My International Kids: Lily and Mariko

My International Kids: Lily and Mariko [1]

By Rabbi Corinne Copnick

Hosting international students during the time my mother – who had lived with me for the last ten years — was cared for at a nursing home filled my own home with life, with young people who had dreams for the future. On occasion, some of the students visited the nursing home with me; they offered smiling faces and gentle words to my blind mother.

There was Lily (not her real name), a spunky, “poor little rich girl” from Taiwan who had spent most of her growing up years in boarding schools, and the best thing about her stay in Canada, she announced, was me. “I brought myself up,” she would say.

But her eyes sparkled. She was filled with curiosity about life in North America and wanted to see and know everything. The students all shared comments about their respective hosts, and Lily’s reports about me were so glowing that several of her fellow Taiwanese students made their house my meeting place on many evenings. The language school encouraged its host “families” to act like parents, even held meetings where we could get to know one another and share helpful observations, and so here I was – a surrogate Mom, whose own children were, at that point, living in other cities, making their way in the world. When one of my own daughters visited while Lily was living with me, she was surprised to hear Lily (and sometimes Lily’s friends) calling me “Mom.”

My daughter was also amazed that her new Taiwanese “siblings” always asked for “North American food.” Hot dogs and hamburgers were their preference, so they were very easy to please in the epicurean department. Most of them had lived their young lives in luxurious circumstances, catered to by housekeepers and maids, and had never learned to cook for themselves. They delighted in helping me clear the table and put the dishes in the dishwasher. Sometimes I helped them with their homework.

When they arrived in Toronto, all the Taiwanese girls spoke a precise, formal English, fluent in varying degrees, but they were anxious to talk like “native speakers.” I was really upset that their elite language school was teaching them “American-style” English, so that they would “fit in”: to say (and write!) things like “gonna” and “wanna” and “coulda” and “ya” instead of “going to,” “want to,” “could have,” and “you.”

Lily was fascinated by the new idioms she was absorbing on a daily basis. One evening she graphically demonstrated her latest idiomatic acquisition to me. Opening her mouth wide, she repeatedly moved her fingers back and forth inside this moist cavity, as if she were vomiting.

“Do you know what that means?” she cried excitedly.

“Tell me,” I said faintly.

“It sucks!” she pronounced proudly.

“They’re ruining your English,” I wailed.

She was not as impressed by the rooms of my home, though, as she was by her acquisition of English idioms. Although Lily was amazed at the spacious lawns that surrounded many of the homes in my Toronto neighborhood – in Taiwan, such exterior space is limited – she considered her bedroom at my home “small” in comparison to the spacious room she enjoyed in her parents’ grand apartment in Taiwan.

The holiday greeting card she sent to me when she returned home bore a triumphant “Joy!” on its cover. Inside was this message in carefully inscribed block letters:

“WISH YOU ALL THE BEST ON THE SPECIAL SEASON! SINCE WE MET ON LAST SUMMER, YOU’VE BEEN AN IMPORTANT PERSON IN MY LIFE. TO ME, YOU’RE A THOUGHTFUL MOMMY, A LOVELY FRIEND, A WISEFUL TEACHER. YOU’RE EVERYTHING!!! PLEASE REMEMBER ME, THE GIRL WHO ADMIRE YOU SO MUCH.

LILY.”

I still cry every time I come across her message. Dear Lily, I wish I could have given you a bigger room.

I learned, however, that perception of space is culturally conditioned when Mariko (not her real name) followed Lily as the next student I hosted. She found the room that Lily had occupied huge. Mariko was from a middle class family in Japan, where interior space is compact. In fact, she had never before called a room her own. At night, her family unrolled their tatamis, spread them on the floor, and slept in the same multi-purpose room together. In the morning, they simply rolled them up again. At home, she kept her few belongings in a small chest. At my home, she had a big closet with not much in it.

Unlike Lily, Mariko was an amazing chef and could slice cucumbers, tomatoes, and a variety of vegetables paper thin or into beautiful shapes with an alarmingly big knife in the blink of an eye. She took pride in creating some of the most beautifully crafted salads I have ever seen. But she purchased ready-made, packaged Miso soup at the supermarket. After she returned to Japan, a friend of her family hand-delivered a handsome, electric rice maker as a gift to me and bowed his many thanks on her behalf. And once she was back home, Mariko got a job (ready or not!) teaching first-level English at a Japanese language school.

