The Middle of Everywhere (11 page)

I talked to a woman from El Salvador about a conference over two years away but already set in time and place. She laughed and said, "Forgive me. I am not used to the American custom of giving away time so far in the future. How can we know where we will be in two years and what we will want to be doing?"

It takes most people from one to three years to learn social English and five to seven years to learn academic English. At first, refugees feel like children: vulnerable, dependent, and unable to express themselves. An educated man communicates only via hand signals and a few simple phrases. A doctor cannot ask for a glass of water. A teacher cannot understand her first-grade son's homework. Simple tasks, such as exchanging a pair of shoes or making a dental appointment, are complex without language. The intelligence, personality, and energy of new arrivals are submerged by their lack of English. We Americans just see the tip of the iceberg.

Language is connected to both good judgment and to forming relationships. Humans trust or mistrust others on the basis of nuances, tonal variations, and small contradictions. Without language, we miss metaphors and subtleties. We cannot read between the lines or sense what is not being said. We can't convey character or style. Imagine yourself applying for jobs, negotiating bureaucracies, and making friends with a working vocabulary of one hundred words. "Hi." "Thank you." "Where is the bathroom?" "Good morning." "You're welcome."

English isn't phonetic and has an amazing number of irregular verbs and plural nouns. It's filled with slang, academic jargon, and technical terms. Rules for prepositions and punctuation seem arbitrary. Many words sound alike, such as
writing
and
riding, a basement
and
abasement,
or
aunt
and
ant.

And learning the language isn't enough. Certain people may speak Spanish but have limited understanding of the culture of Cuba. Likewise, one may know about the customs of a culture without being able to speak its language. To really become American, refugees must become both bilingual and bicultural. (See appendix 1 for ideas about how to speak to newcomers who have limited English.)

I fled from despair and now each day I find despair again and again.

—C
ARRIE
F
ISCHER AND
A
LBERT
G
REENBERG

In their first stage after arrival newcomers briefly experience relief and euphoria. They are here and they are safe.

In the second stage reality sets in. Refugees have lost their routines, their institutions, their language, their families and friends, their homes, their work and incomes. They have lost their traditions, their clothes, pictures, heirlooms, and pets. They are without props in a new and alien environment.

They experience cultural bereavement. The old country may have been a terrible place, but it was home. It was the repository of all their stories, memories, and meanings. Many times newcomers' bodies are in America, but their hearts remain in their homeland.

Ideally, the third stage is the beginning of recovery. Newcomers begin to grasp how America works. In the fourth stage, also ideally, newcomers are bicultural and bilingual. They can choose to participate in many aspects of the culture.

In general, there are four reactions refugees' families have to the new culture—fight it because it is threatening; avoid it because it's overwhelming; assimilate as fast as possible by making all American choices; or tolerate discomfort and confusion while slowly making intentional choices about what to accept and reject. Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut published the results of long-term studies on newcomer adaptation in a book called
Legacies.
They found that this last reaction, which they called "selective acculturation," was best for refugees.

They described two other less-adaptive ways of adjusting. Dissonant acculturation is when the kids in the family outstrip the parents. This can undercut parental authority and put the kids at risk. Consonant acculturation is when members of the family all move together toward being American. At one time this rapid acceptance of American ways was considered ideal, but now it appears that this makes families too vulnerable to the downside of America.

In
Legacies,
Portes and Rumbaut report that most immigrants move into the middle-class mainstream in one or two generations. That is the good news. The bad news is that if they don't make it quickly into the middle class, they won't make it at all. With the passage of time, drive diminishes, and by the third generation, assimilation stops. If two generations fail to make it into the middle class, the following generations are likely to be stuck at the bottom.

Failure to succeed will drive refugee families away from mainstream culture into what Portes calls "reactive ethnicity." Newcomers will revert to enclaves and see failure as inevitable, thus, in many cases, dooming their children to fail.

Portes's research obviously has implications for social policy. We need to help refugees and immigrants early with job training, education, language, and business loans. It's hard to study physics when one is sick and hungry, or to attend GED classes when one has worked all night at a factory. If we miss our chance to help them, we miss our chance to create well-adjusted, well-educated citizens.

I will discuss our environment and the ways we do and do not help refugees in the next chapter, but first I want to tell an archetypal success story. The family arrived here badly traumatized after wandering across many countries looking for a home.

But they were a strong family with many attributes of resilience. In Nebraska, their community helped them survive and their hard work enabled them to build a life for themselves. Thirty-seven million people watched the last episode of the TV show
Survivor.
This family's story and the stories of most refugees are much more compelling than any contrived reality-television program could ever show.

"
I could smell freedom in America.
"

I interviewed Kareem and Mirzana at their high school. Mirzana was small and blond. Kareem was heartbreakingly handsome, with thick eyebrows and black hair. But he was shy and let his older sister do most of the talking.

Their family had lived in a village in northern Bosnia. Their father was an engineer, and their mother worked in a store. They were a hardworking middle-class family. Mirzana said she and Kareem had an easy life, consisting mainly of school and play. Their grandparents lived nearby. Kareem said, "We had everything we wanted. We were never lonely."

Nearby there was a war in Croatia, but their parents didn't think the war would come to Bosnia. One day the Serbs came and put their father and all the men in their village into a concentration camp. The siblings and their mother fled to Croatia.

Mirzana told me about her father's camp. She said, "Many men were in a small, empty room. They had nothing to eat, no papers, and no money."

Their father developed a lung infection. Still, he was lucky—he was only there for a month and not too badly beaten. He suffered most hearing the pain of others when the soldiers took them out and beat them. He listened to men scream for hours.

