So Spoiled

At 9:41 PM, I had just gotten back from teaching my Nutcracker dancers, the house was clean and quiet, humming with the sounds of the dishwasher and the washer and dryer.  Homework and practicing was done, everyone was home, Scott was teaching Tziporah about the Red Sox.  Time to relax and pull out my new book!

Then I got this text from Ari, who likes to text her parents after she's gone to bed:  "What should I do for the science fair?"  My first thought was, "How many more kids do I have to do the science fair with?"  I hate it.

Facetiously, I threw out my most trite, overplayed ideas for science fair project, but Ari didn't know I was being ironic.

This morning, it was down to the wire for the project.  We had to decide before the second bell rang.  I googled "sixth grade science fair projects" on my phone, and after seconds and seconds of laborious research, as Tziporah was running at full bore up the street in her pajamas, we decided to make some egg cartons and see which one is the strongest.  What chaos!  And that's just the deciding part.  Wait until we have eggs breaking all over the place.

Even with all the science fair deliberation and Tziporah deciding she needed to stay up until 11:30 watching baseball and eating Golda's cupcakes, I did dive into my new book last night, "Girl in Translation."  It was so good, I stayed up well past my designated midnight bedtime because I couldn't put it down.

It's the story of a girl about Ari's age and her mother, a music teacher, who emigrate from Hong Kong right before the Chinese takeover in 1997, and end up in a squalid, condemned apartment in the Brooklyn projects.  This little girl, who doesn't speak English, rises to the top of her sixth grade class, even though the teacher is a bigoted bully, and gets a scholarship to the most prestigious private high school in New York.  This is while she works until all hours of the night with her mother in a textile factory.

The girl's mother, speaking of the endless, backbreaking factory hours, says, "Most people never leave this life.  It's probably too late for me, but it's alright.  That's what a parent is for, to do whatever is necessary to give her child a good life."  Even if that means your husband dies young and you move to a foreign country as an indentured servant, live without heat or furniture in a vacant building and work 20 hours a day.

And here I am, bent out of shape at the prospect of coming up with a science project.  Meanwhile, there are mothers who don't even have the luxury of providing a warm home, a hot meal, or even their comforting presence for their children.  It is solely by the grace of God that I even enjoy the extravagance of entertaining thoughts like, "Ugh.  The science fair," as I google ideas on my smart phone.

Here is an excerpt from the book that puts me to shame and fortifies me to try harder for my children.  Keep in mind, this is an eleven-year-old who lives in a rat-infested apartment with broken windows and only a bolt of commercial-grade canvas pulled from a dumpster for a blanket at night.  She has one set of clothing, and she works in a factory from after school until midnight.

It seemed that Mr. Bogart went out of his way to assign homework that was practically impossible for me, although now I think that he was just thoughtless: write a page describing your bedroom and the emotional significance of the items in it (as if I had my own room filled with treasured toys); make a collage about the Reagan administration using pictures from old magazines (Ma bought a Chinese newspaper only once in awhile).  I did my best, sometimes using items I found in the trash, but he didn't understand.  "Halfhearted attempt," he wrote.  "Incomplete.  Careless.  A pictorial collage should not, be definition, include Chinese text."

And she ended up getting a bachelor's degree from Harvard and a master's from Columbia through sheer determination, literally 24-7.

So in the warmth and security of a household which includes two parents and no cockroaches and a pantry full of food, in a place where we all speak the dominant language and have an intrinsic understanding of the social cues around us, where we don't have to think in terms of how many skirts we had to make in order to buy a gallon of milk, I think we can pull off a science experiment, and probably without having to raid a dumpster, too.