Author: Wendian Wang
A few weeks ago my guardian, Ms, Chen, received a letter from the district government. It says that in order to save water in summer, those with home address ending in 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 can open their sprinklers only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, while addresses ending in 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 can open their sprinklers only on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. The letter quickly spread among the Chinese immigrant families in our neighborhood. That night, we tried to adjust the sprinkler controller. To our surprise, our controller can only be adjusted according to specific dates, rather than based on weekdays. It confused us a lot and all our attempts failed. Fearing that we violate the district rules, we set the watering time only during the night to avoid community censorship.
We shared our decision with Ms.Li, our Chinese neighbor, but she warned us, “don’t think that way! Americans are not like Chinese! They will not tolerate you because you are their neighbor, but instead, they will report you to the government anyway!” Hearing that, my guardian started to worry about receiving a penalty. But I was surprised to hear Ms. Li’s words. Although I didn’t know if our American neighbors would report us or not, at least we shouldn’t be so cautious with our neighbors. And what cannot be solved through a simple conversation?
Later, we heard that the watering rule doesn’t apply to our district, thus there is no need to adjust the controller. We were confused again, but decided to just leave our sprinkler controller there. My guardian was quickly occupied by other things in life: the auto-pay monthly water bill needs to be reset, bank accounts need more information to be activated, and whether a solar panel will save us energy charge. Piles of English invoice frustrated my guardian, who knows little English. By guessing and translating, she struggled to understand a few sentences but still has to ask me for help sometimes.
That was the first time I realized how different worlds are created by different English fluencies. My English fluency makes me feel confident talking with my teachers and friends at school. And at school, my relationships are simple: student-student, or student-teacher. Therefore, I assume a conversation is not a big deal, just as I did with my teachers and advisors. But the independent houses in a neighborhood separate people, people with different racial backgrounds. And because people are less approachable to each other, relationships among them could be even more complicated. Moreover, to Ms. Chen and Ms. Li, who know little English, language barriers make them the foreigners of everyday life and remind them when they go to supermarkets and banks, even when they’re in their own neighborhood. Just imagine being surrounded by codes you could never understand. The sense of strangeness renders them to think twice about American neighbors and to hide from them just to avoid trouble, which is nothing more than having to communicate in English.
II
After the rise of suburbia in post-WWII America, lawns became a symbol of the American Dream, an ideal that through hard work, house ownership with a patch of neatly maintained lawn is within one’s reach.
“A fine lawn makes a frame for a dwelling," Abraham Levitt said in 1949, “it is the first thing a visitor sees. And first impressions are the lasting ones.” He founded the Levitt & Sons real estate company that built the town of Levittown, New York. Levittown was originally built for returning veterans and is now considered to be one of the first mass-produced suburbs in the country.
I live in a suburban town in California, whose vast lands are surrounded by fluctuant mountains. There are patches of well-maintained lawns around every house in my neighborhood. After living there for one month, I made some friends in its Chinese community. But to my surprise, my Chinese neighbors do not view a perfect patch of lawn as a sign of a good neighbor, or pay too much attention to their grass. “We do take care of our lawns. But we simply mow, and that’s it. The rest of the work is for the automatic sprinkler system,” said Lan, one of my friends who has lived in California for over six years. He was born in Southern China and moved to America in middle school.
For immigrant families who have no idea of the cultural and historical significance of American lawns, taking care of lawns is simply a burden, especially when they receive penalties for their yellow grass. At least for my Chinese host family, the cozy image of mowing and watering their garden during leisure time is simply too “American” and too hard to accomplish.
It’s reasonable. My host family used to live in apartments in urban China and have no experience in mowing and gardening. While for the others who once did live in farms or villages, they never keep a neat lawn for nothing except beauty. They would rather grow fruit trees and vegetables on their small land. The refreshing taste of the first apple brings them the same amount of joy as a perfectly mowed lawn does. Also, turning lawns into tiles doesn’t prevent immigrant families from being a nice neighbor and a good citizen.
It’s not that my host family doesn’t have an “American Dream”, the dream of living a better life through their own hands. Otherwise they won’t decide to move to America. Indeed, their “American Dream” is built on a comparison to their life back in China. Once I asked my guardian Ms. Chen if she would ever return to China when she gets old, “no,” she shook her head, “pork and beef in America is way more cheaper than those in China.” To her, being able to afford pork and beef means a higher quality of life, which is harder to achieve in China. The convenience created by American industrialized meat production made everyday meat consumption, and thus, a self-sustaining life more accessible. That convenience and higher quality of life help immigrants overcome their homesickness and language barrier, and live in a neighborhood in which they don’t understand its rules but still try to obey the rules.
III
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do”. We did. But the senses of subtle strangeness and happiness still intertwined, making me question what it indeed means to pursue our “American Dream” on this land, a welcoming but exclusive foreign land. I hope to find it out before a bowl of hot pork chop soup, or a warm “hey what’s up” push away all my doubts.