Megan H response: On Austrian Soil

[Anonymous]

#753

Well, this won’t be superbly organized, for reasons that my strong reactions are split between thoughts about pedagogy and an unexpectedly strong personal relation to the memoir’s questions about identity and culture:

1. On teaching: “Teaching is the enactent of human values” (95). I was surprised to find that I related to and agreed with Hans’ comment in Chapter 4: “‘…I am not in the business of making better human beings. I want my students to succeed, but their values and their humanity are not my concern'” (47). At the same time, I do not believe that it is possible for the two matter to be separate. I know that I want them to be, which is probably evasive of deeper, unsolvable philosophical and existential questions. But I think that’s just a response to the problem of being one’s “whole self” in the classroom — I have been plagued by the question, especially in the last year, whether a teacher’s own level of personal development can inhibit his/her ability to fulfill the role of teacher in the classroom, especially in matters of guiding students to find their own voices and encouraging them to deeper levels of inquiry. (The old “Those who can’t do, teach” adage tends to haunt me). I always wonder: if a teacher feels undeveloped/underdeveloped in his/her own voice or off track in their own journey of inquiry, are they capable of being an effective teacher, aside from fulfilling the minimum requirements of explaining material and answering factual questions? Can they, but also, should they?

2. On cultures of silence: While I intellectually understood the historical and social influences behind the teachers’ initial tendencies towards silence and suppression of certain questions, I mostly read the novel as a private allegory for many tendencies and characteristics that have affected my life. Silence can be more than a product of shyness or a matter of being a quiet person, which is clearly addressed in the openly honest depiction of the teachers’ communication habits and the frank deconstruction of how culture and society can quell one’s voice through learned habit and also heritage. While reading, I understood this in more ways than the intellectual.

3. I might as well include a short note I began when first reading the book, addressed to you, Sondra. I meant to clean it up for clarity and arrive at some grand conclusion or philosophcial points, but my train stopped.
I’m reading your memoir while on one of Korea’s new bullet trains, traveling from a southern town near the coast back to the capital of Seoul where I’m staying with my Korean American friend, the one who invited me here to visit her. In the beginning chapters, I’ve noted your teenage self’s sense of estrangement from your heritage for the sake of passing and fitting in. The language captures your ambivalence about identifying with a minority culture within a larger mainstream culture that most Americans feel immersed in and feel compelled to be a part of. Then there’s a shift in your perspective when visiting and walking on a land that has so affected and helped define your past (and so the present, too). In parts, it is difficult to read, in the sense that looking closely at something true or particularly reflective of one own’s personal truth is difficult. I’m nearing the close of a short but loaded stay in Korea, also two weeks long, and it’s my first (since birth). The last five days have been spent traveling to smaller towns where few, if any, people speak or understand English. Of course they begin looking at me and speaking Korean. I’ve found that I assert my American-ness, or at least my New Yorkness, more strongly and obviously here. Maybe it’s similar to your need to be truthful about your Jewish identity while in Austria. I think that when you’re in a place where you feel so very different, you’re driven to give that difference a name. (4/15/15)

[Sondra Perl]

#757

Hi Megan,
I am struck by your willingness to share how my story has brought you to a place of real introspection about your relationship to your Korean identity, to your own silence and also to what sounds like your own questions about your readiness or competence to be a teacher who guides others. I do think learning to teach is a lifelong journey as is coming to terms with and embracing who we are. For sure, my own Jewishness was highlighted in Austria in ways it never was in the US. But more important was allowing myself to turn towards what was moving in me and to write about it so that I could see it more clearly. Even when that was very hard.
It sounds as if you are embarking on this process for yourself.
Thanks for letting us all in on it.

[Sondra Perl]

#807

Dear Megan,
Your sense of asserting your American-ness and New Yorkness when in Korea, especially when you felt linguistically isolated, struck a chord for me. I too sometimes feel as though it takes overwhelming difference to make me feel like part of a national, religious, or cultural group. Normally, all I can see are the differences that set me apart from every group I (should) belong to.
I get the sense from your writing that you don’t (yet) know yet how you feel about being an American New Yorker. I also wonder how all of this is “translating” now that you’re back in New York.

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