The Bench

I have been thinking about whether to share this with you after our recent conversations about my children.

I have hesitated because this is not really a story about my children. I don't want it to be mistaken for one. They are not repeating my childhood, and I don't think the school they are attending is the school I attended. In fact, I know they are getting a safer version of school, and I am grateful for that.

What I want to share is something about the mother who comes into these conversations.

It is time to give verbiage to my third-grade self. To articulate, with appropriately clarifying language, what happened in that classroom.

I am grateful that I can now see some of it in context. The problem was not Texas.

The people who taught me, and truly loved me, gave me a great deal. I owe a great deal to that state. I grew up there. I am from there in ways that are not erased by the things that happened to me there.

But that does not erase the pain I suffered in elementary school.

First grade, second grade, and third grade were all difficult. Second grade was bad too, but in a more subtle institutional way. My teacher was Tejano and had a history of her own. I was seven years old. I did not know enough to understand what Tejano meant, or what Texas had done with its Mexican American children, or how many histories of race, belonging, assimilation, and exclusion could exist inside a classroom.

I only knew that the adults around me seemed to be carrying histories that I could not see.

Texas history is complicated.

So is American history.

My elementary school had only desegregated in 1988. Brown v. Board and Ruby Bridges were therefore not some ancient historical world from my childhood. The distance between those stories and mine was surprisingly small.

I was simply too young to know that I was living inside any of that history.

Third grade was particularly bad.

And it was institutional in a way that I can recognize much more clearly now.

My main teacher that year was from Alabama.

She is dead now, so I can write about her. She died in a crash on the way to Florida in the coming school year, and the school named a driveway after her and had a ceremonial bench erected in the playground.

A granite, engraved bench.

The bench is still there.

I always feel something constrict in my throat when I see that bench on visits home.

Some students went to the wake. It caused a huge stir.

There is something strange about institutional memory. An institution can remember a person as important, beloved, worthy of a memorial. A child can remember the same person as the adult who had power over her and did not use it well.

I am writing this because I want to see patterns. I want to understand what happened to me. I don't want to remain porous to harm simply because I did not have the language for it when it happened.

Turning the other cheek does not mean serving yourself up on a platter for the wolves to devour.

I wrote a little about one particular incident in an essay for MIT. It was a game of tag.

We went to play tag during class hours. The teacher chose to take us to the cement, paved basketball court.

Why?

She was supposed to teach us math, science, etc. What relevance did this game have to that?

She did not take us to the vast grass-covered soccer fields or even the woodchipped play area. She took us to the paved basketball court, where I was slammed into the court in the pretense of a sportsmanlike game of tag.

She chose who would start.

The game ended when I was bleeding on the court.

We went in.

I wasn't hurt badly, but we didn't stop by the school nurse.

I never wrote about how I was the only Hindu child in the classroom. I was also the only vegetarian. Sometimes my lunch would go missing and there was no option in the school cafeteria that I could eat.

There were three of us at the bottom of this class.

The Black girl, who had already lost the stars in her eyes. She happened to be tall and big. She beat anyone up before they could come near an inch of her. Everyone avoided her.

Then there was my Jewish friend, who lived in the same decent area as me. She and her siblings were a tight-knit group. They each had different last names. She would talk to me about her siblings, her mother, her mother's boyfriends, the movies her mother and the boyfriends would watch. Her siblings would sneak peeks at their mother's television from behind the couch.

Some of these stories were my first sex education.

They were also an interesting addition to my vocabulary.

Then there was me.

Target number one.

The teacher expected presents from us for various occasions like Christmas. She would open them all in front of the entire class, making comments.

Pottery Barn!

A local boutique!

Oh wow!

My Jewish friend would give her handmade things. She and her siblings had taken time and care to make those presents.

I had given her something we had brought back from a trip to India, from the Cauvery Arts Emporium.

I don't think she knew what Cauvery was.

There was a female ringleader whom the teacher would egg on in the favorite class sport of humiliating me or one of the other two.

I was target number one.

I was naïve.

I still am, too naïve, in some ways.

But I don't think naïveté has to harden into bitterness. It can become discernment. It can become empowerment. It can become the choice to live with your eyes open.

I won't name the classmate. I have wondered about her as an adult and once curiously looked her up. I think she became a lawyer, perhaps even a judge.

She may have been a victim too.

People carry complicated histories.

Children do too, although they don't yet know what those histories are.

The ringleader used to organize another lunch sport.

The cafeteria consisted of long tables with long benches. I don't know how everyone else knew the timing, but on days when I was wearing an Indian frock, the whole group on my side of the bench would get up in unison and flip the bench.

And laugh at me with my underpants in the air.

Why did it never occur to me to wear tights?

It does now.

I was only seven and didn't have the language to process my experience.

I do now.

As a sheltered only child, I did not have the framework for understanding hierarchies or competition. Competition can be healthy. Hierarchies can sometimes be useful. But there I was, trying to understand a world in which my difference could suddenly become the occasion for everyone else's amusement.

I would cope by talking to that one friend or staring at the clock.

I made a game out of factoring the numbers.

I daydreamed my way out of my body into some kind of fantasy.

This is clearly a tendency that remains until today.

Sometimes it is healthy.

Sometimes you should just wear tights.

Or remember to tie your laces.

When we would line up to go places, the main male bully would fall in line behind me. He would look to see if my shoelace were already undone or wait for them to invariably become loose.

Then he would trip me.

