Living Room Diplomacy, Part I (For Paul)

Before the school year started in September, I called the homes of the incoming 9th-graders who would be in my Advisory Class, and I scheduled times with the students and their families when we could sit down and talk, human to human, in their homes. On an educational level, I did this because I will work with the kids in my Advisory class for the next four years. I will see them get caught doing drugs on campus, get 4.0s and 1.0s, experience heartbreak and cause it, love teachers and hate them, fail a test, flee to the bathroom to nurse a popped bleeding zit, act unintentionally revealingly cocky, be bashful, write startling beautiful, cry, rage, and learn. I want to make sure that I can communicate with these students and their families, in any situation, in a way that feels real, empathetic, sincere, and caring, traits I feel lacking in most American conversations, or at least most of the American conversations I'm part of.

But it wasn't just from an educational vantage that I did this. I did this also because I knew that until I saw the lives of my students--lives as seen through their living rooms--I wouldn't understand them as I should. By not understanding where they came from, how they live everyday, I couldn't truly love them, and they could never love me. I knew that once I could visualize and hear and smell their origins, I could understand their behaviors in the class. I would understand their mouthing off, their teasing, their modesty, their playfulness, their confusions, rage, quittings, and I could reach out to them patiently and compassionately, as a Teacher should, and help.

So, in late August, I visited the homes of my students in SeaTac, the poorest city in King County. I learned quickly, from the vantage of my Honda, that half my advisory class lives within eight blocks of each other in a kingdom of shoddy apartment complexes along an avenue that just sounds faraway from anything: 216th, pronounced by the students as two-sixteenth. Though the neighborhood doesn't have the menace of poor neighborhoods in the 80s, it still reeks of 80s-esque inequity and forgottenness, of immigration and hard luck, and when I walk in a neighborhood like this one, I think it's no coincidence that our current economic disparity started in 1979, the year of a different kind of Cultural Revolution, the year we began to defend the Rich more than the Poor. Those with money live in the 21st-century now. Those without money are still, to an astonishing extent, frozen in the 20th.

The streets around 2-16th are lined with shoddy cars, as if the Cash for Clunkers program simply turned around and dropped off the vehicles here. Many of the cars have had piecemeal pimping done to them. An '85 Cavalier will have tinted windows; a '91 CRX will have rims that were cool seven years ago. Litter doesn't exactly tumbleweed down the sidewalks, but there is a grittiness, an unkemptness to the streets, as if a street sweeper has never ventured down this way (no tax revenue!), as if this is neighborhood where no one sticks around long enough to care too much about it anyway.

And that is part of it.

These are the homes of American wanderers. These are the homes of refugees, of those trying yet another fresh start, homes of the undocumented, the disenchanted, the addicted, the hard working, the Americans that I think no political party truly thinks about because these are the homes whose living rooms few visit. You either move up and out of this neighborhood, or you move to another. But you don't stick around too long. This neighborhood is the dark side of American individualism, of picking one's self up by the bootstraps, of kicking government out of our lives. No one loves this place; no one really wants to be here. This neighborhood is one of consequences of our national myth of meritocracy.

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And yet...

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The first home I visited belonged to the Ahmed's. I stomped up a decrepit outdoor stairwell of an apartment building whose landlord was clearly derelict, knocked on the door, and when it opened, was astonished at the Shangri-la that existed like a healthy heart in the body of a leper. My soon-to-be-student, Amino, stood in the doorway, smiling, and as I stepped in (the first step I'd ever taken into the home of a Muslim family) I awed at the beautiful purple rugs that lined the walls and ceiling. Long brown rugs cushioned the floor and most definitely covered nastily historic carpets. A long couch lined one wall, and there sat, barefoot and legs curled under, in a lovely, flowy, violet hijaab, Amino's mother, a woman who gave off an instant energy of wisdom, patience, and love of family. The home smelled of patchouli. This apartment--which felt more inviting and comfortable than homes I've entered in Madison Park or Queen Anne--reminded me of my mom. My mom has an aesthetic of Coziness. She is a great lover of Aromas, ch'i, pretty sheets draped down, candlelight and shells, and barefeet. I love this aesthetic about my mom--no stranger to poverty, either--and I loved entering this home. Quite suddenly and powerfully, in a matter of maybe 120 seconds, the Ahmed's were no longer "Other" to me; they were a human family. They were like my family.

