Immigrant teens find refuge, hope in ‘Newcomers’
It’s usually the infants and children who receive the attention and empathy when refugee families make it to our country.
But what of the teens, those nearadults who will have to help support their families but know no English; have lived their entire lives in another culture with traditions, friends and family they left behind; and must navigate the jagged shoals of adolescence with strangers who speak, act and dress differently than they do?
They’re facing better futures than in the war-torn or drought-ravaged countries they left. But can they establish stable footing, acclimate, learn and find some joy in a new land?
These and hundreds of other ques- tions are answered — as least as they relate to 21 teens who arrived in this country a little over two years ago — in The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom (Scribner, 397 pp., eeeg).
Author Helen Thorpe, a seasoned journalist who knows exactly how to find a timely topic and write a compel- ling story, spent a full school year (201516) in Room 142 at South High School in Denver, chronicling the progress of the recent-immigrant teenagers assigned to Eddie Williams’ English language acquisition class.
The kids were from Mozambique, Vietnam, Burma, Eritrea, El Salvador, Mexico, Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bhutan, Tajikistan and Mauritania. Most had little or no facility with English, and most had no one else in the classroom who could speak their native language. All of them traveled an hour or more on public transportation to get to school, most were struggling determinedly to tamp down memories of gruesome past trauma, and all were living on the brink of abject poverty. And yet they progressed — some with considerable difficulty, some at breakneck speed — and their “shut-door expressions” began to soften.
We’re given a strong sense of the personalities and idiosyncracies of all the students in Room 142, though we learn about the lives before America, exodus journeys and out-of-school lives of only a few of them. It is testament to the strength of Thorpe’s skill (evident in her previous books, Just Like Us and Soldier Girls) that we become so attached we long to know more.
The teens we meet have endured things none of us can imagine, and even after reading The Newcomers, we’ll never fully understand because Thorpe was exceedingly respectful of boundaries and not re-traumatizing the kids by forcing them to talk much about things they weren’t ready to revisit.
But we learn a great deal, and that has never been more crucial than at this moment.