Found Poem

STORY 1 Elizabeth Wong (b. 1958) "has worked as a reporter for the Hartford Courant
and the San Diego Tribune" (Crossing Cultures: Readings for Composition, 3rd ed., H. & M.
Knepler [NY: Macmillan. 1991] p. 21). Wong, whose mother insisted she learn Chinese,
describes her early attitudes toward the language:

Being ten years old, I had better things to learn than ideographs copied
painstakingly in lines that ran right to left from the tip of a moc buc

a real ink pen that had to be held in an awkward way if blotches were to be avoided.
After all, I could do the multiplication tables, name the satellites of Mars, and
write reports on “Litt1e Women" and "B1ack Beauty.” Nancy Drew, my favorite
book heroine, never spoke Chinese.
The language was a source of embarrassment. More times than not, I had
tried to disassociate myself from the nagging loud voice that followed me wherever
I wandered in the nearby American supermarket outside Chinatown. The voice
belonged to my grandmother, a fragile woman in her seventies who could out-shout
the best of the street vendors. Her humor was raunchy, her Chinese rhythmless,
patternless. It was quiet, it was loud, it was unbeautiful. It was not like the quiet,
lilting romance of French or the gentle refinement of the American South. Chinese
sounded pedestrian. Public.
In Chinatown, the comings and goings of hundreds of Chinese on their daily
tasks sounded chaotic and frenzied. I did not want to be thought of as mad, as
talking gibberish. When I spoke English, people nodded at me, smiled sweetly, and
said encouraging words. Even people in my own culture would cluck and say that I’d
do well in life. "My, doesn't she move her lips fast," they would say meaning that I’d
be able to keep up with the world outside of Chinatown.
My brother was even more fanatical about speaking English. He was
especially hard on my mother, criticizing her, often cruelly, for her pidgin speech –
smatterings of Chinese scattered like chop suey in her conversation. "It's not
'What it is.' Mom," he'd say in exasperation. "It's 'What is it!..." Sometimes Mom
might leave out an occasional "the" or "a" or perhaps a verb of being. He would stop
her in mid-sentence: "Say it again, Mom. Say it right." When he tripped over his own
tongue, he’d blame it on her: "See. Mom, it's all your fault. You set a bad example."
What infuriated my mother most was when my brother cornered her on her
consonants, especia11y "r." My father had played a crue1 joke on Mom by assigning
her an American name that her tongue wouldn't allow her to say. No matter how
hard she tried. "Ruth" always ended up "Luth" or "Roof."

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 Found Poem
STORY 2

Sir Robert Hart, as Inspector-General of Chinese customs one of the most influential
Westerners in late 19th century China, was born in 1835 in a small town near Belfast,
Northern Ireland. After achieving success in modern languages at Queen's College,
Belfast, he found employment in the British Consular Service in China. In 1854, he began
his study of Chinese in Ningpo. His progress in spoken and written forms of the language,
which was to culminate in a formidable command, is described in Sterling Seagrave's
Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China (NY: Knopf. 1992). pp.
149-50.

He [Hart] had been in Ningpo for only two months and his Chinese lessons
were not far advanced, but he was determined. He met an American Presbyterian
missionary, W. A. P. Martin, with whom he became lifelong friends. Martin chose to
live not with his fellow Protestants across the river but in a ghetto of the old city.
His rapport with the Chinese and his command of their language impressed Hart and
encouraged him to master both Mandarin and Ningpo dialects and to grasp the rules
of Chinese etiquette that determined the success or failure of all official and social
contacts in the Middle Kingdom. Hart had engaged a Chinese tutor for seven dollars
a month – “queer looking old fellow ... he can let down the corners of his eyes and
the corresponding corners of his mouth in a most peculiar manner.” But he needed
more help than this. "The language is so very peculiar – so much omitted that is
expressed in our language, and so many words brought in merely to turn a sentence
well, that it is very laborious work indeed to get along.” To take the pain out of
learning, his Chinese tutor suggested that Hart might buy a concubine and study
the local dialect with her. “Here is a great temptation,” wrote Hart. “Now, some of
the China women are very good looking: You can make one your absolute possession
for from 50 to 100 dollars and support her at a cost of 2 or 3 dollars per month. ...
Shall I hold out – or sha11 I give way?"
By early May he had a sleep-in dictionary, his concubine, Ayaou. He had just
turned twenty; Ayaou was barely past puberty but was wise beyond her years.
Thanks to her his life settled into a quiet routine and he was able to get on with his
consular duties and his Chinese studies, quick1y becoming fluent in Mandarin and
Ningpo dialect.
His liaison with Ayaou lasted for a decade. By the time he was thirty she had
borne him three children, all of whom lived to maturity.

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 Found Poem
STORY 3

Richard Rodriguez (b. 1944) is an outspoken assimilationist and critic of bilingual education.
His autobiography Hunger of Memory (1982), is read by those interested in language
education. In this excerpt from that book, he contrasts public and private language and
shows the acute linguistic awareness of young children (anthologized in Crossing Cultures:
Readings for Composition, 3rd ed., H. & M. Knepler [NY: Macmillan. 1991] p. 424).

