Peripheral Visions

didn’t need to learn the language, they hadn’t. But attitudes had started shifting by the sixties, and nationalism was increasing. I persuaded the president and the vice president of the university, the dean and the treasurer, and one or two others—all American Jesuits—that if they could, as their rule provided, spend one hour a day in meditation, they could also spend one hour a day learning the language of the people they had to work with.
    Certainly there was moral blackmail involved. But I think the main reason I had a measure of success was that instead of turning my “students” into beginners, incompetent newcomers, I tailored a program to acknowledge that they were veterans. I decided that since they already recognized a considerable miscellany of Pilipino used in daily life, my task was to reveal their existing knowledge, help them privately to use it more flexibly, and add to it gradually in ways that would be immediately useful and rewarding. So I made an inventory of knowledge already in place: common greetings, names of songs and cities, the phrases that any expatriate community drifts into using.
    Few societies have made the assumption demanded by changing technologies and longer lives that adult human beings are in some significant sense constantly recycling themselves—learning new things and finding a way to balance the pains and the joys of learning—so few societies reward those who take the risks of new learning. Most of us have come out of school rather pleased not to accept the position of ignorance any longer. But the Jesuits had to reconcile that preference with a commitment to humility no longer widespread in Western culture.
    Women are often constrained to make new beginnings because of choices made by men, sometimes moving them to new places and cultures. I was in Manila because, after I got my doctorate in Arabic linguistics, my husband accepted a job there. How do you survive under these circumstances? One way to survive is to learn, accepting the internal change that new learning requires and the loss of status that goes with being a beginner once again. In a new country this may mean returning to the infant’s task of learning a whole new language and culture, so it is not surprising that many of those assigned to work overseas take refuge in expatriate enclaves and continue to assume that their way of doing things is right, with few changes. Some American women in Manila took courses in Chinese cooking and learned how to judge the quality of pearls, and in Tehran they took seminars on Persian carpets—skills as souvenirs. Husbands are no more willing than wives to risk the changes that would go with fundamental new learning.
    Most of the jobs that take Americans overseas are structured so they are not obliged to learn the local culture; indeed they may carry a sort of obligation to hold on to American ways of doing things and to the authority this implies. Barkev has taught management in several countries, in English. To do this, he has eventually had to learn a great deal about the business climate and how people function. He is being paid for expertise, however, not for a willingness to put himself back in nursery school and try to learn the system from scratch. Even in socializing with the local community, expatriates seek out those who will reinforce their sense of confidence and familiarity. Shortly before the Iranian revolution, a member of the diplomatic community said to me, “Look, I socialize with Iranians all the time, and there just is no groundswell of hostility to Americans.”
    Women have suffered from lower self-esteem than men and have been less respected and less valued, but the very responsiveness demanded from women can sometimes lead to greater adaptability and greater willingness to follow the cues of a new environment. Today women are especially likely to work for change in cultures where, having been valued primarily for beauty or continuing fertility, they face an earlier loss of status than men, a declining future. There are societies, however, where women’s status traditionally rose as their sons grew to maturity. An Iranian woman of fifty, courted and honored by a son coming into his prime, could be poised and confident, with little motivation for new learning or social change, while a new bride, who has recently left her home environment to start from scratch among strangers, is necessarily malleable. Even when he has set up a new