Afternoon laisons

 

I've been seeing a married woman I met online a few hours a week for the past two months. We meet at a third location for about an hour and a half, usually on Tuesdays and Fridays. I've never met her husband, but he sounds like a nice guy. During these meetings, I give this woman, I'll call her Z, something her husband can't.
English lessons. Z is from China and we were connected through a volunteer English teaching program in my county. I taught English as a second language full time in China and Japan for four years in the 1980s and part time in Philadelphia as a volunteer in the nineties. In both cases, I was teaching classes of varying sizes, seldom of fewer than a dozen. This is one-on-one tutoring.
The books and materials my student and I have been given are terrific. I had some decent teaching material in my previous stints, but nothing like this stuff. It makes sense that teaching material evolves, of course, but compared to what I had in China in 1985, material twenty years out of date then, this is like comparing a laser printer to a slate board.
Z has been in America for four years and if you met her you might be surprised by how low her level of English is and judge her negatively for it. I know better. She lives with her husband, daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren in a large suburban house. Her daughter and son-in-law have high-paying jobs and are the breadwinners of the family, and Z and her husband's role is to take care of and teach Chinese to the grandchildren, who are four and seven years old. I begin each class with an exercise I call Weekend English. On Tuesday, it’s, "What did you do over the weekend?" and Fridays it's, "What are you doing this weekend?" The suburb Z and I live in is not especially diverse, so when Z said she spends her weekends meeting up with six other Chinese ex-patriots who live within walking distance of her house, I found it hard to believe.
She’s getting better and speaking and says her level of confidence is increasing. I’ve told her that learning a new language is like climbing a slippery mountain and that you’ll go up some steps and sometimes fall a few steps and get discouraged. Her understanding of that was in a way that made me think she’s already experienced it.
I am awful at learning languages and it was a source of feeling extremely bad about myself. Nearly forty years later, I remember vividly sitting alone on the platform of a small train station on a hot night and trying to grasp a concept in the Japanese language instruction book I had. It was a good book, one used in U.S. colleges at the time. I just couldn’t get it even though other foreigners who did what I was doing could. I realized that if I had a gun with me, I’d put the barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger. It was one of the two strongest urges to commit suicide I’ve ever had, and it frightened me. Good thing Japan has strict gun laws!
Z is a basically happy woman, so I don’t worry about that with her. But still, I’m careful to make her language learning experience a positive one as much as I can without being insincere.