Coming to America; or, Then and Now

When I was sixteen or so, I went with my honors English class to see the play Emperor Jones. It made a huge impression on me, and I wish I could remember the name of the actor who played the title role, because he might be famous now.
But that, as Arlo Guthrie once said, isn't what I came to talk about.
We wandered around what passed for Dallas's art district later.
"If I didn't speak, could you tell I wasn't American?" I asked my boyfriend.
He assured me he could, in a second. I wondered about this for years; eventually, I think, it stopped being true.
But I was reminded this week.
We have a new student at my school, a Peruvian. He arrived in this country, I guess, last week sometime. And yes, even if he keeps his mouth shut - and he does - it's easy to guess he's a new arrival.
It isn't just his classically Inca face, which could be the model for the codices the Spaniards and Portugese found in their ravages across Central and South America. His entire appearance speaks of his foreign origin. He wears small, neat shoes that no Norteamericano boy would be caught dead in - almost girls' shoes, shiny leather and the kind of Keds - styles American women favored in the late 60's. With white socks, and neat pants and shirts. Yesterday he had a velour tracksuit - not particularly outrageous, but nothing I would consider purchasing for my ten year old. His hair has a kind of bowl cut that is neither short nor long enough to be fashionable, even by middle school standards.
And oh, my heart goes out to him. I got here when I was exactly a year older than he is now. In Czechoslovakia, hot baths were a once-a-week thing, which meant that you washed your hair about every two weeks. Really! So for the first few months, I mostly went to school with hair so greasy that, nowadays, I would be calling my parents to see if they could do something about the grooming issue. I wore the same dress every day for the first week, and I don't think it got laundered in between. It was simply the only thing I had that had come from the United States, shipped to Vienna ahead of time, and thus the only outfit of whose acceptability I was certain.
The only thing I remember distinctly from my first day of American school was that I broke the slide with the algae in my science class, roughly 5 minutes after my arrival. All I knew to say, to most inquiries, was "I don't understand," a phrase I used so often that it became a single, garbled word.
But I learned. By Christmas, I had no trouble memorizing the words to the carols the choir sang, and had taught the class, phonetically, the Russian words to "Katyusha" (incidentally, the song at the end of the wedding in The Deer Hunter..). I was on the honor roll from the first quarter - and yes, those first grades were charity, but after that I earned them. My math teacher, Mr. Graham, stayed after school with me one afternoon, and taught me how not to roll my r's.
"Put the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth," he said. All it took.
My sister still rolls her r's.
That summer, my parents enrolled me in summer school. Having no other options, I didn't object - and by the end of it, earned vocabulary scores in the 90th percentile. And my verbals on the SAT and GRE and all those other tests you take to prove your academic worth continued that trend.
Beyond my math teacher's informal intervention, I never got help of any sort to help me learn the language from the public schools. My mom, bless her, taught me most of my early skills; at first, sitting on athletic mats in the emergency displaced-persons center in Vienna, then in the room where she and my father slept, as we together decoded a children's biography of Clara Barton. By the end of the book I had passable English skills.
The Peruvian student's world is so very, very different.
The educational assistant assigned to him waved to me excitedly today from her seat next to him in science class.
"Look what I found!" she crowed.
It was a science book in Spanish. She was so very pleased, because it defined, in his language, exactly the terms we discussed.
I smiled encouragingly.
But, I wanted to say. Will this help him learn, really? Does it help us, any of us, travellers in foreign lands, to have the option of using our native language? Or does it instead cripple us?
In Vienna several years ago, my sister and I stopped by a uniquely non-English speaking flower seller to purchase a bouquet for a friend.
"How much?" she asked louder and louder, an unwitting caricature of the American tourist. It wasn't working.
I combed the memory banks for my high school German class.
"Wie Viel?" I finally remembered.
"Drei Mark." was his pre-Euro reply.
Would I have bothered to remember, if, like the desk clerk in our hotel, he spoke English fluently? Doubt it.
I've taken the classes in sheltered instruction for non-English speakers. I recognize that my situation was special, because my mother spoke the language of my new home, and that perhaps languages come more easily to me than to most, because I'm an auditory learner.
But I keep thinking about that quiet Inca, reading his Spanish science book. Are we doing him a favor? Or are we assigning him a de facto disability?