The Kids Are Not Alright
My older kids had a writing assignment, this week.
We were reading Montague on the High Seas. It's about a little mole who gets washed out of his little hill during a torrential downpour and takes refuge in an abandoned bottle of Five O'Clock. The bottle is washed out to sea and the little mole floats along for days, living off vodka and seaweed. Eventually, he is brought aboard a fishing ship and, after narrowly escaping the one-eyed cat, Barnacles, befriends the other rodents living aboard the ship. Montague devises an ingenious plan and Barnacles is fed his own entrails and the human crew aboard the vessel dies of typhus.
Anyway, the writing assignment took the form of a make-believe adventure story. This is a difficult assignment for everyone concerned. . . on so many levels! As it is, I'd say my grasp of the difference between fact and fiction is tenuous, at best. From my point of view, that's a blessing. But I'm not so naive as to believe everyone can think the way I do and still manage to feed the dog while listening to Johnny Cash.
But the kids. . . They lisve in a country that invests billions and billions and billions of dollars into a foreign economy that spends billions and billions of dollars maintaining a rusted war machine bent on the destruction of their country. . . These damn kids dwell in a country where an authoritarian regime ran things into the ground, got booted out of power, and then blames an imaginary authoritarian regime for running things into the ground in a futile bid to regain power. . . They live in a country where the aforesaid authoritarian regime, three time (and counting) losers, still entertain hopes of retaking the aforesaid foreign country, even though it's on the brink of social collapse. . . And, Jesus, you know damn good and well any kid going to a buxiban in Taiwan has at least one parent with a view of reality skewed toward the surreal. And considering our buxiban. in particular, (what with its rampant lesbianism, casual drug use, and twelve year old boys walking around saying [with proud certainty] "I get much more pussy than foreign-born, English-teaching parasites!"), you find yourself at a loss to explain the difference between fiction and nonfiction.
Where was I? Montague. Most of the kids took the easy way out, on this assignment. That's nothing new. And, just once more, to be clear, what I mean by "easy way out." This time around, the easy way out entailed describing tripped out situations involving raging fires behind closed closet doors, small woodland creatures waving to park-goers, and latently homo erotic encounters with some jerk named "Naruto."
But then there was the new girl. She was bumped up from a class taught across the hall. Very quiet girl. A little shy, but well-liked by the kids in the class. She does her homework, responds when called upon, doesn't ransack my bag, refrains from brandishing her middle-finger. . . no real hassles, from this one.
She handed in a story called The Delicious Apple Pie.
I'm not going to reprint it, here. . . Her writing is actually pretty good for a Taiwanese kid's. And, besides, laughing at another's attempts at getting a point across is a passe sport best enjoyed by those unable to muster anything to say on their own.
The gist of the story was this:
"My Mom got up early one morning and went to the store to buy things to make an apple pie. She went to the store to buy things to make an apple pie and then came home with the things she bought to make the apple pie. My Dad went to the kitchen and helped my Mom make the apple pie. We sat at the table and, after a yummy dinner, ate the apple pie. It was delicious and yummy. A delicious and yummy apple pie, indeed."
After reading it, I knelt down beside the little smart ass. I thought about my Dad. He cooked us a few Sunday dinners, when I was back home. I very clearly remember him making pies. I remember him baking cinnamon rolls on the mornings of holidays. . . All very delicious and yummy. Indeed. Nothing about her story didn't strike me as being even remotely far-fetched.
"Honey," I said. "You do understand there's a difference between real-life stories and make-believe stories. . . right? Fact and fiction, yeah?"
She nodded.
"What in God's name am I to make of this?"
She shrugged.
"Your Mom doesn't make apple pie?"
She shook her head.
"Because you don't have an oven, right?"
She nodded.
"And your Dad doesn't help your Mom in the kitchen?"
She laughed out loud. I saw her tonsils. She brought her wrist to her mouth to hide her smile. Some of her classmates started to chuckle. When what had been said between she and I had been translated into Chinese, the entire class started to laugh. It aroused the attention of the Taiwanese assistant, who was then told, in Chinese, what had been said between she and I. What made it even better was when word spread to the other classes, but by now you quite get the point.
"And you guys don't eat dinner together? At the table? At night?"
More laughter, from all sides. In the fucking streets, even. I had to threaten the little rat-bastards with homework to get them to shut up, this only made those inside and outside the classroom laugh harder.
And then, thanks to an intoxicated trucker answering a phone call which described what had been transpiring in the classroom, a truck loaded with livestock jackknifed in front of the school. Blood ran into the gutters and onto the sidewalk, it spread to the front door, seeped in, and made its way to the little K3'ers.
Just a hellish day at work.
This is an interesting essay written by a guy named . He tries to tie together Phillip K. Dick's Vast Active Living Intelligence System with The Fantasm Soldier Valis videogame franchise. He gives it one hell of a shot.