Um, I don't think I get it?

In the land of ESL, you have to be prepared for anything. You especially have to be ready to recast speech, speech that is said by a student, but needs correcting because the idea isn't understood. I do this all the time. On this particular day, I thought it was more of the same...boy, was I wrong!


Two weeks into our second semester, a male student came up to me after class. He said "I want to buy girl." Oh, I said, you want to buy something for a girl, sure, what do you think would be nice to buy a girl? He scowled at me, "No, I want to buy girl." I nodded my head smiling, "Sure, you want to buy something for a girl, I understand." "No", he said sternly. " I want girl for sex."


"Where can I buy girl."


Now, it hadn't hit me that a young man would actually have the courage to come up to a female professor and actually ask her where he could "buy" girl. It also hadn't hit me that a student would feel so comfortable with me in class that he felt he could ask me such a question. After I realized what he just asked for, I could feel my face change. It started twisting and my eyebrows quickly had knit themselves together. I took on a different voice. "I am going to answer your question with two statments, " I said calmly "First, men do not buy women, it is against the law here, and if you try to "buy" a woman for sex, you will be arrested and sent home." I gasped for air, "Second, I am a professor, I am also a feminist, I am against this behavior because it harms women and it treats women like animals, we are not animals, we are humans, with rights." I stopped talking, glaring at him. He calmly looked at me and said " OK!" he turned around, grabbed his bag and out the door he went.



It took me several weeks to figure this out, but my analysis of this whole sorrid story came to this; There is a line in each classroom and culture defines that line, where it is, and why you should not cross it. Foreign students in American classrooms do not know where that line is. A smiling, warm, teacher is enough to throw this whole idea into disarray. Students have no idea what they should or should not say and how they should or should not act. It's like walking through a penny candy store with a trash bag and no clerk to take your money! Whatever these students feel like doing, they do it!

I realized that I was in the land of no boundries and I would have to set them, something I wasn't entirely ready to do yet at this level. However, if it meant saving some young Chinese man from trying to buy girl, it's on!