One icy winter morning when I was in third grade in Mrs. Graper’s class, my best friend Ruthie came over to me talking about something I couldn’t make out, and it sounded like a kitty and a car were involved.
Ruthie was the product of a union of two of the homeliest people I had ever seen, a pair which my mother had lowered her voice about once in private to me, telling me I must not make fun of these people, but they really had what she called “a poor blood line” as their problem; all their children had serious problems like they did. Their eldest, Alberta, had gotten a pinched whiney voice, very nasal, and had continuous problems with her adnoids or sinuses. She had glasses just like her mother’s coke-bottle round ones that blew eyes up big as a fish’s. Her mother’s solemn Norwegian face with those strange glass globe eyes had scolded us about not questioning the Lord’s intentions for ourselves on at least one occasion. We were not to complain, ever, nor say anything against God.
There was whiney voiced Alberta, the eldest; the youngest, Frances, who seemed to have been blessed with some good luck, had golden hair and a normal face. Hopefully she was healthy. But Ruthie, my warmest, most fun friend, was the middle child who came out with the shortest straw. She was born with a cleft pallette, a hole in her face which had been mended on the outside somewhat satisfactorily, but with a split in the roof of her mouth that had no possible repair in those metal and leather days. She too had the coke bottle glasses, and her coloring was chalky over her strange gaunt bone structure. She didn’t seem very coordinated either, her skinny limbs awkward and energetic, graceless, but exuberant as any child’s. Even at my age of eight, I wondered while looking at her run if she was going to last — she seemed so frail. But by her very spirit, she was intent on being a normal happy child, and I liked her immensely. Run she did, and head first into everything, jumped rope with abandon, and was always coveting my attention when around her sisters.
She was a fighter, and I liked that. She had a temper on occasion, she had stuff to say; she just couldn’t always be understood. Her speech was a real problem, and even after hospital visits and speech pathologists, she was hard to make out. I usually could make most of it out, since we were together a lot, and what I couldn’t make out, Alberta usually could translate.
But early on that cold day, she was unintelligible. We were taking off our winter coats before our wooden open lockers, and she tugged on me, turned me around, and said, NO!. Kitty got hit by a car!.
I looked sad, and said, oh, that’s too bad, but still she was frustrated further and flung her arms up and louder sound wheezed out, KIDDY GOHD HHID BY A KHHAR. Again I didn’t understand her face, puzzled as I went to my desk, and she still looked so upset, like I didn’t get it.
Our teacher called us to attention once we got to our desks and in a hushed voice told us that one of our classmates had been hit. It was Kenny from third row who’d been hit. I felt my stomach sink. And then it sank again. Not just for the weirdness of death, for the strangeness of never seeing a familiar face again in our classroom, for the inexplicability of it all, but for Ruthie. She had tried so hard to tell me. And I hadn’t understood. In a situation of real urgency, I had not been able to be with her, my good friend. I suddenly felt all of it, and her separation, and I think that was the first time I felt true selfless remorse for the injustices dealt others. The sheer unfairness of it made me taste my first bitter sting of unplaceable anger. I saw Ruthie and her little sharp awkward boned fists pounding on a door with no sound emerging.
In 1989 as a college student, and so attuned to things Chinese, my Chinese boyfriend by my side, I watched the Tiannanmen square demonstrations in fear and wonder. I saw China’s young people trying something so daring and so unprecedented — just simple freedom of speech to address changes that had to occur for life to improve for thousands. I feared and hoped for them.
And my friends and I saw through fuzzy footage one lone man, the next day, in the daylight, just going on his way across a street somewhere with shopping bags in his hands, suddenly stop a row of tanks and demand the tank driver come out and tell him what he was doing. What was this tank doing rolling into his town? Just what was going on? Why were they rolling tanks into his town? What right had they? He stood defiantly in front it. They tried going around him and he repositioned himself in front of them. He argued and climbed up on top and knocked on the hatch and demanded they come out and talk to him. He demanded they make some restitution for their actions. He had no idea that videotape of foreign journalists was rolling. It almost seemed to me that he must have been an older man, not a student, because he did not approach the tank like a young demonstrator with waiving fist and slogan. This was just a citizen, and one full of righteous indignation, demanding the truth, and almost scolding these troops like a father for having been cowed into plowing along over their own people so thoughtlessly. What were they thinking?!?
It was a moment unlike anything else to me because it registered the sting of dread as well as the righteous nobility of its gesture. We all knew at once, by the rough arms of soldiers, by censorship, by death, by vaporized questions, by secret police in some future attempt at second life, by nonrecognition at the doors of neighbors, by any means, that indignant, honest fighter of a man would most likely be put behind the silent door. I saw a red wisp of Ruthie again that day. And I was a continent of courtrooms and cloakrooms away.
