Today a 13 yo girl, Mandy, taught me a life lesson.
It was a Toastmasters meeting via zoom. The theme was Patroit’s Day and sent out one week ago. Mandy was the Table Topics Master of the meeting. She would be leading a round of impromptu speeches among the audience, with questions of her own design but pertaining to the theme.
Mandy started with a briefing of the Patriot’s Day, the time, the place, the opposing sides, and so on. Then she brought up the questions, picking up one audience with one question:
— Why is Patriot’s Day a holiday in some states in America?
— What were the soldiers called in the Revolutionary War?
— What events are people celebrating for Patriot’s Day in modern times?
— Name some events in the rest of the world that are similar to the Patriot’s Day in America.
— and so on.
I was picked up for question #3. I like impromptu speech very much despite it is never an easy job for me. However, I never felt so hopeless this time. I had no idea whatsoever! I can’t remember what I said to make up the one-minute minimum speech, except that it was more like a confession than answering. Words like I like US culture very much, I read books and watched movies about American history. Looking Mandy in the eye at the little screen, I felt she stand right before me with a hint of disappointment. My son is at a similar age as Mandy’s. For a moment, an online trending hashtag rises in my mind, #KidsThinkDadNotGood
I could feel other audience picked up for questions go through the same struggles. After each speech, Mandy gave more information about the question before moving on to the next. I went to the chat window and quickly typed a message, “It’s a hard question.” I was not sure I did it to ease my embarrassment or others. Then I saw there were already a number of messages there: “Mandy’s questions are really hard.” “What’s minutemen?” “What’s the first battle?”, and so on.
A little fact check may make this scene look less dismal. The club is called Bilingual Chinese, with only two local American members and all the rest new immigrants. In this virtual meeting, there were even three guests that got in from China. However, my face burnt for the rest of the meeting, kind of feeling lucky that nobody couldn’t see my red face through the dim screen. Lessons learned the hard way.
Maybe Mandy knew the Patriot’s Day story before the meeting, maybe she just had a 20 minutes or so online research. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is, the theme was sent out one week before; In this quarantine time, we all equally have plenty of time to look through these stories before the meeting. We don’t have to be historians of America, a10 minutes or so research would provide enough food for thought before the speech. In peaceful times, I can have tons of excuses to shrug off the stumbling speech, “Oh I am too busy to check out the theme”. But this quarantine time took away my last disguise. Inside, I found myself staring at a middle-aged immigrant amid self-separation, emotional distancing, and lethargy.
This reminds me of the everlasting topic among middle-aged new immigrants. It’s always about how hard it is to get integrated into the local community. Multiple-years of staying, even decades, doesn’t seem to be helping. Neither does language. The claim of “no matter what, I always feel I am a foreigner” always wins quick resonation, or another popular one that says “My heart is already full with my original culture. I can’t find room for another one.” Like snails carrying the heavy shell of origin, we languish between struggle and denial, until the end of life.
If you are not committed to diving into the local culture of the land that you have given up everything to come up to, it’s disrespectful to this land, its culture, and finally, yourself. Staying in the shell, you not only feel you are a foreigner, also you are felt that you are a foreigner.
But the younger generation refuses to carry the shell. Mandy is a smart girl. She moved to the US with her family at 6. She now speaks flawless English. Her golf play is at a professional level. She plays guitar. She sings at Church concert. One year ago, we all watched her give a speech about Lincoln’s Speech. Today at this Toastmasters meeting, she teaches me, nobody is building the shell but yourself.
