I blew some smoke out the crack in my window and pressed the repeat button on my cd player so that Kanye would stay Heartbroken. I had stopped at a red light waiting to turn onto Harding. It was a long one. I had to stay in the right lane with everybody else or I wouldn’t be able to make another right one hundred feet later. Out of the corner of my eye, someone was staring at me in the next car. I glanced over to see a man wearing a suit and tie waving at me coyly like he was a prepubescent schoolboy.
Why do guys think it’s cute to wave at total strangers in other cars? It must be aesthetics because I could literally be hiding a peg leg behind the car door and Mr. Happy over there would never know.
Considering this idea of the peg leg, I looked forward with a smirk and blew some more smoke out of the window. Then I realized he had rolled his down. The light was still red.
“You are very gorgeous,” came his intro.
I looked over, much more directly this time, to notice that he was actually kind of attractive himself. It might have been the suit. Guys in suits don't usually try to pick up girls at traffic lights.
…All right. And I rolled down my window.
“Thank you.”
“I say correctly?” And I realized he was foreign. Something Latin. He had a nice cream color going for him and his eyes were dark and shining. He looked like he was on the older side of thirty. A wider grin escaped me.
“Yes. Gorgeous. You got it.” The light changed. We both looked up at it, and I shrugged at him and started to move.
“I give you my card!” He yelled over at me.
Card? He had a card. Oh, this I had to see.
Still smiling, I slowed on the turn enough to let him into my turning lane. Three cars behind us hit their brakes before we turned into the post office parking lot.
I stopped in a space with no intention of getting out of my car. He pulled up beside me, windows still down.
“You have a card.” I acted impressed, because I was.
“Yes. Here.” And he pulled one out of his wallet and handed it to me through the window. He had to lean over across his passenger seat. He had on cufflinks.
“Nice suit.” It was a nice suit.
“Thank you.”
“You work at the bank?” I read the card.
“Yes. I am the branch manager for them.”
“I’m sure being bi-lingual helps.”
His eyebrows raised, “How you know I’m bi-lingual?”
“You don’t know how to say gorgeous. You’re a Spanish speaker.”
“How you know that?”
I lifted the card, and eyed him, “Vasquez?”
I should have a BA in flirting.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Here.” Always here, I am so culturally challenged. “You?”
“Where you think?”
“…I don’t know. El Salvador.” Never assume Mexico, even if it’s your best guess.
“El Salvador?! Come on!”
“I don’t know!”
“Cuba.” He looked in the rear view mirror. “I have to go to work. But you call me sometime.”
I never called.
To tell you the truth this happens to me a lot.
There are an estimated 40 thousand foreign born residents in this city, and I cannot tell you how much I love that.
Culturally challenged, I am. Everyone always talks about diaspora and the return to the roots of your heritage. I took a class in college called Black Women as Writers and quickly realized that I couldn’t say much regarding my own heritage except, “I’m sorry.” White people have pretty much run the globe like a free lunch for centuries. Everything in history has been rewritten white. Flippin Jesus wasn’t even white. I feel that my "history" is all some big fable based on lies, exaggeration, and ego.
“I have no good English. You teach me?”
“Oh, you are teacher? I can learn with you.”
“How much you charge an hour?”
No, no, and no no no.
By the time I was student teaching at Murray Middle School I knew I wanted to teach ESL kids. That is, students who are learning English as a Second Language. Almost the whole school at Murray was made up of the foreign born population. Their biggest demographic was Hispanic, then Kurds, then blacks, then whites. I could count the white kids I taught on both hands. Having gone to school at Murray nine years before, I realized that the city’s changing demographic was not my imagination.
But the truth is I feel like I've been teaching English as a Second Language for a long time now.
“Ms. Robinson’s dating a Hondureno.” Somehow, my students discovered the fact, and I quite suddenly became infinitely more popular. "So you're trying to learn Spanish, Ms. Robinson?" Kids who weren't even in my class came up to me. I hadn't consciously sought Spanish speakers, or Gujarati speakers, or Sorani Kurdish speakers, but I think I found them because I was looking for culture. Attempting to improve their English was sort of a bonus.
It's not just that I'm culturally challenged. There's a lot of things that I think white culture keeps from me. We white Americans (maybe all Americans?) are all muddled and confused about the line between independence and selfishness. We don't know when to care for ourselves and when to care for others. We don't know respect. Being edgy and unique has replaced being respectful and honest.
Now this is not to say that other cultures are completely honest and respectful. This is not to say that they don't look down their noses occasionally.
What I'm saying is that there’s just something so base and pure about a lot of these people who come here to chase the ever-elusive "American" dream. The number one source of economic gain in Guatemala comes from wired money outside the country. The whole idea of the nuclear family, often lost on the divorce-ridden, emotionally isolated American populous drives these people in ways I find myself constantly in awe of. They are often moral and spiritual, and despite the fact that they might be able to drink like fish, their ingrained values of family, love, and mutual respect keep them afloat in the mad sea of America. How many college grads or dropouts do you know sitting on their butts waiting for someone to give them what they don’t have the courage or the ambition to take? These people I know have built their lives from the ground up, and they’re living day to day with the determination that they’re going to provide better lives for their children, and their children’s children.
I want those values. I want that determination. I want someone who is so dedicated to me that he would bend over backwards to provide for his children and I. And he wouldn’t forget that he’s doing it because he loves us. I want an extended family of best friends. I want an understanding that no matter what happens, nobody leaves each other high and dry. I want mutual respect. I want passion. I want to be surprised by the small things in life.
It’s all out there. It might not always be glamorous, but it’s so full of love.
Maybe someday I’ll be lucky enough to find it all, and culture too.Still, I don't think it'll drive up next to me wearing a suit.
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