124: Welcome to America

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life.

Ira Glass

Monday. US District Court in Chicago. The honorable Abraham Lincoln Marovitz presiding. 30 men women standing, taking the oath to become citizens. What would you say to somebody becoming a citizen of this country?

Ira Glass

Judge Marovitz is 93 years old. He still runs a citizenship ceremony only because he loves it. He's been part of the Chicago political scene going back to the bad old days of the original Daley machine four decades ago. His office is lined with signed photos of politicians of that era and luminaries. Jimmy Durante, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope.

But there is something about welcoming people into this country that somehow conjures a picture of life here, evokes a picture of life here that is rosier than, for example, the grimy world of Chicago politics. It is as if, when welcoming people into this nation, we tell them not about the competitive, harsh realities of life here sometimes. Not the country we see around us every single day. But the country we want to believe this is.

Ira Glass

His citizenship ceremony is so moving that immigration officials, whose job is normally to enforce all the laws that make it hard for people to become Americans, immigration officials compete to be assigned to the naturalization ceremony. It's coveted. And they're only allowed to stay on the job for a limited time. A few months.

I'm Ira Glass. Each week on this radio program, we choose some topic. Bring you a variety of stories on that topic. Today's program, Welcome to America. Stories of people arriving here, how they see us, how we think they should see us, and what they know about us that we don't necessarily know about ourselves.

Act One, What do Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sigmund Freud have in common? A true story of a group of Austrians who come to New York City to teach in the public high schools, and how their experience here is nothing like what Americans seem to think it will be.

Act Two, Are Movies Stronger than Communism? A man flees Cuba, comes to America, always partly regrets it. His son embarks on a project to convince him that he did the right thing. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One. What do Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sigmund Freud Have In Common?

Well, the New York City public schools consist of roughly 65,000 teachers, 1.1 million students. And the New York City public schools could not find enough math and science teachers for its classrooms. There's a shortage. Americans somehow do not want these jobs.

Meanwhile, in the European nation of Austria, there was a surplus of math and science teachers. Somebody noticed these two facts. One thing led to another. And before long, there was a decision to import Austrian teachers to New York City. This summer, school officials began the hiring process with job interviews that they conducted by videoconferencing between City College in Harlem and Vienna. Writer David Rakoff has this account of the Austrians' welcome to America and of the platitudes about this country that people kept trying to force upon them.

The Sound of Music. Maria von Trapp. Julie Andrews. As seen on television so many times that anyone can complete the following sentence-- "How do you solve a problem like--?"

Two. New York City public schools. Association. Metal detectors, baggy jeans, box cutters, white flight. A futile, underfunded, ineffectual exercise in neglect. The last stop before entering the revolving door prison system.

In part, it is these exact stereotypes, the guileless, defenseless foreigners being used for target practice by young toughs, that have so piqued the interest of the national media. And it is these very stereotypes that I will find debunked time and again over the next five months.

The reporter from ABC asks all the questions that are on the minds of those of us not in public education. They are, verbatim, "New York is one of the toughest places to teach in this country. Are you up for challenge?" "New York is a very diverse city, and there are students from various different countries, and almost anywhere you teach, you'll find students of various backgrounds, various ethnicities. Is that going to be very different for you?" "You, no doubt, have heard about a string of rather unfortunate incidents we've had in the past school year. Students shooting other students in school. Are you aware of that, and did that at all affect your decision to do this?"

All of this takes place at City College, where, for generations, immigrants made their start in this country. And all of this takes place in New York, a city which had not one of the much-publicized school shooting sprees of the past year.

The posters in California Lounge at the Delta terminal of Kennedy airport are, paradoxically, of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Perhaps the only thing that seems authentically California to me about the California Lounge is how boring it is. I and 13 other newspeople wait for the Austrians get through customs.

The teachers' union has issued this deadpan statement. Quote, "We're pleased they're here, but it's regrettable that New York doesn't pay its teachers more." Unquote. The starting salary for a teacher in New York City's $29,600, which is a living wage in this town, but not fat city, by any means.

Those same two young men from City College come in with that same purple banner, and try to tape it up on the wall, to no avail. When eventually the teachers arrive, my heart races a bit, as if I were in the presence of major celebrities. This is especially true when I see Andrea.

I'm also shocked by how young they all look. They're all in their twenties. This only increases by fear for them. Just listen to the poker-faced reporter.

David Rakoff

Andrea and three other of the 26 Austrian teachers, Lutz Holzinger, Elke Rogl, and Nikolaus Ettel are all assigned to teach at FDR. I decide to follow them. Here's Nikki.

This is one of our customs as New Yorkers, welcoming foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them. And if oblique auguries of physical peril don't work, well then, we can always talk about rent.

