During Woody Allen's divorce from Mia Farrow and the ensuing custody battle, it was argued that he was a poor father because, among other things, he did not even know the names of his children's teachers. I tried to recall the names of my daughter's teachers and had to conclude that remembering your child's teachers' names is a stupid way to measure parenting quality.
In my defense, my memory for names in general is not that good. I bat about 0.500 on the names of ex-girlfriends, for example. I can remember the names of very few of my own teachers. But if I am honest for once, my policy for a long time was, my wife went to school in Austria, she knows the inner workings of this odd system, so she is responsible for the organizational, administrative and logistical side of things, while I am responsible for the fun side, and pack school lunches in the mornings.
When I call this system odd, I am not suggesting that it is any odder than the educational system of any other country. I am a product of the American public education system, and had a strong feeling as a kid that they could be doing a better job with us; time has done nothing to weaken this suspicion. And during the years I lived in Japan, I likewise failed to be impressed by the public education system there.
No idea, really, how other countries do it. I suspect it's like digestion: roughly similar everywhere, with some cultural differences. But if you assume education can influence a person at all, and then look around at the world, you have to suspect something could be improved.
Explaining school systems is about as fun as explaining the rules of baseball or cricket. I am no expert on any of these things and I won't try. Two things, though. In Austria, after the first four years of public education, children are currently split into two groups, those who enter some sort of vocational training track and those who enter "Gymnasium", an eight-year academic track from which they will then graduate and if all goes to plan become doctors and attorneys.
As luck would have it, our daughters are eight years apart in age, meaning one is just finishing her fourth year of elementary school and the older one is graduating from Gymnasium this year. In other words, one is at each end of the Austrian academic digestive tract. It is, for the kids especially, a stressful year. The older one is studying day and night for her school-leaving tests, called the Matura in Austria (Abitur in Germany). The Matura is basically a series of four-hour written tests and four-hour oral tests in most of the pupil's most important classes, testing material from the last four years of school. So before the tests, all the kids have to do is review everything they've learned in the past four years.
If they fail, they can repeat the tests in the fall. I am not sure how often they can repeat. If they really mess up, they can go to night school like everybody else and get their diploma that way.
Unlike school-leaving exams in some countries (I think France is one), the Matura is not standardized, which would at least allow authorities to compare schools. The test and the grades awarded vary from school to school, is my understanding. In other words, as I understand it, it is an arbitrary and subjective system with no real value beyond it keeps a group of teenagers (those with academic ambitions) very occupied for several months during their last year of school, which, looking back on my own experience, may actually be enough to justify the system. No one has yet asked whether the American public school system, where passing grades and the ability to read your diploma (waived for athletes) would suffice.*
Meanwhile, our younger daughter (who was recently nominated by her school to participate in a gifted program) got a "C" on her last math test. She normally gets better grades. My wife called me on my drive home from work and told me about it. She was not taking it well. "One single test might destroy her entire future," she said, among other things.
One "C" might mean she doesn't make it into Gymnasium, you see. The Education Ministry recently ruled that classrooms may not have more than 25 students. This was meant to reduce overcrowding and improve the quality of education, but in fact, since no additional teachers were hired, all it currently means is that fewer kids are accepted into schools.
So, here we sit, with a kid at each end of the Austrian public school tract system. The little one is being chewed up with concerns that a couple sloppy mistakes on a math test could block her passage down the academic esophagus on her way to eight years of academic middle and high school and then a study of, what, who knows, leading to who knows what, career success or waiting in lines with the rest of Austria's unemployed journalism majors or something.
The big one, meanwhile, awaits her painful, slow passage into the toilet of the Austrian university system. Which is a whole nother chapter, just wait.
______
*my subjective experience only, I don't claim it's general policy...
On Wednesday night, I lay down on the bathroom floor because the tile was cold and it was all I could think to do. That’s about as pathetic as I ever want to be, curled fetal on the bathroom floor. I’d like to point out that the toilet is in a different room than the bathroom, so I was pathetic but not filthy. A girl's gotta have her standards.
I used to think that I wouldn't be able to really trust somebody who didn't understand me exactly. I don't mean I felt like I could only trust other women, or other Americans. I thought I needed somebody who knew what I was saying if I claimed to weep for the future or referred obliquely to my great-grandfather; someone who understood in excruciatingly precise detail why I thought and felt the way I did. I thought that if someone understood those things, then they would understand me, and then I could trust them.
