As an ESOL tutor, Jean Gordon ’87 Kocienda has learned valuable lessons herself.
Despite the high cost of living, the San Francisco Bay Area’s diversity and vibrant job market make it a magnet for refugees and immigrants. They arrive by the planeful into SFO, exhausted but hopeful. They have escaped war, famine, political persecution, and sometimes decades in refugee camps to make it this far, but before they even set down their bags, they must contend with a new set of worries. Besides housing and food, they need work permits, driver’s licenses, and jobs in a region where the median income for a family of four is more than $180,000, according to the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Their children must be enrolled in school at grade level, regardless of their English ability.
Immigrants and refugees have been arriving into ports like San Francisco for generations. On Christmas Day 1941, my then-7-year-old father, along with his siblings and mother, fled Honolulu after Pearl Harbor was bombed, leaving my grandfather behind. They had only recently moved to Hawaii from the Philippines, looking over their shoulders at the gathering clouds of war. When they arrived in San Francisco, they were met by International Red Cross volunteers, who helped them find a place to live and gave them warm clothes to wear (they were shivering in their Hawaii cottons). When my grandmother became ill, my father and his siblings were cared for by strangers for months. My family’s enduring gratitude, and their fascination with global cultures, were communicated to me. I grew up wanting to travel the world, speak a foreign language, and live in faraway places.
Forty-five years after my father’s family received that help, I participated in the Japan Study Group as a Colgate undergraduate. I will always remember how it felt to be surrounded by strangers speaking to me full tilt in a language I did not understand. On the train ride to my new home in Osaka, when my homestay mother saw that my eyes were filled with tears, she patted my hand and repeated, “dai-jo-bu.” At the time I did not understand her words, but the warm smile communicated enough. It meant, “everything is going to be all right.” Score another lasting win for the kindness of strangers.
I have been a volunteer tutor of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) with the nonprofit Refugee and Immigrant Transitions (RIT) for the past 13 years. RIT welcomes people to the Bay Area who have sought refuge, helping them to thrive in our shared communities. With RIT, I have worked with families from Myanmar, China, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ukraine. It is not an overstatement to say the experience has changed my life. I could not have sat in their kitchens, struggled with them over homework and registration forms, and held babies while moms took showers, without becoming emotionally involved.
Many RIT students are women who speak little to no English, stuck in their apartments with small children. Most of them have no transportation, no daycare, and no income, so they cannot take advantage of the many ESOL classes offered at community colleges and libraries around the Bay Area. Making friends is a challenge, and they are often lonely and isolated. They do their best.
Here’s an example: When I first met Thang Suan and his family in 2013, he and his wife, Mang, had recently fled ethnic violence in Myanmar. My initial focus was their oldest daughter, a charming second grader who needed homework help, but I soon found myself doing schoolwork with all the kids — there are six of them now. We subtracted and multiplied fractions, learned the alphabet, and wrote book reports. We have cranked out too many science fair projects to count, and the kids have grown up before my eyes. That second grader is a young lady now, a senior in high school. Thang still works as a custodian on the night shift at a university. He leaves for work in the evening and gets home in the morning as the kids are getting ready for school. His family is harmoniously squashed into a three-bedroom apartment a stone’s throw from Route 101, the noisy main artery cutting through Silicon Valley. I doubt he ever gets a full eight hours of sleep. Still, he is irrepressibly optimistic.
“One of my happiest days was when I got a car,” he says with his big smile. “It was such a feeling of freedom.” He chuckles when he describes his first months in California. “We didn’t even know how to sleep in beds or cook with a stove,” he says. “We cooked over a fire back home.”
He faces new challenges now. They need a house but cannot hope to buy or even rent one at market prices. His oldest daughters are now thinking about college, and that requires navigating the bureaucracy of student loans and scholarships. “Sometimes we need to talk about complicated things, but my children’s English is better than our native language (Chin). We can understand each other most of the time, but we have trouble communicating on a deeper level.” His faith, family, and community give him strength, though. “I’m proud to be an American citizen,” he says. “This is a great country, and I am thankful to be here every day.”
Within a few weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, families began arriving in the Bay Area from Kyiv, Odesa, and the Donbas. Many of them crossed into the United States from Mexico, some of them stopping at BayMarin Community Church, which had opened its doors to Ukrainians in need. The church was looking for an ESOL tutor, so I packed up my alphabet flash cards and drove to San Rafael, Calif.
One of my new students is a young woman named Halyna, who told me sadly that she had to leave behind the online marketing business she had painstakingly built in Rivne, Ukraine. She arrived in the U.S. last fall with no work and no place to live, expecting a baby. She is now rebuilding her company here in the U.S. while working on a college certificate in digital marketing, learning English as fast as she can, and raising a bright-eyed new American citizen. Her roommate, Ksenia, also a single mom, is building a massage therapy business here.
“It is not an overstatement to say the experience has changed my life.”
Jean Gordon ’87
Here are a few things I have learned from this experience:
— Borscht calls for fresh sorrel; chicken kabobs benefit from a soaking in onion juice. Let’s face it, food is a universal way of expressing love.
— It is nearly impossible to live in the U.S. without a car. Public transportation in the Bay Area is terrible. Without wheels, getting to doctor’s appointments, school, work, and the grocery store are major problems. A driver’s license is an essential form of identification. Cars are a major, ongoing expense, and don’t even think of getting into an accident.
— Moving to a cheaper part of the country is harder than it sounds. In my experience, most refugees are reluctant to move far once they put down roots in a new place. After the trauma of fleeing from their home countries, they wince at the idea of starting over again, even if it could save them money.
— Refugees want the same things that we do, including dignity, independence, and the pursuit of happiness. They want to take their kids to Disneyland; they want to own homes. They want meaningful jobs and reasonable pay for their work. They don’t want to take handouts, but nor did they ask for war or famine. Despite all the problems we have here, immigrants cherish the belief that the United States is still a land of opportunity, especially for their children.
— Time spent trying to help others is never wasted. There have been many days when I emerged from a lesson convinced that at best, I had been no help at all, or at worst, I had confused things. At such times, my mother’s words come back to me. For many years, she and my father volunteered with migrant workers in Kentucky. Just knowing that someone else cares, she would say, just showing up week after week with a smile, that has value. That time is never wasted.
An RIT coordinator once introduced me to a new family by saying simply, “We get no money. We do it for love.” And she made the sign of a heart on her chest. Our hearts all get bigger when we share them with others. There is so much sadness in the world, but there is also hope where strangers help each other. I hope the United States remains a place where immigrants feel welcome and want their children to grow up. We are all better off with them here.
— Jean Gordon ’87 Kocienda worked in the U.S. intelligence community and briefed Silicon Valley tech CEOs on geopolitical risk before retiring in 2021 to focus on writing a historical novel about Japanese feminist poet Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) and volunteering with refugees. Kocienda’s writing can be found in various publications including the New York Times and Redwood Writers Anthology; Cisco System’s cybersecurity blog; and on her blog, accidentalfeminist.net.