My parents noticed that I looked sad. That I was quiet.

I didn't have language for my experience. All I could say was that I was bullied by these boys.

They requested meetings with the school.

The teacher told them, “Boys will be boys.”

They had a meeting with the male bully's mother. I remember meeting her. She was apologetic.

We had only moved to Texas two years before, from California. In California, I had tested well on some performance test. My parents thought that perhaps moving me to a more academically challenging class would improve the situation.

The counselor who was also part of these meetings insinuated that my parents were unnecessarily pushing. There were various insinuations that perhaps I wasn't bright in the way they thought I was.

Nothing was said directly.

A lot was implied.

Years later, after graduating from MIT, I wrote to one of these people, and I received what I feel was a very sincere reply. I can see now how differences in culture, perception, and systems would have made it difficult to know what to do to help me.

I went back and reread that letter.

In it, I was trying to prove my worth with my intellectual accomplishments.

I am not doing that now.

I honor that seven-year-old child.

There were adults who did see me.

My main teacher that year was responsible for science and math. Her co-teacher was responsible for English, language, and arts. She quietly tried to toughen me up. She had me enter the spelling bee.

I still can't spell for nuts.

But I tried.

The next year I was put in a program to prevent bullying. I had a teacher whom I loved. I made her all sorts of gifts. I thought she loved me.

Probably she was burnt out. She had been given a motley crew of misfits like me.

When I went to visit her when I was in middle school, she didn't remember me.

She was incredibly patient.

It still hurt.

My mother that year had also taken a job that required fewer hours. I loved coming home to my mother.

Years and years later, when my name came in the newspaper when I was graduating high school, the English, language, and arts co-teacher remembered me.

I remember thinking:

Oh.

She actually liked me.

She saw me.

It now seems to me that perhaps, more accurately, she had a decent conscience. She was bothered by the treatment I had faced.

I will leave it there.

The PE teacher at that elementary school was also a consistent, year-after-year version of the bench problem. She used to look at me like I was a worm.

She had thick, straight red hair, which she held back with a band in a high ponytail.

We had these exams where we had to run a mile in a certain time, do push-ups, pull-ups, measure body fat percentage. She sometimes conducted these exams unobtrusively.

I remember having my body measured with a pincer in a pretty visible area where the whole class could see.

Like, look at this fatso.

Oh well.

It is what it is.

Except that I have spent a long time thinking about what children are supposed to learn from experiences like that.

I more than survived.

I remained kind. I remained honest. I held fast to ideals.

The part of me that strived at MIT was a techno-optimist. In Cambridge I found the soft, fleshly, emotional part of me.

In both places, I made amazing friends.

And I have come to think differently about performance.

I don't associate performance with happiness.

That doesn't mean I don't value achievement. I do.

Achievement can give a person confidence. It can open doors. There is real pleasure in becoming good at something. There is a particular kind of happiness in seeing that your own effort has changed what you can do.

I don't want to deprive my children of that happiness.

What I don't want is for achievement to become the price of being loved, or a substitute for connection, friendship, peace, or happiness.

My own accomplishments have given me many things. They have not, by themselves, produced the simple, harmonious life I might once have imagined they would.

So when I talk with teachers about handwriting, focus, phonics, or performance, there is sometimes more history sitting in the room than is immediately visible.

I know what it is like for the output of a child to become confused with the child herself.

I also know how much genuine joy can come from mastery.

I want my children to know both things.

I want them to be able to work hard at something and experience the pleasure of becoming better at it because they worked at it.

I just don't want them to believe that performance is proof of worth.

And I don't want to erase my own history in order to become the mother of children who are doing well.

My children are not me.

They are also not the seven-year-old child I was.

Most of the danger in our recent family experience has been directed toward me rather than toward them. But children don't live in a vacuum. What happens to a parent affects children, even when the children themselves are safe.

They have responded differently.

I don't need to explain every difference through my childhood.

What I do know is that I have become unusually attentive to the possibility that a child can be carrying something they don't yet have language for.

That is why I am telling you about the bench.

Not because I think the school my children attend is that school.

It isn't.

I know that.

I see the difference.

I see it especially when a teacher notices something that could easily be dismissed and instead asks what might help.

I am grateful that my children are getting this version of school.

I was an Indian, Hindu child in Texas.

I didn't need to stop being Indian in order to become Texan. And I don't think being Indian meant I had no responsibility to become curious about the place in which I lived.

I think this is part of what education ought to do.

Not erase where you came from.

Not trap you inside it either.

Become curious.

Learn the place you are in. Learn the people around you. Take what is beautiful and useful wherever you find it. Keep what is precious from where you came from. Let the worlds enlarge one another.

I don't think that is assimilation.

I think it is becoming larger.

And perhaps that is also why the photograph of brown college students cheering for their university feels so strange to me when someone looks at them and sees foreigners.

They are doing one of the most ordinary, quintessentially American things imaginable.

They are participating.

They belong.

They have not had to become less Indian to do it.

And perhaps belonging was always the thing I was trying to understand as a child.

Who gets to belong?

Who gets to decide?

Who gets remembered?

The bench remains.

I can sit on it now.

I don't have to forgive it.

I don't have to forget it.

I don't have to pretend the child who remembers it was mistaken.

I can simply sit there, understand a little more about the histories that surrounded her, and then go home.

Life is complicated.

It's okay to cry.

You may encounter people with benches.

Hopefully there is no chewing gum on the top.