You may wonder why a person who thought this way has spent most of her adult life in foreign countries. Get my movie quotes? Not even close. Half of my friends have never been to the country where I was born; only a few have ever met my family. Although most of them speak English, my friends could not be much further from where I came from, metaphorically or literally. As I have gotten older and less capable of explaining why I think and feel the way I do to anybody who doesn't already have that knowledge, the more I have drifted away from my original cherished idea of being explicable, or ever being understood, or trusting anybody.
Now I think about it and I think, phew. I don't believe anybody needs to know every WHAT that I think and feel, completely, much less WHY. I think what I wanted was to see myself reflected in someone else's eyes, because then I would see myself clearly. That’s a load of crap. A reflection is never, can never, be completely accurate. The further I get from this idea of being completely known, the more I realize it's more than sufficient that I have some idea of what I think for myself, without having it understood by anyone else, ever. I am over needing to see myself reflected. And I know that means I’ll never trust anybody completely, and realizing that is realizing that it doesn't really matter.
I’ve been thinking about this because of some recent conversations about culture and the importance of defining it. My idea of myself was never of myself as a race or sex or nationality or language* or anything so... vague. My idea of myself is such a composite of amazingly general and painfully specific things. And maybe because my deep-down impression of my culture has always been so extraordinarily limited, the culture of Anne, I have not understood the importance of culture to others. I wanted people to understand me as me. I wanted them to know where I am now and to understand the complicated trails that I took to get here. It was not so much important to me as a woman or an American or a person with freckles or a girl who grew up eating oysters whole and fresh from the Chesapeake or anything. It was important to me as Anne, a combination of all the external and internal forces. and the realization that this was first impossible and second silly has left me absolutely baffled to find that other people, people less self-obsessed and insane than I am, still think that it's important; and more that they think the broadest definitions are more important than the narrow ones, and that the ones you're born with are more important than the ones you grow into. Really?
*yes, I am mighty attached to English, but I believe this is because I am mighty attached to talking. I don’t feel better in English because it’s a better language for expressing myself, but because I am better at expressing myself in it.
Sometimes I’m telling someone something, like telling Petr how the superhero housewives of the seventies influenced my understanding of what was expected of women, and I’ll get most of the way through and it's like: who am I kidding, he doesn't know and he cannot possibly. Just like I don't know what it was like to grow up buying one banana at a time. But I see now that the listener's personal understanding of how it felt doesn't matter; what matters is that I have stories and other people have stories and we tell them and come to a better understanding of who we are now, and what's important to the people we've become.
What matters is not that anyone totally understands exactly who I am and how I got here. What matters is that we have enough respect for each other to consider our stories worth telling; worth hearing. That we consider them, maybe, more important than if we could take them for granted. That I can say, I lay on the floor because the tile was cold, and it's not to do with some externally defined idea of who I am, but to do with the idea that my tooth really fucking hurts, and now and for the forseeable future, I am defining myself in terms of my toothache. That someone listens to that and brings me ibuprofen and room temperature water to wash it down.
This morning I dreamt that I had gone back in time, to the New York of my childhood.
I was down in the Village, walking along Sixth Avenue. It was a beautiful summer day, and the sunlight glinted off the old shop signs with their block letters and slanted scripts, and the rattley old buses, rectangular and homely, but looking like a real metal vehicle instead seeming to be made out of white plastic. I walked past the stores and marvelled at how many stores in New York used to last for decades, generations even: an old lunch cafe with its 40s-style speckled counter top and spinning stools; a small newspaper shop, the bright red "Optimo" cigar sign above the door and rows of the yellow boxes in the glass counter under the cash register; a shoe store with deep display windows that lined the hallway to the entrance, selling kid's school shoes and sensible women's pumps and conventional brown or black shoes for men.
I stood looking at the shoes, wondering if I went in there if they'd have pretzel nuggets and Archie comics for me like they did when my mother would take me for shoes when I was a child, and a bunch of laughing kids, four or five little boys, passed by, and stopped to bring me into their conversation, as you do when you want a disinterested third party to settle a bet. "What's the silliest name you can think of?" said the ringleader, a boy of about 10 with brown hair and eyes and caramel skin. "For a person or a pet?" I asked. They looked at each other briefly. "For a person!" I put my hand up to my chin, as if it were a matter of great import, and said, "Sylvester." This elicited instant shrieks and giggles, and they moved on down the sidewalk crowing "Sylvesterrrr!" at passing businessmen.
