Introduction

Editorial Review

Though Lincoln, Nebraska, seems a strange gathering place for refugees from all corners of the globe, it is the setting for Mary Pipher's The Middle of Everywhere, an ardent, anecdotal, and at times moving study of some new arrivals to the United States. Pipher emphasizes the resiliency of the refugees--from Laos, Bosnia, Northern Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and the former Soviet Union--whose homeland tales of death, privation, torture, and multi-pronged persecution vary only in the details. In America the refugees must learn a new language and pick their way among the temptations and wonders of a complex land. Does a Publishers Clearing House notice mean one is a millionaire? What is aluminum foil? Is an overdue library book a jailable offense? Pipher visits classrooms and homes and offers extended portraits of a female family of Kurds and a bewildered clan of Sudanese, as well as snapshots of many other refugees. She is a harsh critic of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and an advocate of "cultural brokers"--the social adjustment equivalent of practical nurses. --H. O'Billovich

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

CULTURAL COLLISIONS on the GREAT PLAINS

I AM FROM

I am from Avis and Frank, Agnes and Fred, Glessie May and Mark.

From the Ozark Mountains and the high plains of Eastern Colorado,

From mountain snowmelt and lazy southern creeks filled with water moccasins.

I am from oatmeal eaters, gizzard eaters, haggis and raccoon eaters.

I'm from craziness, darkness, sensuality, and humor.

From intense do-gooders struggling through ranch winters in the 1920s.

I'm from "If you can't say anything nice about someone don't say anything" and "Pretty is as pretty does" and "Shit-mucklety brown" and "Damn it all to hell."

I'm from no-dancing-or-drinking Methodists, but cards were okay except on Sunday, and from tent-meeting Holy Rollers,

From farmers, soldiers, bootleggers, and teachers.

I'm from Schwinn girl's bike, 1950 Mercury two-door, and West Side Story.

I'm from coyotes, baby field mice, chlorinous swimming pools,

Milky Way and harvest moon over Nebraska cornfields.

I'm from muddy Platte and Republican,

from cottonwood and mulberry, tumbleweed and switchgrass

from Willa Cather, Walt Whitman, and Janis Joplin,

My own sweet dance unfolding against a cast of women in aprons and barefoot men in overalls.

As a girl in Beaver City, I played the globe game. Sitting outside in the thick yellow weeds, or at the kitchen table while my father made bean soup, I would shut my eyes, put my finger on the globe, and spin it. Then I would open my eyes and imagine what it was like in whatever spot my finger was touching. What were the streets like, the sounds, the colors, the smells? What were the people doing there right now?

I felt isolated in Beaver City, far away from any real action. We were a small town of white Protestants surrounded by cow pastures and wheat fields. I had no contact with people who were different from me. Native Americans had a rich legacy in Nebraska, but I knew nothing of them, not even the names of the tribes who lived in my area. I had never seen a black person or a Latino. Until I read The Diary of Anne Frank, I had never heard of Jewish people.

Adults talked mostly about crops, pie, and rainfall. I couldn't wait to grow up and move someplace exotic and faraway, and living where I did, every place appeared faraway and exotic. When I read Tolstoy's book on the little pilgrim who walked all over the world, I vowed to become that pilgrim and to spend my life seeing everything and talking to everyone.

As a young adult, I escaped for a while. I lived in San Francisco, Mexico, London, and Madrid. But much to my surprise, I missed the wheat fields, the thunderstorms, and the meadowlarks. I returned to Nebraska in my mid-twenties, married, raised a family, worked as a psychologist, and ate a lot of pie. I've been happy in Nebraska, but until recently I thought I had to choose between loving a particular rural place and experiencing all the beautiful diversity of the world.

Before the Europeans arrived, Nebraska was home to many Indian tribes. The Omaha, the Ponca, the Pawnee, and the Nemaha lived in the east, the Lakota Sioux in the west. In the late 1800s immigrants from Europe pushed out the Native Americans. Wave after wave of new pioneers broke over Nebraska and we became a state of Scots, Irish, British, Czechs, Swedes, and Danes. For a while, we had so many Germans that many schools held classes in German. But after World War I, when nativist sentiments swept our state, our unicameral made instruction in German illegal.

