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| Our first few moments as a family of five, 12/2010. |
Meimei decides the perfect Thanksgiving dessert for her class is: Brownies! (Brownies?) She makes them almost all by herself and in the morning she decorates them with lots of sprinkles. (OK, I tried to keep the sprinkles in the orange family in some homage to the holiday). When I got home from work she listed by name all four kids who partook.
Jiejie and TJ are upset that Meimei got have her own baking time and did not share the bowl-licking. Mommy will try to make it up to them by enlisting their aid in some projects that will appear on the Thanksgiving table.
A few days ago I was talking about how corporal punishment (and evil name-calling) on the part of teachers used to be common in school, at least the ones I attended. I still remember the sting of the yardstick across the backs of my legs at rest time in Kindergarten when I got too chatty, and the time the second-grade teacher held a girl by the neck and shook her, and the awful thing the sixth-grade teacher said to a chubby boy who ended up being a football star and police officer.
These stories percolated around in TJ's mind for a few days, and last night he told me, "Mama, I go to a bad school in China too." Since he has a strict rule of secrecy about anything related to China, no doubt imposed quite firmly by someone else, I was all ears. Well, the "bad school" seems to have had some physical punishment, but nothing TJ would go into detail about. He did say there was no paper and no crayons, so no drawing, which explains his reluctance to pick up the crayons at home.
"There was only reading and reading," he said. When I asked if the teachers were better in China or in the U.S., the boy who hates school gave a resounding vote to the local elementary school.
"Remember when I only knew how to spell TJ and Sonic," he said. Sonic, as in the hedgehog, was the first word he learned to spell. He is acquiring reading skills slowly and shies away from practicing at home. Now that his tonsils and adenoids and ear tubes have been taken care of, we can see there is still some sort of auditory processing issue that needs to be dealt with as part of the package of of help TJ will need to get him caught up with his peers. He is also starting to sense that he is behind is slightly younger sister and often comments about what grade people are in, a fact he seemed oblivious to before.
Then he started reminiscing dreamily about the candies and (white, flat round?) cookies of China that he got at a little store, and that was the end of the sharing of significant details of his past, or maybe it was the beginning? As those days in China dissolve in his memory, we feel we need to mine his thoughts for details we can piece together into narratives he may want to hear when he is older. But maybe the past was fuzzy or painful or bitter, and the elusive sweetness of the flat, white cookie will be the remembrance he clings to.
"The toy store," said the teacher. "How nice."