Luckily enough for the Austrian teachers, their introduction to life in New York City and its public school system will not be left up to the paranoid, hysterical likes of me and other members of the fourth estate. Like the news cameraman who, upon hearing that they will be teaching high school, whistles, asking no one in particular, "Anybody know karate?"

They will instead sit through a series of days-long orientation sessions at the Board of Ed, where they will be turned into fully functional New Yorkers with social security numbers and bank accounts. The bank accounts courtesy of Miss Licorice, her actual name, the representative from the Chase Manhattan bank. They are taught how to write checks.

David Rakoff

At these sessions, they're told that the United States is a free country. They're told that they don't have to register with the police wherever they live. They're told that when they apply for a driver's license, they won't actually have to know how to fix an engine, as they do in Austria. They're told that in New York, teachers use modern teaching methods, unlike, it is implied, Austria.

The New York educators warn them time and again about the dangers of the dreaded "chalk and talk," that driest, most outmoded Teutonic kind of pedagogy where one stands at the chalkboard, lectures, maybe draws some diagrams, but has no capacity to field inquiry or lead a discussion. The underlying message is, Toto, you're not in Klagenfurt anymore.

David Rakoff

One of the more useful moments in the whole orientation, and one that reminds them why they are here, comes when the Austrians meet actual New York City high school kids for the first time.

David Rakoff

They run for their flash cards. "Bounce," "whatever's clever," "the bomb," "jiggy," "phat," "you buggin'," "you played yourself." The lesson in slang continues just a few days later in a week the class about life in the city that is being called New York 101 by the media. Although no one out of the media seems to have another name for it. They just call it "what the media are calling New York 101."

The professor, a retired English scholar and native Brooklynite, spends the first 20 minutes of the first class quizzing them on their various subway routes and telling them quicker alternatives. It is one New Yorkers' favorite pastimes, telling one another the best subway routes to get someplace. As the other New Yorker in the room, I am fascinated, and cannot resist even chiming in at one point about the long underground transfer between the 4/5 and the 2/3 at Fulton Street. The Austrians stare blankly and seem exhausted.

Then comes colloquialisms lessons in the form of a handout. This glossary of New York argot has words and phrases like "86," "schmear," "bimbo," "maven," "what am I, chopped liver?" and "schlepping all over town, looking for some tchochkes." All of which would be very useful, if it were 1949, if you were a hard-boiled cutie pie gun moll, or in the USO, or a been-around-the-block dishwater blonde waitress, or a private dick, anyone from a Damon Runyon story, or auditioning for Seinfeld.

What becomes evident over the course of the orientation is that the Austrians are also being given an unvarnished glimpse, albeit an unwitting one, into what it is truly like to be a student in a public high school in North America. Hours spent sitting, listening to lecture after lecture, frequently droning, and frequently about things they will never need to know. The bureaucratic structure of the board of education, for example. Or how to say "86 of whiskey, down with the schmear!"

The orientation does teach them how to find an apartment in New York City-- no laughing matter. Well, if it's a laughing matter, it's in that bitter, rueful kind of way. But very surprisingly, in one weekend of hitting the streets during a Wall Street boom, they all have homes. Homes they have given names to.

David Rakoff

Elke and Andrea live in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. Lutz and Nikolaus are in Sunset Park, another part of Brooklyn. Their place is huge and sunny. Seven of the teachers occupy two apartments in the same building. They take me along with them when they go to see their school for the first time a few days before the beginning of the semester. It's two subway rides away, in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Bensonhurst was the scene of some racist violence a few years back. I am quite frankly terrified at the thought of going there. As far as I knew, if you weren't white, Italian-American and straight, you stayed out of Bensonhurst. But as it turns out, FDR's 4,000 kids are from 72 different countries, representing 32 different language groups. One third of them identified as limited English-speaking youngsters, meaning they entered the US within the last two or three years. Easily 60% of the entire student body was born outside the United States. The Austrians will be right at home.

The media attention surrounding them shows no signs of abating. Their schools are Fielding inquiries from CBS, Austrian TV, and a Japanese television crew. The Austrians tell me how fed up they're getting with being portrayed as being too scared to take the subway, unfamiliar with different ethnicities, and oblivious to social problems. Lutz gently points out that the small matter of the genocidal civil war in former Yugoslavia is happening not too far from Vienna. There are refugees coming into Austria every day. Lutz and Nikki are not men who are unaware of the outside world. "We are international people," says Nikki, whose girlfriend is spending the year working in Moscow.

I ask them if they have drugs and teenage pregnancy in Vienna. Lutz replies, of course, although not to the extent of New York City, obviously. But it's really an idiotic question. Where do I think they come from, Shangri-La?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt High is beside a huge cemetery. Literally beside the graveyard, with headstones coming right up to the building. It almost seems like a teen exploitation film joke, a summer camp actually built across the lake from an insane asylum. Architecturally, the school is one of those early '60s Bauhaus-y structures of glass and cinder block. It's quite an attractive building, actually, and there's a friendliness, a sense of community about the place. It's in perfect repair. The floors gleam.

