language

I have now made four visits to TZ as his English tutor. On the third visit he takes me to the back garden when we are done talking and listening, reading and writing, and his wife picks me a bunch of the best coriander I have ever held in my hand. In Chin it is nan nan.

The next Sunday I bring Kaffir lime leaves, green chillies and stalks of lemon grass from my garden but TZ is not at home. I hand them to his 15 year-old daughter. When I see him on Thursday afternoon he explains that he could not get home on time.

We do a 19-question exercise titled Worksheet 1: Talking about yourself. TZ works hard to find the words to tell me who or what has been most helpful to him since coming to Australia, and what is the best thing about where he lives. Question six asks what is the best time of day for him, but he cannot say.

Question 13 looks innocent enough: it asks about a favourite subject at school. In our first session he tells me that he has no education, but it turns out that he went to school until year 3, then left. Tears well in his eyes. He left school against his father’s wishes. His father died last year. Now he cannot show his father that at 41 he can get an education.

He wants to be educated.

Somehow we depart from the worksheet and he tells me that before the Chin converted to Christianity, each man, each father and husband was the ‘king’ of his house. Now men and women are more equal. I can see the pain on his face and hear it in his voice. I deduce what he is feeling.

He wants his children to value education in a way that he did not. He does not want to be ‘king’ of his house but I can tell that he feels powerless. His children have language and he does not. His children are able to negotiate their new home in ways that he cannot. He should be doing this for them, but he “cannot see far”, he says.

He works in the trailer factory each day and goes to English classes in Box Hill on Mondays and Wednesdays. Sometimes he falls asleep in class. It is hard. He faces a dilemma: the time he needs to  learning English is time he cannot have with his family. And they are all he has.

My good woman tells me that the second year after migration is the hardest. It is for all migrants, she says. The first year is survival: a house, money, food. The second year is language.  

       

TZ has been here 18 months. I try to tell him that things will get better.

I want to adopt him but I know I cannot and it is not my role. I will do my best to give him language.  

Rock on.