Recently, a journalist again visited China, this time to talk to the rich children of the elite in the University which now runs without bloodbaths or unrest, but with green grass and ivy. He held up the picture we had seen around the world of the angry man holding up a line of tanks. Four students held the picture in their hands. One of them recognized it must be with regard to the events in 1989. But it appeared none of them had seen it. Or if they had, none of them would admit with the slightest flutter of an eyelash any inkling of knowledge. I saw this strange mute group of young adults, shaking their heads politely. A parade scene? I don’t know what context this is in, they said. The cokebottle glasses, a quiet condemnation by vacuum, flashed on their unstirred faces. Behind this door even memory could be rewritten.
But I have known for some time now what to expect.
One could villify so many chamber-holders in our lives, they come in all races, religions, sexes, even private torturers. But I heard something last week, and again today like sound.
Hot shouts in the street come every day in my country. In my lifetime nothing may not be double-thought, all forums were allowed to be vaulted as God, turned inside out and dropped flat in the boredom of overkill. We grow callous in my country to the slightest repetition of a plea for help, but we even find ourselves singing with the constant pounding car commercials or the trumpet charges of stadium games. It’s always been so for me, for us, here, because we were not born cleft, but with whole mouths, stuffed with food, and no tanks had men in them with cokebottle glasses. I thought.
But last week I saw the flags driving around in circles on so many cars. Scarlet on the top, blue, and then orange. I had never seen them before. Who is this flag? Downtown they were lining the avenue with their cars. Men with dark hair and large strong faces. Girls and old women with eyes ringed with a delicate darkness. I had seen them all before, and still I did not place them as a race. I saw on my television that night old sepia reels of corpses and mass genocide, it was their story, but it was not who I thought it was for. 6 million, 6 million, I began in my mind. But it was not that figure, it was not them. It was a race I had never even known was persecuted.
How could I have gone my entire free educated well traveled life, and never been told of the Armenians? I came to understand the contradictions I had heard of them all in a rush like wind out of a tunnel. It came together of shards of sound in my memory, tinkling to the floor only now. The way they had been accused of being so harsh on others, the way one Armenian man I had known had fled Russia, the way they were disliked without reason, the way they were considered almost an impenetrable brotherhood, and yet I had not known WHY.
I have been the one with my history rewritten, it’s me so blank before the camera.
Then they showed me today what happened after 1915 at the bloodied hands of the Ottoman turks, at the hands of the Europeans who were too busy splitting spoils of war to pay heed, in the midst of the unheeded reports of American and German diplomats, all those people who had been a country called Anatolia, and what became of it.
I had never even heard a tale of it. Not one. Not in my classes, or travels, or news, or people. I kept saying to myself, How could that be? How much of a controlled peasant am I now? They got me, Mr. Chomsky. I don’t even know how they did it. How could they?
I did not feel foolish to know so late, because I knew there might be many more things, all at once, that were being breached apart at last. What else could we not know? What more was there? I know their flag now when I see it. I know their eyes now when I see them.
Today’s long drive home I wound in and around the buses, a huge train of them, carrying the thousands in white shirts, waving only American flags, at our Hispanic-descent Mayor’s request. So many. So very many of the short brown people in white shirts, our field pickers, our stuffed-animal sewers, our nannies, our housekeepers, our car-washers, our contract haulers, our diggers, our piecework assemblers, our builders, our grill cooks, our taxi drivers, our gardeners, all together in one ambling cloud, saying: We built you. We beautified you. We fed you. We clothed you. We raised you.
They have never been my close ones, they have never been ones I had entrusted things to, my circle had always swung away, they have never come into my odd experience of a nonmenial mental cage. But some of them starved just like that. Some of them did die coming here on long marches in the desert. Some suffocated in vans. Hunger, glitter, longing, any number of them gave up what little they had for that hint of something that could become. Some of them had little choice. Some of them gave up everything. Some of them still have next to nothing. Some of them work like slaves, dreading their secrets will be released.
I have not thought nor wanted to look this direction, perhaps I was not paying attention, perhaps it just was never closer. They are not clean, they are careless, they don’t learn our language, all those things you hear.
As I drive through an intersection at a crawl, someone in the interview on the radio shouts against these dark-eyed people, how they will ruin our economy, how they will take what they need of us and send it to Mexico or Bolivia or El Salvador or Peru, and they will escalate to violence if they can.
I look at them on the bus benches. This part of the march is finished, some will go back now. It began hours ago.
I do not SEE any violence.
I see grandmas in aprons, abelitas, high school hopefuls, fathers with toddlers on their shoulders, and so many many young sons — can they have a good life? Will they go for the money only and fail in the ghettos? What do you see in there? I see mothers, aunties, young girls with arms around each other without a trace of anything trendy or sexual, and there’s a girl in a Mexican skirt, and for an instant I see — Irish. In shawls, in dirty boots laced up high, the only ones they own. In long skirts, with animals and bundles and children with dirty faces. How we hated them.
And somewhere, skinny and fierce in the back, see my Ruthie, standing with angry eyes and shaking my shoulders to listen.
Alright. Say it again. Perhaps this time, I will understand.
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