©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved. Adapted from Corinne Heather Copnick, Cryokid: Drawing a New Map. (New York: iUniverse, 2008). Finalist in Next Gen Awards of Excellence, 2009. Available on Amazon.com.

* * * *

My International Kids: Khaled

My International Kids: Khaled [1]

By Rabbi Corinne Copnick

n Toronto, in the absence of my children when they headed for the American Southwest, I “adopted” a surrogate family. For two years, I consecutively hosted what I called “my international kids,” a “family” of students from a variety of countries. They arrived with student visas that had been arranged in their countries of origin. I gave them my hospitality, my love, and my guidance in a strange land. From each of them I learned more than they learned from me.

My last student was called Khaled [not his real name] – and I would love him most of all. Like my own son. Khaled was from Saudi Arabia, and I was Canadian. He was Muslim, and I was Jewish. Like the other students I had hosted from many lands, he had come to Canada on a student visa to study at a private school catering to international students who wanted to learn English.

“You are so good with the students,” the coordinator cajoled. “If you are not happy, just call us, and we’ll place him elsewhere.”

Only Khaled didn’t know that he was coming to a Jewish home when he arrived at my home, fresh off the plane and obviously agitated because his luggage had apparently been lost and would be delivered to him later by immigration authorities. Every few minutes he kept stepping out of my home to nervously puff on a cigarette – the school had advised him that he could not smoke on my indoor premises.

He was bareheaded (later he wore a baseball cap) at the time and wearing a business suit, white shirt, and tie that were his usual garb during his more formal, first days in Canada. Sweat was glistening on his dark-skinned face, and his eyes darted nervously around, hesitant to look at me directly. His small mustache quivered above his compressed lips. He was twenty-six years old.

I didn’t know then that I was the first unveiled woman, apart from his mother and sisters, with whom he had ever been alone. Or that he had never before met a Jew.

I had struggled with my own doubts about accepting him as a resident in my home when the school had almost begged me to take him in. “We have such trouble in placing Saudis,” the harried housing coordinator explained. “Most of the Saudi students who come to us are from very wealthy families and tend to be somewhat arrogant. They treat the people who house them like servants.” She told me about one Saudi prince who was furious when the father of the hosting family asked him to limit his time on the only computer in the house. “The prince stamped out angrily,” she confided, “and came back a little later with is own newly purchased lap top.”

Khaled was not a prince. He had not travelled internationally. The only places he had ever visited outside of Saudi Arabia, and then only briefly with his father, a music teacher, were the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. He came, he said, from a “middle class” family of Bedouin heritage (cousins seek to marry cousins, and males must pay a bride price)in Saudi Arabia. The combined family income, with each of his eight brothers (several of whom had some degree of sickle cell disease) contributing, came to about $25,000 weekly.

When he sat down on my white-tiled kitchen floor to mix the rice for the meal he had offered to cook for me, it brought home to me the enormous chasm that separated our cultures – Khaled who called me “Mummy.” The worst day in his own mother’s life, she told her sons, was the one she was too sick to make her husband lunch and forgot to phone him not to come home for it.

“He loved her so much,” Khaled said with pride, “that he didn’t beat her.”

* * * *

Soon after I had transplanted myself to California – living now en famille with my daughter and infant grandchild – I received a concerned e-mail message from Khaled. It was 2001, and the 9/11 disaster was filling the world’s media screens.

“How are you, Mummy? Are you okay? How is your family?”

I noted that the return address on the e-mail was blank but replied immediately. “Yes, we are all okay in Los Angeles. Where are you, Khaled?”

“I am still in Toronto, Mum,” he answered. “I am trying to finish my studies.”

“I am glad that we had a chance to get to know and love one another in Toronto,” I responded calmly. “Let us hope for peace in the world, despite this madness.”

The last e-mail I would receive from him read, “They are crazy, Mummy. They kill everything, even peace.”

[1] ©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved. Adapted from Corinne Heather Copnick, Cryo Kid: Drawing a New Map, Los Angeles, (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2008). Finalist, Next Gen Awards of Excellence, 2009. Available from Amazon.com.