I sat down. We talked about the upcoming school year, Amino translating, her mother never meeting my eyes, as custom, I learned. We talked about what Amino could expect in terms of her schedule and homework, and her mother's concerns and questions were the concerns and questions of all mothers. What supplies would she need? How could she get a hold of me if she needed to? Amino wasn't sure where she'd catch her school bus. I told her I'd get that information. I reminded them to turn in the Free & Reduced Lunch form. Did they understand how to fill it out? No? Then let's do it together.

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From there I went to the home of Rodolfo, a 15-year-old boy who lives with his 28-year-old brother. I sat in the living room talking to his brother who makes money from maintaining middle America, and while he spoke in a Spanish unedited for me, Rodolfo sat smiling (a gringo teacher in my home!), and saying yes to everything his brother and I said. (Yes, I will make sure to get a Spanish-English dictionary. Yes, I will use an organizer to keep track of what I need to do. Yes, I will be on time.) Several little kids (sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, neighbor kids) ran through the living room, falling, tickling, singing, squirming. Rodolfo's brother, stepping over the horde on his way to the kitchen, asked if I wanted a Sunkist, and I said yes please. While it was just me and Rodolfo, I mentally noted how clean the home was. Both of the homes I'd visited were much cleaner than my place. I asked Rodolfo why he came to the United States. He said to learn English, to learn more. I thought to myself how strange it would be to live without a parent at the age of 15. He added in Spanish, "I guess that's why I'm here." He smiled and looked at the mass of little kids on the carpet wistfully. I sensed it then and confirmed it later: Rodolfo is a teenage boy and, de facto, a goofball, and he really really misses his mom.

Students in my Advisory class recently wrote letters to themselves to be opened in June. I saw that Rodolfo wrote to himself, "It's been a year since you saw Mama but maybe you will see her this summer and then you will be okay."

Rodolfo's brother returned with a Sunkist, and his other brother's (who also lives in the house) wife. "I present to you Magdalena." Standing up, I said, "I'm Sean." She said, "And you now know Rodolfo." We all looked down at Rodolfo. He smiled at us and then looked down at his clasped hands and watched them wriggle like newborn puppies.

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Since then, I've sat in the living rooms of many students. I've seen mattresses on the ground in living rooms. I've seen standless early-90s televisions, flat on the carpet. I've drunk several soda from the seats of hard sofas. I've handed out Free & Reduced Lunch forms. I've asked myself many times, "What is this parent like to this child when I'm not here?" I've seen students cry finally and necessarily, in the security of their own homes. I've looked in the eyes of grandmas and said I will always do the best I can.

It's so easy to forget the humanity of someone, to forget their goofiness, their turmoil, their struggle. In our individualism--provided my cellphones, televisions, cars, social networks, headphones, comfort--we can forget about the lives of others. Worse, we can become indifferent. Elie Wiesel writes,

Indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.

But once we go into someone's home, indifference and prejudice and pejoratives start to evaporate, and we the Comfortable regain our own humanity. For me, to go into the living room of a fellow human, I form a bond, and I can't possibly be indifferent. I instantly start to care. It's not about work. It's not about finding an answer to all their child's challenges. It's about trying. It's about beginning another relationship and journey with a fellow of the continent of mankind, this vast, pained, miraculous experience. It's about progressing, together. Existing, together. Caring, together. There's nothing more to this existence than earth and its inhabitants. We serve nothing more and nothing less than that.

Ultimately, it's--and by "it," I mean work, I mean action, relationships, life--it's what we've known since we were children: this whole damn thing is, in fact, about Love.