when she was at university my mother would go to the workers’ dormitories at taman jurong to teach night classes. some of the students had heard that the workers wanted adult education classes, so my mother volunteered (she was, afterall, a chinese linguistics/literature major). only 6 students came to her first class, but after a while word spread and more people came (some even brought their family members.) soon she was teaching a regular evening class of more than 20 students. what did you teach them, i asked. grammar? writing? i knew most of them had only 3-4 years of primary education and were poor readers. “oh, you know, we read 朱自清 and 鲁迅, things like that, 一些比较感性的散文 — of course, they couldn’t read all the characters, so i sometimes read to them, and explained the meaning and history of words, and we talked about the works.” i was a little stunned — you taught them literature? and indeed my mother’s selections were elegant, moving essays and stories, and she encouraged them to write as well, and helped them correct their language and style. (if i didn’t say, in the 80s my mother was at MOE and wrote chinese textbooks — i can see now, in her selections for her night classes, some of what went into those textbooks — that is, she didn’t condescend and pick easy texts, she chose what she thought was the best literature and made it accessible for them…)when my mother graduated the night classes should have ended, but the workers said they wanted to keep on with their studies. so once a week after work (her first job was in chinese collection acquisitions at the then new toa payoh library.) so she would travel to jurong to teach, and then go all the way home to katong by public bus (the ride took 80 minutes.) it being late when her class ended, the workers would insist on walking with her to the bus stop and wait for her to get on. then they would all wave to her as the bus pulled out. “再见！郑老师 再见!” (she said all the bus drivers always shook their heads and complained in hokkien: “so many of you flag down my bus, but only one person gets on ah?!“) this arrangement lasted another year until a combination of mysterious landlord troubles and factory closures (i think) saw the classes disbanded permanently.
the reason i was thinking about my mother and the night classes was because one of the workers she’d taught, all those years ago, came to visit tonight, still deferential, still using the honorific to ask for her when i answered the phone this morning.
i think that is the image i will always have in my mind of my mother teaching night school — of a very young woman (who, from old photos, looked rather like i did at that age, but livelier) — waving goodbye from a bus at a small crowd of men and women all waving back at her and calling 再见， 老师再见！what strange dynamics — she was barely 21 then, a mere undergraduate, and these factory workers she taught were already middle-aged, who came faithfully to class to hear the wee chit of a girl talk about beautiful essays because they cared about self-improvement. what was i doing at 20? nothing as meaningful as that, nothing that had changed anyone’s life in that way. and even today, would i simply go out to the dormitories for construction workers and commit to teaching a weekly literature class? i suspect i couldn’t do that, and certainly not for as long as she did.
but i do think my mother is pretty cool. i wish i were more like her — having that drive and caring about other people and doing whatever she thought was meaningful and not giving two hoots what anyone else thought, not even self-conscious. when she turned 50 she decided she would get herself a masters in counselling and social work. it took her almost five years to do that, part-time, because her B.A. was not in the social sciences and she had to get the necessary pre-requisites, and also to clock the clinical supervision hours. (she was the oldest person to graduate in her class.) i remember some unsympathetic people saying to me at the time: “really? at your mother’s age, surely getting a masters is not really a serious career move. she’s just doing that “for fun”, right?” i did not repeat that to the mother of course, and i seethed inwardly. but the mother, if she had heard, would probably not have let it bother her. for when she decided to go back to school, she explained it to me and the father this way: “well i’m only fifty, so that means i have at least another 20 years of active life ahead of me! there’s still so much i can do!” so if i do sometimes lament being 10 years older than everyone in law school, i also suspect that my mother must think i’m completely nuts — by her reckoning i have decades of useful life ahead of me, what am i complaining about?
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