Add to the institution of family vested with family values the institution of religion and the result was a sticky mess out of which a black widow could not extricate herself without losing a limb or two. I always confused arachnids with insects anyway. To me, arachnids were deft runners and insects were plain bothersome. Unfortunately, they overran everything from sacred, household, and garden variety obscene until the best way to fight them was to lay back and let them drown every bit of your skin in their pincers and biters until the welts on your skin ran into each other and became one big swollen bite. The wounds of a clan are like that. Symbiotic. Together the sum of their potency is greater than the parts. That is a clan's strength. That is how they confront the world, and that is how they make sure each member of the clan stays in line. For the solid face presented to the world is turned inward on its own just as quickly and noncompliance is dealt with as swiftly as a bite of a black widow even if she be partially amputated.
It wasn't always so bad. Clannishness had its benefits that outweighed its cost in the beginning. Being in a new country, closeness ensured survival.
We started life in an immigration camp where the Midwestern townsfolk truly did have family values and set us and other immigrant families up in low income housing, found us used cars that still had a thousand miles on them, found our parents blue collar jobs cleaning, paining, hauling, things that did not need English. We, meaning the extended family of a dozen aunts and uncles (luckily most were unmarried, which means no children at the time) lived in a tiny cramped apartment with barely enough warmth in the winter but being a happy child I remember the drifts of snow crunching underfoot and always wanted to run out and play with my older siblings, two older sisters and one older brother, but was too young sometimes for the subfreezing temperatures.
I remember a general feeling of strife that shaped my father's posture as he spoke to native countrymen, the gratitude when he spoke in broken English with the locals, and the stress of work that I did not specifically understand but certainly felt every time he came home late from work. It was no less for my mom. She would sometimes walk through the front door and barely greet us as she went to the bedroom to lay down. I knew it was bad, even at four years old. It was a type of spiritual stress that comes from people with great talent and potential who cannot express it, for the land of opportunity meant food, and safe shelter for the first generation adults. The first generation children did not have the spiritual stress of having society look down on them for not being able to speak English and having to clean other people's toilets when they were capable of so much more than the people for whom they cleaned toilets.
My siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles did not learn about culture from our parents, for they were busy working for our happiness. We learned it in school. And if you have heard about how loners, homosexuals, and anyone different are persecuted, immigrants are no different. Try fighting back when you can't speak the language. Luckily for some of us, learning to speak English was easy since we were young. But small nuances in language persist to this day.
For instance, anything with a flat surface was a shelf. If my sister told me to put something on the shelf, she often pointed to the coffee table or the living room table or the dresser drawer. We actually did not have a coffee table or a table made specially for the living room. Those concepts were not known to our young minds. We just sort of placed a table of a certain size in our house as was convenient.
This did not make much of a difference until I went away to college and my roommates laughed when I pronounced cupboard phonetically. Is it my fault Americans don't enunciate and slur their syllables?
Being poor and wearing second hands from your classmates didn't help either. I remember an off-the-shoulder dress in green floral print that I thought was so sexy. I was always happy to get new hand-me-downs. I never felt any sense of inferiority from my classmates and even thanked them for their old faux fur coat that felt more luxurious than anything I had ever had. I was lucky that way, the things that people would be ashamed of, such as wearing your neighbor's clothes, I saw as wow, what a sexy little dress and faux fur coat, I can't wait to wear it to church this week!
My pink colored glasses sometimes got cracked. Not everything could be viewed with a smile, so it's a good thing my family was tough. We fought back against the bullies. Not all of us could, however. When you are an immigrant all battles are uphill, steep and rugged. For my sister, the battle uphill approached vertical. She was a bit different. In a way that was hard to explain. It wasn't anything obvious in one faux pas. It was more like a series of odd things she might say. The first time you kind of thought whatever, people explain things in a confusing way all the time. The next time you kind of blinked. Maybe she didn't really say it the way it sounded. The third time, okay, that was a little weird. After hanging out with her for a while, you realized the out-of-kilter things my sister said was a real reflection of the way her mind worked. A little more than two standard deviations from the mean. And for this, kids and adults alike were mean to her.
It was something we all noticed but wasn't big enough to do something about. What could be done anyway. There was no word for it when we were growing up. Hey, I'm not saying there wasn't anything wrong with the rest of us. However, most people are different within acceptable boundaries. And being different in a not good way is usually balanced by talents, strengths, such as excelling in school, being pretty, or running faster. My sister had none of these except art. But who values art these days unless there's a big price tag attached to it. Things might have been tolerable but my sister got it on all sides, at school and at home. It wasn't a purposeful thing, not at home anyway. But you have to be around to see how difficult it was to not take advantage of my sister. It took the patience of Saint Job to hang around my sister without losing one's temper. So at the most one could take her in doses. Continuous exposure was not like inoculating yourself to cyanide by taking little doses over a period of time. There was no dose sufficiently small that would not be harmful in the long run. Immunity did not exist. A cure was as hopeful as a cure to breast cancer. Exposure meant certain debilitation, if not permanent, long lasting with a taste for no further contact or a dose large enough to end one's misery. The nature of this beast however, was its skill in prolonging misery. At least with the bull, the picadero would be replaced with the bullfighter and his long sword. In the real world, the picadero kept on pricking you until you finally bled to death, but how was that possible when pinpricks close up faster than you can prick them.
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