I have recently begun volunteering with a non-profit agency that works with refugees from various Asian countries who have been settled in the Cleveland area. This agency offers medical services, legal advice, and many other support services to these refugees. I’m helping out with a newspaper begun by two Nepali-speaking Bhutanese cousins who grew up in a refugee camp in Nepal. They wanted to improve communication and cohesiveness within their community here in the United States, so they began this newspaper. I’m also volunteering in the afterschool tutoring program for refugee kids of all grade levels, helping them with their homework.
My first day in the afterschool program, I walked into a classroom filled with second- and third-graders, all speaking in several different languages, including English. I worked with two little girls, both from Thailand. The older girl, a third-grader, spoke Thai as her first language while the younger girl, a second-grader, spoke Burmese as her first language. But they both spoke English very well. And the first thing they asked me when I sat down to work with them was what languages I spoke. It was just accepted as fact by all the school kids in that classroom that people speak multiple languages. So I explained to them that I speak some French and a teensy weensy bit of Korean. We compared how to say different words in different languages, and we laughed at how funny they sounded, words like “book” or “pencil” or “heart”.
When I was growing up, my siblings, my parents, and I would sometimes make puns using Korean words that sounded close to English words. There is an expression in Korean that means, “That’s driving me crazy!” or “That’s crazy!” that sounds like “mi chi geh neh”. When you say it quickly, it sounds a little bit like “Michigan”. So we used to joke about going to Detroit, mi chi geh neh, and then cackle hysterically. Now I have a family of my own, and I once tried to explain this joke to my children, why it’s so funny. But, as everyone knows, once you start explaining why a joke, a pun, or ANYTHING is funny, it immediately becomes completely flat and completely unfunny.
But my children and I had our own language jokes. When we were living in France, my kids went to a French school and would often tell me about what they were learning in school. One day, they came home and sang a song they had learned that day. It was called “Voici que l’ange Gabriel” (Here is the angel Gabriel) but I thought they sang “Voici le linge de Gabriel” (Here is Gabriel’s laundry). I was confused why an archangel would have laundry—and why a song would be written about it—so I asked my kids, which confirmed their opinion that my French was mediocre at best. In spite of the fact that they felt so sorry for me (or maybe because of it), they only laughed for a few minutes before teaching me the real words to the song.
This past summer, I taught at the summer school run by the non-profit agency for refugee kids. The school was for all grades, and I taught reading and writing poetry to high school students. Again, there was a mixture of languages in the classroom: Karen, Arabic, Afghani, Somali, as well as English. When working on their assignments, the students often conferred amongst themselves in their own languages. Even though I had no clue what they were saying, whether they were discussing their work, their plans for the weekend, or their thoughts about my teaching creds, I was not bothered. I was comfortable with not understanding the languages around me because I was (obviously) used to it. And it seemed the ultimate in power politics and condescension to make them speak so that I would be able to understand everything they said. Who was I to take their language away? We just laughed and learned together and assumed that every language was equally valid.
Of course, laughter and language have been powerful partners for as long as people could communicate and laugh. We use language to laugh at ourselves but also to laugh at the foolishness of others. François Rabelais, an early 16th-century humanist, monk, scholar, and physician, wrote one of the first French satires to laugh at the sophistry and hypocrisy of the clergy and the nobility. We are all familiar with the broad satire of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the precise piercings of Jane Austen’s novels. The targets of the satirical language in all these works are people or institutions that deserve mockery, either because of cruelty and inequality, selfishness, hypocrisy, or just plain muleheadedness. And the laughter separates those on the “inside,” who do the laughing, from those on the “outside,” who are laughed at.
Sometimes, I get confused by the intended target of some satirists. The most recent case was the infamous “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” The (supposed) intended target was the owner of the Washington Redskins, trying to defuse the controversy over the name of the team by setting up a foundation supporting Native Americans. But then why mock Asians and Asian-sounding names? Are Asians inherently laughable? Or was the assumption that Asians are always outsiders and so safe targets for laughter? Stephen Colbert is a wonderfully incisive satirist, and I admire his show. But gratuitous mockery, laughing at and making outsiders of an entire race when you mean to poke fun at someone who puts commercial value over racial sensitivity, seems too easy and rather hypocritical.