We run into the school guidance counselors, who treat the Austrian Four like celebrities.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

David Rakoff

Despite the fact that she has two days to get the school ready for 4,000, and that Andrea, Lutz, Nikki, and Elke are by no means the only four new teachers starting this year, FDR's principal, the amazing Adele Vocel, takes the time to sit down with them in the conference room. She doesn't talk to them like Austrian teachers, just teachers. And it's not for my benefit, either. I am, in a word, tolerated.

David Rakoff

I follow along as Lutz and Andrea are shown the newly renovated science labs, introduced to the ninth grade biology curriculum, and meet Jim and Alex, two biology teachers who sit down with them and joke around like a Vaudeville duo for about 30 minutes or so. They're friendly and contagiously funny and irreverent, and like everyone we meet at the school, they project this sense of shared purpose and excitement. They make it look like great fun. And there's no false nobility here, either. There's none of that sunwashed earnestness of films like Dead Poets' Society. All of this is a long way towards dispelling the fear of the school year that begins in two days' time.

I conjecture that a lot of the feeling of goodwill and helpfulness so evident at FDR seems to emanate in large part from Adele Vocel. She speaks to the Austrians, and indeed everyone we're introduced to that day-- from the vice principals to the payroll secretaries. As colleagues, not as subordinates.

It strikes me that the New York these Austrians will be working in is very different from the New York inhabited by the members of the media covering them, including myself. For starters, there's a lack of ironic posturing to the Austrians, and to almost everyone I encounter on this story. No one is making constant air quotes or dropping their voices in "what, me, serious?" disaffection. No one acts like they've seen it before.

At one point during a teacher orientation, Adele Vocel read a poem called "Average" to a room full of adults. "I don't cause teachers trouble. My grades have been OK. I listen in my classes and I'm in school every day. My teachers say I'm average. My parents think so, too. I wish I didn't know that, because there's a lot I'd like to do. I'd like to build a rocket. I have a book to tell you how. And start a stamp collection. Oh, no use trying now. Because since I found on average, I'm just smart enough to see it means I'm nothing special, that I should expect to be."

Later on, at a reception at the Austrian consulate, another woman in public education planted herself in the middle of the room, took out a laminated card in your pocket, and read a poem to the effect of, a hundred years from now, it will not matter how much money I made, what kind of car I drove, how big my house was, whether or not I was famous. What will matter is that I made a difference in the life of a child.

Generally the words, I'm just going to redo this poem elicit feelings of mild embarrassment in people. How avid, how earnest. I'm not proud to admit that I was a little amused when I first heard these two problems. Neither of them is very good poetry, after all. But on reflection, I realize that they achieve precisely what poetry is meant to accomplish. They edify. They elevate. They speak to an underlying truth not immediately apparent. They change the way one looks at things.

We in the media have all been portraying the Austrians as heading off into a blackboard jungle. All cynicism, institutional neglect, and violence. When in fact, they're entering a world none of us reporters imagined. A world where being earnest and avid and passionate is anything but embarrassing.

It's been made clear to me by Adele Vocel that I am not welcome in the classrooms once the students arrive. He obligation, she tells me, is to the kids, and I would be an unnecessary distraction. I see the sense of this, but I need to see what happens with the Austrian four, so I invite them for dinner, and they accept, and seem happy to be asked.

We have two dinners together, one in September and one in March. At both, they describe the work as hard and time-consuming, with evenings spent either preparing lessons, grading homework, or marking the many, many tests they seem to administer-- far more than are given at schools in Austria. And seeing New York City teaching methods up close and firsthand, the Austrians are finding some of their own preconceptions debunked. They seem surprised and more than a little bit disappointed that their training turns out to be far more unconventional and modern than that of their American counterparts. It turns out they were being warned against "chalk and talk" at their orientation because "chalk and talk" remain such a tenacious mainstay of American teaching.

David Rakoff

Take all that with a grain of salt. That was recorded in September. At the dinner in March, they feel calmer and have a more positive and three-dimensional view of American methods and school in general, as they themselves are more realistically viewed. After sharing three bottles of wine, I am given enough courage for my next question. The question that I have been waiting to ask since the day they entered the misbegotten California Lounge of Kennedy Airport

David Rakoff

Ever the gracious host, and ever eager for a colorful setting to exploit in the service of this radio story, I take the Austrians to see the New York panorama at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows. It's an enormous diorama of the five boroughs with scale models of every single building in the greater metropolitan area. I checked. Everything is there, right down to a half-inch replica of the four story brownstone where I live.