Their father saw many bad things, most of which he didn't tell them. He did tell of a drunk soldier who came into their cell and shouted, "Run to the corner. The last one there will be shot." One man didn't run and was killed by this soldier. Mirzana shook her head sadly as she said, "This man was deaf."

Eventually their father was released. Before he could escape the country, he was ordered to fight the Serbs. He didn't even have a weapon and, as Mirzana put it, "He was there to be shot." After a while, he managed to run away and find his family in Croatia. When he came to their door, none of them recognized him. In the two months he had been away, he'd aged ten years.

The family lived in Croatia for two years. Eventually a friend helped them get into Germany. They spoke no German and lived in one small room, which Kareem didn't like. He said no one could ever be alone and there were fights about space and sharing.

Mirzana and Kareem learned German, but their family couldn't become German citizens and they had no hope of improving their situation. In 1998 the Germans kicked them out and they came to the United States.

They were optimistic on the plane here, but when they arrived in Lincoln they were taken to a small dirty apartment. They were exhausted from the thirty-hour flight, but they couldn't sleep. Their mother was in shock. She cried, "I want to go back." The father said, "You forget, we have no choices. We have no country to return to."

They had no car and they didn't know anyone. No one in the family spoke English. But after five days they moved into their own apartment and they discovered next door a family that the father had known as a child. The two families cried with joy to be reunited. Now the family knows all of the Bosnian community. Bosnians in Lincoln share meals and throw parties. The men help each other find jobs and the women help each other learn English and shop for bargains.

When I met them, Kareem and Mirzana had been here only three months, but already they were speaking pretty good English, their fourth language. They laughed as they talked about early experiences in Nebraska. A neighbor gave them bananas, but they thought they tasted like soap and threw them away. They missed European bakeries. In America everything supposed to be sweet was salty and vice versa. Here herring was sweet and butter was salty.

Kareem and Mirzana like it here. Mirzana is making A's and, after school, she is a stocker at a supermarket. Mirzana laughed as she explained. "The staff teaches me a new word each day." Kareem is too young to work, so he cleans the house, does laundry, and studies after school. Both Kareem and Mirzana want to go to college and get good jobs. They want to care for their parents.

Their parents are ambitious, too. They have difficult factory jobs because their English is still poor. They work from two until ten. But in the morning they study English. Mirzana said, "In a year or two they will have better jobs."

This family is lucky. They have each other and a supportive community. Everyone has many of the attributes of resilience. The family carries with them a great deal of human capital. The external environment has been pretty harsh, but most likely, they will eventually transcend it.

Sometimes Mirzana wishes that her life these last few years were just a dream and she would wake up in Bosnia in their old house. Her grandmother would be calling her to come work in the garden. There would be no war. Kareem disagrees. He is filled with newcomer zest. He said, "I could smell freedom in America."

Recently I visited friends from Northern Iraq to celebrate their daughter Noora's tenth birthday. They live in an apartment complex run by Lincoln's most notorious slumlord. Shady Acres is a stucco building with six units on the outskirts of town. Just west of the building is a trailer park, infamous for its tornado deaths, and next door to the east is a triple-X dance club featuring a dancer named Anna Mal. As I walked toward my friend's place, I passed an empty unit with its door open. Piles of beer bottles and magazines, trashcan liners filled with old clothes, and unfurled rolls of toilet paper filled the place. I wondered if someone called this unit home.

My friend's place was clean and neat, an oasis of order in this chaotic universe of sleaze. Zena, her husband, and four kids lived in a two-bedroom apartment. Zena greeted me with a big hug and led me into the living room where a small television blared cartoons. I asked about the new baby and Zena said she was sleeping. I asked about her husband, a gentle man hurt in the war, and Zena said he was at an ELL class at the library.

Zena's daughter Noora carried her stuffed dog, Toto, over to show me. Her two younger brothers ran by in Spiderman underwear. I called the three oldest kids Snap, Crackle, and Pop, because their favorite food was American breakfast cereal—the more sugary the better.

The living room was dark and bare with no curtains on the small windows, no pictures on the walls, and only one saggy couch. Like many refugees' homes, it was a weird amalgamation of Disneyesque cutesy stuff, goods from the old country, used furniture, and discount-store toys. Video games, Pokémon figures, and plastic motorcycles were piled everywhere. I noted a pack of Marlboros and an ashtray, new since my last visit.

Zena looked at me apologetically as she lit up. "My job makes me smoke. Since I work there, I do many bad things." Zena worked for a food-processing plant that used up, then discarded, its workers. I had been trying to get her a better job, but she had limited English and couldn't read or write in any language.

Zena was a small, almost fragile, woman who worked eight-hour shifts lifting heavy buckets in the frozen-food locker. Her arms were always tired and were growing weaker. She knew of workers who could no longer lift bags of groceries or their own babies. Tonight, even though it was hot outside, Zena was dressed in several sweaters. In the food locker she wore three jackets, a wool cap, and two pairs of gloves. Still, she was always chilled there and she told me, "I can never get warm. Not even on weekends."

While we talked, her sons banged action figures into each other and zoomed their motorcycles around us. Noora watched an animated version of
The Wizard of Oz.
Zena said the kids had memorized the five cartoon videos they owned. As if to prove this, when the video reached the scene where Dorothy clicks her ruby slippers together, Noora jumped up, clicked her heels together, and recited Dorothy's speech. I laughed and clapped but felt a twinge of sorrow at this young Kurdish Dorothy looking for home.

This family had come from a very different world than they now inhabited. Zena was sixteen when her marriage was arranged, and like many brides from her country, she first met her husband on her wedding day. Now Zena was twenty-eight, caring for four kids and an ill husband and supporting the family. She had many more burdens and far fewer resources than she ever imagined would be her lot.