next few days I went through old pictures and drove by my old school again to see what else I could shake loose from my memory. It was like using a TV antenna to tune in my past. One thing became painfully clear; I never used the school bathroom because there I would be alone, no Michael and no Jonathan to have My back. There was no way to escape. By five I figured out the best way to stay safe was to hold it. I never told my parents because I was a good Indian girl, I kept quiet and minded my manners. No one ever talked about things like this in our community. We held it in. I quickly learned to assimilate into the American society, after all I was born here, I am an American, right?
I sat down with Mrs. Winter and shared with her what my mother had done for me in Kindergarten. I mentioned that Diwali was less than two weeks away and asked if she would be open to having me share something from India with the kids. She loved the idea and together we planned for it. I arrived at school with a large garment bag filled with clothes, a bag of cooking utensils, handicrafts and Indian sweets. Mrs. Winter already had the map out and was showing the kids where India was located. I opened the garment bag and all of the kids oohed and aahed over the vibrant colors. I pulled out a folded cream and pink sari and unfurled all six yards of it. Mrs. Winter smiled and asked "How do you wear it?" I asked if she would like to try it and she nodded. After a few minutes of pleating the fabric, draping it over her shoulder, and tucking it in around her waist, I realized I had a captive audience. Not a word was said during the time it took to dress her in the sari. "What do you think?" I asked the class. "Beautiful, so pretty, I love the colors, you should wear that all the time!" were the responses. Then, one little boy said, "So they're just clothes? It's still Mrs. Winter, just in a different dress?" "Yes, it is," I nodded. "She's still the same person no matter what she's wearing" "Ooooohhhhh" said the class. It was as if a collective light bulb went ON in the classroom. I couldn't fight the hate when I was five but I could fight the ignorance and racism like my Mom did for me by educating and disarming them, hopefully before it started. I didn't realize that my presentation had run long and that there were half a dozen parents in the back of the room. When I looked up I saw the smiles on their faces. "I'd like to come in and talk about Africa" said one Mother. "I'd like to talk about Argentina" said another.
It was the perfect way to celebrate Diwali, a symbolic victory of light over darkness, knowledge over ignorance, and good over evil. I smiled back at them and thought, my work here is done, for this year anyways.
Anjali Kapoor-Davis is a Storyteller, Playwright, and Musician. Born and raised in Fresno, Anjali graduated from Clovis West and earned a BA in Music from U.C. Davis. After moving back to Fresno with her husband and son, she took on the roles of robotics coach, Boy Scout troop treasurer, choir Mom, and also served on local non-profit boards. Anjali is also a thyroid cancer survivor and started a thyroid cancer support group in Fresno to raise awareness for this disease. The Yonsei Memory Project, Playwrighting at FCC, and CSU Summer Arts have helped Anjali develop an outlet for creativity and healing through writing. She loves spending time with her family, all animals, the arts, baking, and laughing.