In public, my father and mother spoke a hesitant, accented, not always grammatical
English. And they would have to strain – their bodies tense – to catch the sense of what
was rapidly said by los gringos. At home they spoke Spanish. The language of their Mexican
past sounded in counterpoint to the English of public society. The words would come
quietly, with ease. Conveyed through those sounds was the pleasing, soothing, consoling
reminder of being at home.
During those years when I was first conscious of hearing, my mother and father
addressed me only in Spanish; in Spanish I learned to reply. By contrast, English (ingles),
rarely heard in the house, was the language I came to associate with gringos. I learned my
first words of English overhearing my parents speak to strangers. At five years of age, I
knew just enough English for my mother to trust me on errands to stores one block away.
No more.
I was a listening child, careful to hear the very different sounds of Spanish and
English. Wide-eyed with hearing, I'd 1isten to sounds more than words. First, there were
English (gringos) sounds. So many words were still unknown that when the butcher or the
lady at the drugstore said something to me, exotic polysyllabic sounds would bloom in the
midst of their sentences. Often, the speech of people in public seemed to me very loud,
booming with confidence. The man behind the counter would literally ask, “What can I do
for you?” But by being so firm and so clear, the sound of his voice said that he was a
gringo, he belonged in public society.
I would also hear then the high nasal notes of middle-class American speech. The
air stirred with sound. Sometimes, even now, when I have been traveling abroad for
several weeks, I will hear what I heard as a boy. In hotel lobbies or airports, in Turkey or
Brazil, some Americans will pass, and suddenly I will hear it again – the high sound of
American voices. For a few seconds I will hear it with pleasure, for it is now the sound of
my society – a reminder of home. But inevitably – already on the flight headed for home –
the sound fades with repetition. I will be unable to hear it anymore.

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 Found Poem
STORY 4

Nicolas Slonimsky (1894-) has led a polyglot life. He is the author and/or editor of many
reference books on music. An immigrant to the United States, he was armed with a number
of languages including Russian and French, but his lack of English was a drawback. The
following excerpts, taken from his memoir Perfect Pitch: A Life Story (New York: Oxford,
1988, pp. 82, 87), attest to Slonimsky's good ear.

My great worry was that I spoke no English. I got an English conversation book and
memorized some dialogue in it: “Hello, old boy – you seem to be out of sorts. I came to
cheer you up.” How can a boy be old? In my English-French dictionary a boy was garçon.
And why cheer up? Was the old boy so sick he could not get up by himself? I translated
‘out of sorts' as 'dehors des sorties' – outside of the sorties. Then I tackled irregular
plurals. I learned that the plura1 of sheep was sheep, but that the plura1 of cow was kine.
I also memorized collective nouns for animals: a pride of lions, an exultation of larks, a
skulk of foxes, a volery of birds, a bed of clams, a charm of goldfinches, a knot of toads,
and a gaggle of geese. ... And the pronunciation! Even before learning the most elementary
words, I already knew European jokes about English; the worst was that 'ghoti' was
pronounced 'fish' (‘gh’ as in cough, 'o' as in women, ' ti' as in nation). The most intractable
sound of all was the diphthong ‘th’. This unnatural phoneme had two varieties, the hard one
and the soft one. I knew that in order to articulate this sound I had to stick my tongue
between my teeth. What civilized nation would accept a language which requires sticking
out your tongue every time you use the definite article?
Everybody in Rochester tried to teach me English, which was in an embryonic
stage of deve1opment in 1924. I avoided using the dictionary but proceeded to learn the
language as if it were some new extinct dialect... A serious impediment in my progress was
the enthusiastic adoption of Hogan and others in my Rochester entourage of my own brand
of English, which they thought was 'awfully cute', much as British society adopted the
‘small talk’ of the heroine in Shaw's Pygmalion. I used to say, for instance, that I saw
something with my 'proper eyes', which is perfectly all right in Chaucer or Milton, but
hardly in Rochester, New York; this gallicism was picked up along with my other
aberrations as some sort of baby talk.

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 Found Poem
STORY 5

Maxine Hong Kingston (graduated U. C. Berkeley, 1962) is both a writer of fine English
prose and an English teacher. In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts
(NY: Vintage Books, 1977, pp. 191-92, 193-94), she recalls the painful silences of a bilingual
childhood.

When I went to kindergarten and had to speak English for the first time, I became
silent. A dumbness – a shame – still cracks my voice in two, even when I want to say
"hello" casually, or ask an easy question in front of the check-out counter, or ask
directions of a bus driver. I stand frozen, or I hold up the line with the complete,
grammatical sentence that comes squeaking out at impossible length. "What did you
say?" says the cab driver, or "Speak up," so I have to perform again, only weaker
the second time. A telephone call makes my throat bleed and takes up that day's
courage. It spoils my day with self -disgust when I hear my broken voice skittering
out into the open. It makes people wince to hear it. I’m getting better, though.
Recently I asked the postman for special-issue stamps; I’ve waited since childhood
for postmen to give me some at their own accord. I am making progress, a little
every day.
Reading out loud was easier than speaking because we did not have to make
up what to say, but I stopped often, and the teacher would think I'd gone quiet
again. I could not

understand “I.” The Chinese “I” has seven strokes, intricacies. How could
the

American "I," assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the
middle so straight. Was it out of politeness that this writer left off strokes the
way a Chinese has to write her own name small and crooked? No, it was not
politeness; "I" is a capital and "you" is lower-case. I stared at that middle line and
waited so long for its black center to resolve into tight strokes and dots that I
forgot to pronounce it. The other troublesome word was "here," no strong
consonant to hang on to, and so flat, when “here” is two

mountainous ideographs. The teacher, who had already told me

every day
how to read "I" and "here," put me in the low corner under the stairs again, where
the noisy boys usually sat.

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