Contact: alana@eveninghawk.com
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I entered the world in Massachusetts in 1977, the youngest member of a Puerto Rican/Portuguese household and I remained in the New England state for my education. I hear that Massachusetts is an emotionally cold place, when compared with other parts of the country, and my sarcasm and dry sense of humor probably have more to do with environmental nurturing than family genes. Heredity compliments that with stubbornness and a drive to figure out the age-old infant's question "why."
The predominantly Jewish neighborhood we live in was a community of people knowledgeable of great schools. I attended a Jewish nursery school with the blessing of the pastor of our church, and one of my greatest childhood misconceptions was that all little kids, Jewish or Christian, should be able to recite prayers in Hebrew. So far as I could tell I was the only person there who wasn't Jewish, and no one minded me being there so long as I did what everyone else did. If they let me play with clay and finger paints, I was willing to oblige. My understanding at that time was that it was fine to be different if you could understand and get along with everyone else. Meanwhile I also had the challenge of figuring out how to be me.
Puerto Rico wasn't so much an exotic place as an extended family base (in my mind, dad's extended family base is in Puerto Rico, and mom's is Cape Cod). What frustrated me about Puerto Rico was that no one seemed interested in teaching me how to speak. This was crucial later in my school experience. Papi, my grandfather, taught me numbers, parts of the body, members of the family, and a ton of other random words. One of the first things I ever learned to say was "Bless me," said before going to bed. Everyone including my mom knows the proper response, even though she doesn't speak Spanish. I wonder sometimes if my brother's kids know how to say that, because I always thought it was something important in our family. Missing out on the language left me feeling not quite the same as the rest of my cousins, and on visits I often sat with my grandfather while they ran around speaking incomprehensibly.
Throughout school I identified most strongly as "other." This wasn't for just about standardized school forms, but within the classroom as well. I was the not-Jewish kid when I was five and six, then I was the not-Irish and not-British descendent for all of primary school; I was the not-normal height girl; I was the not-average student, the poor-athletic performer, the not-girly girl.
When I finally got to high school "other" was more than just ethnicity, it was an attitude. I didn't talk much and was on the social edge because I kept my mouth shut. That silence went beyond a personality quirk, and people thought I was antisocial. I came to a realization when I was sixteen and having fun with people my own age at MIT's ESP programs: I am not antisocial, I am very social with the people I like and not social with folks I don't like. I was very talkative with a small group of people that I got along with, otherwise I couldn't be bothered.
Spanish was part of my Jr and Sr high school curriculum. That long-standing frustration in Puerto Rico served as strong motivation. Nothing pushes like a lifelong regret of never having been able to speak to your great-grandmother and a wish to speak to your own grandmother, that desire made class easy. At that time I met a family from Spain and spent two unforgettable summers with them. As a consequence, I speak proper Castellano and still cannot entirely understand my family's dialect. Learning a language in school both entranced and infuriated me. My classmates blamed my ease in class on my Puerto Rican family, but we never speak any Spanish in the house since my brother and mother cannot speak the language. My motivation and desire to speak the language left me wanting to move faster than the classes progressed, and often the teacher let me sit in the corner and read a Spanish magazine or work on an art class project. I graduated high school with a comfortable command of Spanish, but knew I wanted to learn a more challenging language.
In high school I received a computer for Christmas, and I spent a lot of time learning the basics of the Internet. I wanted a handle that somehow represented me or at least my ideals, and I ended up using the screenname "eveninghawk." The Robert Penn Warren poem stuck to me after we'd read it in AP English, and shortly after I started using the term as a name since it symbolizied an amazement with the natural world and a falling away from romantic ideals. I liked the stark contrasts in the poem that served as a verbal slap in the face. My experiences left me falling away from the education system that I was in, but still driving to learn.
Fairly certain of what I wanted out of an education, I departed from the conventional path and attended Hampshire College. The school was filled with people I wanted to be around, and this was new to me. Normally I had to search for people I wanted to hang out with, and they had never really been in the academic circles of school. While baffled by the social situations induced by living away from home, I seemed well liked and was not lacking in things to do. I joined many groups and collectives my first year, and later moved on to fencing rather than activist groups. Hampshire students are known for a metamorphosis over the four years where they become antagonistic and pessimistic in their last years as students (only to launch from the cocoon as an alma mater loving alum after graduation). As an older student I identified more and more with younger students during my experience, I didn't follow the traditional path to "bitter-older-student."
I spent 5 years at Hampshire, taking on a full plate while balking at requirements. I knew what I wanted to concentrate my efforts on, and taking introduction level courses to complete beginning modes of inquiry seemed a moot point to me. The requirements eventually caught up with me and cost me more study time. As a friend pointed out, I knew what I wanted to do too early and couldn't be bothered with the rest of the hoops in my way. Hampshire introduced me to China.
Primarily an environmental studies student, I took language classes, history classes, and spent one summer flying through 33 books on China to talk my way into a new exchange program. In 1998 I spent six months in China for intensive language and cultural training with an independent study in fish farming, but again I spent a lot of time learning about myself and the ways I learn. Language classes were a combination of discovery, wonder, boredom, and suppression - suppression of the desire to strangle my classmates. I was going through my Spanish learning experience all over again To be fair, I imagine I annoyed my classmates just as much. Language acquisition occurs through doing (speaking, listening, reading, and writing), and while I can learn from others' mistakes, the whole process is amazingly personal and I was frustrated when people didn't get it because I wanted to progress, I wanted more words and sentences than we were getting per class.