I was back in the NYC I loved, when it really was a crazy and special and cool place to live, to be from, different from the rest of America, from the rest of the world; before the big-box chain stores came in and took over old department stores and warehouses, with their giant signs that you could see along any interstate anywhere else; before that pit-bull of a mayor "cleaned up" Times Square for the Midwestern tourists, putting in all the franchises they can visit at home, and got rid of the strip clubs and dancing in gay bars and put up the street cameras and kicked out all the homeless people; before flimsy plastic cards replaced punch-cut metal subway tokens that clinked satisfyingly in your pocket; before Starbucks and Blackberries and cell phones and the internet, when everyone ordered a one-size coffee in Greek paper cups and got their news from the papers and the radio and the TV. Before my parents split up. Before the towers fell.
But that's thing about nostalgia. We don't cherish the way things were because they have any particular, inherent worth; things weren't necessarily better back in the old days, in fact, were rarely so. It's more that back then we lived with less of a burden of knowledge, of the past; the accretion of years and sadness was still so thin and light as to feel nonexistent. This is a necessary consequence of growing older and growing old, of seeing the old shops disappear, replaced by a new city we don't remember, and the new faces in the playground, wondering what sort of world they will be growing up in and how different it will be from ours. We turn to nostalgia not to relive the past, but to relieve the present: to be able to put aside for a bit the anxieties of a world we have little or no control over, to return to the one domain where we have complete mastery, a world that doesn't exist – that never existed – anywhere except in our own minds, and hearts. And in our dreams.
I woke up, feeling an ache for New York, desperate to be back there, back then, when I was happy to live there, when I never thought I could ever live anywhere else, and indeed never wanted to. But at the same time, knowing that that New York is gone forever, if it ever even existed, felt like I never want to step foot in the place again – because far worse than the feeling of not being there is the pain of having to leave it. Staying away from something you love is always easier than having to say goodbye.
Three days ago, my Australian student visa (subclass 573) expired.
Now, several weeks ago, I applied for a tourist visa extension for 3 more months so I'd have enough time to finish up the freelance projects I'm working on, plus continue to look for work and see if I can find a job worth staying another year for. So I'm actually still legal: with an application pending, I'm automatically covered by a "bridging visa" until the decision comes through. I crossed and dotted all the "t"s and "i"s on my application, and I don't think there should be much of an issue in getting approval – when I met with the case-worker at the Department of Immigration (unexpectedly, a young and very handsome man, dashing all my preconceived notions about bureaucrats), his attitude pretty much indicated that he didn't foresee any problems, and I think my situation is a fairly common one.
Still. Here I am, in the city that's been my home for 2 years; in my house, where I live, surrounded by the things I own (furniture, personal possessions, major appliances, a car), and it's a bit daunting to think that with a stroke of a pen, someone in a government office down on Londsale Street could tell me that my application was denied, and I had exactly 4 weeks to sell off, pack up and ship out my entire life here and have to start over again back in NYC. That's the thing about moving to another country – you're in a place where you don't just have a right to be there, unlike when you live in the country of your birth. You're a guest in someone else's house, and even if you've been paying rent and buying the groceries and cleaning up after yourself properly, they can still show you the door at any time.
But I'm not complaining: I realise, of course, that I have it so much easier than many. Let's be frank: I'm a white, middle-class American citizen who came here for a full-tuition postgrad degree – I'm not exactly in danger of being packed off to some detention centre in the middle of nowhere. But we all know that Australia has not exactly had the best record on dealing with immigrants and asylum seekers (or even their own citizens, for that matter), so it's still just a bit nerve-wracking to have to sit and wait for my fate to be decided by these people. While most of daily life in Australia is similar enough to feel comfortable and fairly familiar, jumping through hoops to beg immigration officials for a visa has been an entirely new experience for me.
But I suppose that's both the reward and challenge of expat life: learning not to take the once-simple things in your life for granted – the right to live and work somewhere, the ease of native communication, the intuitive understanding of a culture.
Of course, as of four days ago, my overseas student health cover expired, too, so now I don't actually have any medical insurance unless I pay an exorbitant monthly charge for out-of-pocket coverage. But hey, that's nothing new – I've been unemployed in America. I guess some things about Australia do feel just like home.