The diorama. is really big. Certainly a healthy percentage of a football field in size. Spectators walk around its perimeter on a catwalk from above.

The videotaped presentation about the display's construction that plays constantly on loop begins with an announcer exclaimed over a Gershwin score, "New York City, the Big Apple, making it big, the arts capital of the world." This bit of cheap New York, New York propagandist metaphor seems a little naive. Because what one actually sees by looking at this accurate depiction of the city in its entirety is that most of the city, the New York that is New York to most New Yorkers, is actually Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, which all contain some pretty vast areas of Urban blight and desolation.

It is the perfect backdrop to ask them how they're doing. They are assimilating rapidly.

David Rakoff

We're standing over the Brighton Beach and Rockaway is part of the diorama, Manhattan far behind us. And while it's certainly the most crowded of the islands, its buildings are the tallest, it's also noticeably smallest. Seeing it from here, from the equivalent of a few thousand feet up, Manhattan's disproportionate influence, the power of its few over the millions in the outer boroughs, seems not just strange. It seems futile.

All of us in the media have been wondering how the Austrians would deal with it all. Expecting them to crumble when actually faced with real New York. That the smug assurance that Manhattanites like myself know what real New York is. But more than almost anyone I know, these four teachers have been thrust into a uniquely diverse and mixed environment where almost everyone is from somewhere else.

In my search for an authentic backdrop to this scene, I brought these teachers to a large simulacrum, when probably the most authentically New York place is the block they live on. It's time to find their houses.

David Rakoff

Night descends upon the miniature city. Their city. The sky darkens and blacklights illuminate the buildings, whose windows seem that up in millions of pinpoints. A few moments later, it is morning again, and another day dawns on the greatest metropolis on earth. The orchestra on the video plays. It is all one can do not to stretch out one's arms and turn around like some singing nun on the mountainside for the sheer joy and beauty and hugeness of it all.

Tiny planes on invisible wires come in for landings and take off from the diorama airport. And far higher than all of them, an airplane sails through the sky, tracing its path from across the Atlantic westward to somewhere else on the continent. Nikki wonders aloud how any plane passing over New York could possibly resist landing there. Indeed, how could any aircraft ignore the very center of the universe? He's become a real New Yorker at last.

Ira Glass

David Rakoff lives in Manhattan, USA.

[MUSIC - "NEW YORK CITY" BY THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS]

Coming up, trying to convince Dad down in Florida that it was a good idea to immigrate to America all those years ago. That's in a minute on Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today's program, Welcome to America.

So I'm on a plane coming home from oversees. And the plane lands and is taxiing to the gate. And the flight attendant gets on the PA and says all the usual things they say. The weather, the local time, customs information. And she ends by saying, we hope you enjoy your stay in the United States of America.

We hope you enjoy your stay in the United States of America. The thought had never occurred to me before. And then I thought, yes, I do hope I enjoy my stay in the United States of America. My, you know, 50, 60, 70, whatever it is year stay.

Because you know, not everybody does. Though that's usually the story we tell ourselves as Americans. The story we tell ourselves about people coming to this country is that hopeful people coming here, escaping political oppression, escaping poverty. And it's hard at first for them to adjust, but then they do, because everybody has so much more here than they did back home where they came from. That is the story we usually tell ourselves about coming to America.

Ira Glass

Ignatius is here for school. Works in a parking garage. When he's done his studies, he wants to move back home to Cameroon, where he won't have to work from eight in the morning to one at night.

Ira Glass

Some people take a long time to convince, to feel like they belong here. Alex came over when he was eight from a small town in Sicily back in 1958.

Ira Glass

What's amazing about his history is just how American anybody would think he was. He spoke English, worked among non-Sicilians, married a non-Sicilian, lived like this for decades. And still, he did not believe that he belonged here.

Ira Glass

What changed his feeling about America? When his mother was buried here, in American soil. When he found a church and the community here. When he spent time alone in the wilderness in southern Utah. He became a citizen in 1998, after 40 years.

Some people never make the transition. And that is the subject of our next act in our program today. Act Two. Are Movies Stronger than Communism? This is the story of a father and son, told by the son, Juan Zaldivar, who was born in Cuba.

Ira Glass

Juan Zaldivar's movie about his father in Cuba is called 90 Miles. 90 miles is the distance between the two countries, the US and Cuba. In the time since we first broadcast this weeks' radio show, he has finished his film. You can get more information about it at www.90miles.com.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Jorge Just, Todd Bachmann, and Sylvia Lemus. Engineering help from Mr. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Williams. Elizabeth Meister runs our website.

[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS]

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This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. This American Life comes to you proudly from the city of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, mayor. Funding for our program is provided by the listeners of WBEZ Chicago.

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. I hope you enjoy your stay in the United States of America.

Announcer

PRI. Public Radio International.