Something In Common

Angelina was from Rwanda. Her last name was long, with many syllables: when I first saw it in my advanced English class roll book, I did not read it carefully; my assumption was that she must be the European wife of a Japanese man. I got quite a surprise on the first day of class when I opened the door and saw instead a middle-aged African woman sitting among a group of Japanese students.

One of the first assignments I give my intermediate and advanced students is to tell me how they have studied English over the years, and why they want to continue. I have them do this verbally, in groups of three or four, then later in writing. This gives me not only an understanding of their learning processes and language learning history, but also a good idea of their English proficiency and motivation. It also helps students see how much they have in common: I've seen taxi drivers bond with junior diplomats over the shared experience of how little they managed to learn in their first English classes.

Most Japanese people begin learning English in middle school and carry on through high school. English isn't a popular subject: rote learning with an emphasis on grammar is the norm, and people who enjoy English are sadly a minority. Those who learn enough to hold even a simple conversation are an even greater minority.

Angelina was my first African student in Japan, and I wondered how her language learning experiences would compare with the others'. I divided the class into four groups, making sure to put Angelina in the more proficient group which included an elderly retired professor of engineering, a housewife who had lived overseas for decades, a graduate student, and a freelance photographer. As I moved from group to group, I heard virtually the same story: I started learning when I was twelve. Our classes were not interesting and our teachers were strict, but they could not speak English themselves. It was boring.

When I got to Angelina's group, though, a lively discussion was in progress. In any class, there is almost always a brief period where the students get to know each other and establish whose linguistic skill is superior. In this group it was obvious that Angelina had won hands-down; you could tell by the way the others were beginning to defer to her. Kinue, for all her fluency acquired from years overseas, was obviously second fiddle.

"My junior high class was one of the biggest in Tokyo," said Minoru, the photographer. "Over forty kids -- too big for an English class."

Angelina frowned. "There were over fifty in my class."

Everyone turned to look at Angelina. She had certainly done well for herself, considering.

"Twenty years ago, Japanese English textbooks were poor," observed Kinue, the housewife. "My children's English textbooks make me envious: so colorful -- so many photographs and pictures!"

"We had just one textbook. It was adequate, but it was very old," Angelina responded.

I leaned closer. Angelina's English was accented, but grammatically near-perfect; surely she had made a mistake...

"Don't you mean they were?" murmured Minoru, reading my mind.

She looked mildly annoyed. "No. I mean it. We had one book."

"You mean you used one book throughout the course?" I prodded. "But everyone had a copy, right?"

Angelina narrowed her eyes. "No. I mean that the class had one book in total."

Kinue's chin dropped. "But you said there were over fifty students!"

"Yes."

"And you had one book?" queried Akio, the retired professor.

"Yes. We each got a turn copying it. That book was very important to us."

"During the War, we had very few things too," Akio mused. "Books were very important..." Angelina looked at him with interest.

This conversation fascinated me, but I was aware that time was slipping away and I wanted the shyer, less articulate students to get a chance to speak. "What about you, Mayumi?" I asked the graduate student.

She ducked her head. "My family and I lived in Mexico. I studied English there, but I also studied Spanish."

"How wonderful! So you speak three languages?"

She smiled and nodded.

"How many languages do you speak?" Akio asked Angelina.

She pursed her lips, thinking. "Kinyarwanda and French."

"And English," murmured Akio in awestruck tones.

"Yes," agreed Angelina in an offhand manner.

Minoru looked delighted. "Parlez-vous francais?" he quipped. Angelina's smile was frosted with noblesse oblige.

"I wish I could have spent more time on English," said Kinue a little defensively, "but after my children were born, I was so busy!"

Angelina turned to her. "How many children do you have?"

"Three," said Kinue proudly. "Do you have children?"

Angelina nodded.

"How many?" came the inevitable response.

"Eight."

There was a brief silence while we all absorbed this.

"Are they with you here in Tokyo?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Oh no, they are back in Rwanda."

"In school?"

"Yes, the younger ones are."

"And they are okay without their mother?" Kinue wanted to know.

Angelina looked surprised. "Of course they are. They are at school."

"African peoples expect to learn English," observed Akio thoughtfully. "Japanese use their own language, so they do not expect to learn English."

Angelina considered this. "In my country, we use our own language too -- everyone knows Kinyarwanda. But French is our official language now, not English. We know that we cannot speak Kinyarwanda to others all over the world. But in many countries, they do not speak French, they speak English. So we must learn English too."

By now, the rest of the groups had finished and everyone was listening to Angelina. "What were your classes like?" a woman at the next table asked.

"Well, they were large, as I have said. And we did not have a proper classroom. We had to share one book and we also had only five pencils."

"Each?" asked a man. Five pencils didn't seem so bad.

Angelina shook her head. "No, our class had five pencils. We all shared them."

"Five pencils for fifty students?" asked another student in hushed tones.

"Yes."

"What about your teachers? Were they strict?"

"Oh my, yes. They used to beat us when we did not learn." Angelina smiled as though recalling precious memories.

By now, I felt a little nervous. It was true that the entire class was fascinated by Angelina: given her background -- so much more deprived than anyone else's -- her superior English fluency was staggering; you could see this reflected in every face. But she was so completely out of their realm that I feared they would never bond with her. She was far and away the most fluent English speaker in the class, she spoke two other languages, and she had raised eight children who were obviously self sufficient. Superwoman might be interesting, but who wants to be her buddy? For the rest of the class period, I worried about this, watching as the others treated Angelina with cool deference.

A few days later, I walked into the class and interrupted a conversation between Akio and Angelina. "...never enough food to eat," Akio was saying. "We were always so hungry! And if anything broke, we had to fix it. And my grandchildren, if they break something, always buying new one!"

"Children today do not understand," Angelina commiserated, "even in my country."

Thank God they had found something in common.