Ink Aria

Down the Street in Bangladesh

Renee Gehman

On a sweltering day in July I turned off a street in Pennsylvania and onto a road in Bangladesh. That’s what it felt like, at least. Despite years of driving through this suburb enroute to the mall or a number of other commercial destinations, I had missed the development of a whole cultural enclave that had been planted somewhere near a local mosque and then sprawled out like a pumpkin patch on the many side streets along this main stretch.

I had a ways to walk from where I parked my car parallel to the curb. To me, the homes on this street all looked the same, and I could never remember exactly how far up the house was. I felt conspicuous walking up the sidewalk, more so than you’d imagine I’d feel in an area so close to my own home. Bangladeshi children dressed in Western clothes stared at me, sometimes waving, from their yards and balconies—Western children among Eastern grandmothers in their brightly colored . . . saris, are they called?

I felt I needed to give myself a pep talk to come here each week to tutor. When I signed up to tutor, I anticipated working with students who struggled with learning disabilities or motivation. This girl’s biggest struggle was against parents whose expectations of her seemed to have no ceiling.

As a seventh grader, she has taken and done well on her SAT, a test most tend not to think about until high school graduation is approaching. She gets top grades on most of her schoolwork and writes much better than expected at her age. Her older sister has skipped a grade and is still at the top of her class. 

As their mom says, “It doesn’t matter if you are number one in your class; you can always do better. No matter how good you are, you can always do more.” Difficult as I found it to teach more to a student who was already far beyond her peers, her mother made a valid point. So once a week I came, and we did more.

I always planned to stay an extra twenty minutes beyond the hour-long tutor session, because the mother liked to talk about her latest arguments with her youngest daughter, the one I tutored.
In Bangladesh, the children never talked back to their parents, she said. Here, her daughter has no respect. She always wants to be on the Internet or texting on the phone. She doesn’t even talk to her mother; it’s always yelling. She won’t even eat the Bangladesh food.

The mother wanted me to agree with her, to talk sense into her daughter for her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so. She’s twelve, I thought. She is a great student, she doesn’t get into trouble, and if I were in her place I’d be going crazy. I too am a victim of this culture!

Amid these snippets from everyday mother-daughter bantering, I also picked up pieces of their family’s story. In Bangladesh, he, along with his brother, owned and operated a textile company with 3,000 employees. She was a university professor. They came to the United States thinking that here their two daughters would have the best opportunities in education and beyond.

They invested their savings in opening up a small convenience store in Philadelphia, but suffered losses from two break-ins. After the third break-in, which involved a drawn gun with his two young daughters in the store, he became disgusted and immediately sold the store for less than it was worth.

They moved to this suburb jobless. She went back to school part time to become an accountant and now works full time. He works part time in a 7-11 and continues to look for something else. I don’t imagine most of us walk into 7-11’s and wonder whether the man behind the counter might own a business in another country, with 3,000 employees. But this man does.

In my senior year of high school, Dr. Bishop read us a quote from Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning. Here is part of it:

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the byproduct of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.

I confess to sometimes coveting the success of others, mostly those who are my age or, worse yet, younger and have great-paying jobs. When this happens, I quickly discipline myself to remember that I am on the right path for me, and I have found that this serves. 

I know this family often wonders why they left their grand, real Bangladesh to come to this little Bangladesh where they can’t find great jobs and where their youngest daughter has become an independent thinker who talks back to her parents. I have wondered if the mother thinks the harder she pushes her daughters, the greater the likelihood will be that she will justify their move.

To me, success has already ensued for them, in the form of two brilliant daughters she and her husband sacrificed much for. It is more difficult to see success when it doesn’t look like we thought it would, usually cloaked in more money and a better job. But I imagine this family, far from home and their dream as they envisioned it, is somehow on the right path for them.
—Renee Gehman, Souderton, Pennsylvania, is assistant editor, DreamSeeker Magazine; and ESL teacher.