Mexican workers came to build the railroads and to work on farms and in meatpacking. African Americans came to farm and to work in our cities. Nebraska's first free black person, Sally Bayne, moved to Omaha in 1854, and an all-black colony was formed at Overton in Dawes County in 1885. Malcolm X was born in Omaha in 1925.

Even though people of color have a rich history in our state and, of course, the Native Americans were here first, our state's identity the last 150 years has been mainly European. Until recently, a mixed marriage meant a Catholic married to a Methodist. After World War II, so many Latvians came here that we became the official site of the Latvian government in exile. Our jokes were yawners about farmers or Lutherans-"What did the farmer say after he won a million dollars in the lottery?" "Thank God I have enough money to farm a few more years." Or, "Wherever four Lutherans are gathered there is always a fifth."

However, in the last fifteen years something surprising has happened. It began with the boat people, mostly Vietnamese and Cambodians, coming in after the Vietnam War. In the 1980s Lincoln began having a few Asian markets, a Vietnamese Catholic church, a Buddhist temple, and English Language Learners (ELL) classes. Around the same time, Mexican migrant workers, who had long done seasonal work in our area, bought houses and settled down. Refugees from the wars in Central America trickled in.

The real change occurred in the 1990s. Because Lincoln had almost no unemployment and a relatively low cost of living, we were selected by the U. S. Office of Refugee Resettlement as a preferred community for newly arrived refugees. Now we are one of the top-twenty cities in America for new arrivals from abroad. Our nonwhite population has grown 128 percent since 1990. We are beginning to look like East Harlem.

Suddenly, our supermarkets and schools are bursting with refugees from Russia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Hungary, and Ethiopia. Our Kurdish, Sudanese, and Somali populations are rapidly increasing. Even as I write this, refugees from Afghanistan, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are coming into our community. Some are educated and from Westernized places. Increasingly, we have poor and uneducated refugees. We have children from fifty different nationalities who speak thirty-two different languages in our public schools.

Our obituary column shows who came here early in the 1900s. It is filled with Hrdvys, Andersens, Walenshenksys, and Muellers. But the births column, which reflects recent immigration patterns, has many Ali, Nguyen, and Martinez babies. By midcentury, less than half our population will be non-Latino white. We are becoming a brown state in a brown nation.

Lincoln has often been described by disgruntled locals and insensitive outsiders as the middle of nowhere, but now it can truthfully be called the middle of everywhere. We are a city of juxtapositions. Next to the old man in overalls selling sweet corn at the farmers' market, a Vietnamese couple sells long beans, bitter melons, and fresh lemongrass. A Yemeni girl wearing a veil stands next to a football fan in his Big Red jacket. Beside McDonald's is a Vietnamese karaoke bar. Wagey Drug has a sign in the window that says, TARJETAS EN ESPAÑOL SE VENDEN AQUI. On the Fourth of July, Asian lion dancers perform beside Nigerian drummers. Driving down Twenty-seventh Street, among the signs for the Good Neighbor Center, Long John Silver's, Fat Pat's Pizza, Snowflakes, and Jiffy Lube, I see signs for Mohammed's Barber Shop, Jai Jai's Hair Salon, Kim Ngo's jewelry, Pho's Vietnamese Café, and Nguyen's Tae-Kwon Do.

We celebrate many holidays-Tet, Cinco de Mayo, Rosh Hashanah, and Ramadan. At our jazz concerts, Vietnamese families share benches with Kurdish and Somali families. When my neighbor plays a pickup basketball game in the park, he plays with Bosnian, Iranian, Nigerian, and Latino players. I am reminded of the New Yorker cartoon which pictured a restaurant with a sign reading, RANCHO IL WOK DE PARIS, FEATURING TEX-MEX, ITALIAN, ASIAN, AND FRENCH CUISINES.