My attendance became sporadic, and my Chinese improved as I stopped speaking English. I made some great friends and learned to have fun despite classroom frustrations. People outside of their cultural element are drawn to each other, so I met and talked to all kinds of people that I would never think of conversing with in the US. Upon meeting another foreigner in China, I would try to learn all that I could from their experience. I did the same with my Chinese friends.
I balked at how women were treated, which usually involved being assigned lesser positions in the workplace and often in the family as well. I ran into this when traveling with a male classmate. Officials and new friends assumed that he was the brains behind the operation and I was his translator, and I got into more than a few heated arguments about answering questions pointed at him. I stood up for myself and my area of study, even when people tried to convince me that water and fisheries issues were not worth investigating in China. Language and culture could be used as a skillful weapon when necessary, often discussions about studies and possible field trips were discussed in English, after being talked at I would convert the conversation to Chinese, leveraging my understanding of the person's position to gain access to research deemed "worthless." Those 6 months were amazingly successful, I learned more outside of the classroom and negotiating what went on in the classroom than I did in the classroom itself. My experience worked wonders for me, but I have little faith in many study-abroad programs. If I expected to learn by just being there, I would not have had half the experiences I did.
Completing my time at Hampshire I could see that the educational program was good, but many people could not successfully maintain the drive and direction to get the most out of it -- more importantly what they need out of it. Hampshire has a progressive hands-on approach that is different from the more traditional university. The problem is that students often lose the way by sitting back or failing to decide what they want to do. Seeing friends leave the school, or complete their education without really finding something they wanted to do showed me that every school, no matter how wonderful the mission and philosophy, has problems. That realization made Hampshire seem less like a neat place but more as a springboard that students have to learn how to use: Hampshire reminds students to look for what they want more than the average school. It's not just a neat professor taking a vested interest, rather an entire institutional approach provided you have an idea of what you want to do.
College completed in 2000, I returned to China to continue a more unguided learning experience while also gaining work experience. Through some floundering and temporary projects, I finally landed a teaching position at the Hefei Institute of Technology. I taught undergrad and graduate classes, trying to instill the idea of independent analysis and presentation of ideas. The undergraduate classes proved more fun and rewarding, though organizing a structure that gave the students creative reign in a system where they have to be pushed and tested in order to achieve results was hard for me to get my head around. The students were smart, but they didn't have the same motivation to learn things as I had in my school experience. Material is easy to teach, motivation is a lot harder, and I spent as much time teaching organization and time management as I did teaching English. I did a lot of part time work, including tutoring at the local orphanage, helping in Anhui Agricultural University's English program and singing backup vocals for a jazz/blues/reggae band.
I love Hefei, I think of the city as my home in China, but it is a very small city. The area is not known in the same way as China's big cities, so there are few foreigners. This means that walking down the street is that much more of a show, because people want to see what a foreigner does. After a few years I couldn't take being accosted on the street. People either knew me, or just thought I was another foreigner who didn't know anything about China. I couldn't just be another face on the street, since someone was always running up to talk to me or had seen me on TV, and after two years, that notoriety coupled with apathy in the workplace left me wanting to move.
2002 landed me in Shanghai willing to do anything except teach. I ended up at Wicresoft, an interesting new computer company where I stayed for a year. Nothing like moving to China's corporate heart and trying to show my corporate colors. I had a fairly understandable desk job in a company providing language and cultural support to folks who provide customer service to American customers. It was a fascinating year, but the long hours, inability to take advantage of amassed vacation time, immobility to deal with efficiency problems, and feeling that there wasn't more for me to learn fostered a desire to change. I gained valuable experience and understanding of corporate and managerial comings and goings. I left the rat race wanting my time and life back, and in terms of finances and time commitment the teaching arena was the best fit, this time in the Shanghai public school system.
Teaching children for a year was both a confidence booster and patience builder. I learned about myself through my teaching, and through feedback was able to modify my approach. I started out too serious and too dry for “kids,” and was more than a little intimidated by the little ones. Once I was able to open up to the children I taught, the returns were astounding. They were excited, dedicated, and wanted to make their American friend happy even if that meant painstaking hours of English interaction. I learned to recognize their hard work and make the learning process a lot of fun. Computers helped me build a more solid teaching plan full of variety, and this experience showed me that I am, in fact, a geek.
Being a geek is not understanding a required list of known programming languages (though that helps), it's actually an approach and ability to figure things out and make things work that is prevalent in the engineering disciplines. There is no fear of what I don't know, rather a desire to figure it out and piece it all together. I imagine a creative self-taught knitter actually has many of the same traits as a talented web-designer. Making my classes more visually appealing showed me that art is more than a hobby for me. Convincing students and teachers not to turn me in for a television talent show reminded me that I can make a meager living off singing, and for a time I had a small band in the Shanghai area singing lead vocals and playing the bass.
What next? Sustainability and environmental issues still float my boat, and maybe, just maybe, I can write and make some comics.