Women in veils exchange information with Mexican grandmothers in long black dresses. Laotian fathers smoke beside Romanian and Serbian dads. By now, every conceivable kind of grocery store exists in our city. And the ethnic shelves in our IGA grocery stores keep expanding. The produce sections carry jicama and cilantro. Shoppers can buy pitas, tortillas, egg rolls, wraps, and breads from all over the world. My most recent cab driver was a Nigerian school administrator who fled his country because he was in a pro-democracy group. S. J. Perelman's description of Bangkok-"It seemed to combine the Hannibal, Missouri, of Mark Twain's childhood with Beverly Hills, the Low Countries, and Chinatown"-could now apply to Lincoln.

Copyright © 2002 by Mary Pipher

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Discussion Questions

Questions from the Publisher's Teaching Guide:

1. In the Foreword to The Middle of Everywhere, Mary Pipher discusses how September 11 changed the way she thought and felt about this book (since she had finished writing it just before that tragic Tuesday morning). How did September 11 affect this author? And what does she mean by saying that "The Middle of Everywhere is my way to chop wood and carry water"?

2. In the book's Prelude, Pipher points out an striking image she saw on Ellis Island: "a tree whose branches were countries and whose leaves were words." Revisit this passage. Which of these words did you recognize? Which were new to you? And what point is Pipher making about the links between language, culture, and experience in America?

3. What do we learn in the opening pages about the setting of this book, the Midwestern city where it takes place? Look again at Pipher's description of contemporary Lincoln, Nebraska (in Chapter 1). Where does the book's title come from? How has Lincoln changed in recent times? Be as specific as you can. And why has it thus changed?

4. What is a refugee? How does the United Nations define one? (See Chapter 1.)

5. In Chapter 2, Pipher says she discovered that a certain recent Hollywood movie is often "a favorite of refugees." Which movie is it? And why does she think it is so popular amid refugees?

6. Near the conclusion of Chapter 2, Pipher writes: "There are two common refugee beliefs about America." Identify these two beliefs, explain why refugees hold them. Are they true? False? Both? Explain.

7. Linh is a young woman from Vietnam whom we first encounter in Chapter 3. After learning of Linh and her family's ongoing adjustment to American life, what differences can you articulate between family as a Western construct and family as a part of more traditional cultures?

8. Explain in detail why driving is so often a problem for newcomers and refugees in America. (See Chapter 4 and elsewhere.)

9. How would you summarize Pipher's experiences at Sycamore Elementary School (see Chapter 5)? Describe the physical and educational environment of the school itself--including Grace, the English as Learned Language teacher whom Pipher befriends--and then describe each of the ten pupils on Pipher's abridged roster. In each case, reflect on the social ability, cultural background, and academic achievement of the student in question.

10. In Chapter 6, we "sit-in" (alongside Pipher) on a high school ELL class taught by a composite instructor known as Mrs. Kaye. Why does Mrs. Kaye decide not to return to this school next year? How do the students react to her news? And how have they changed, individually and collectively, over the course of their time in Mrs. Kaye's classroom?

11. "In some ways, young adults are our most vulnerable newcomers," Pipher states in Chapter 7. Recount the stories of Thiep and of "the three Iraqis" so as to illustrate this key point about vulnerability and refugees.

12. One of the women Pipher converses with at length in Chapter 8 is Nessima. Where is she from? How old is she? What does she do in Lincoln to a earn a paycheck? What does Nessima like about America, and what does she dislike? Describe her personality, her socio-political views, her family, her home life, and her "mixed feelings about Nebraska."

13. Why do Pipher and her husband decide to act as "an American mom and dad" to the family from Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp? And what does being such a "parent" call for in this scenario? (See Chapter 9.)

14. In Chapter 10, Pipher discusses the twelve "attributes of resilience" that she believes all refugees must possess in order to adjust successfully to life in America. Looking back over this list, which individuals from throughout the book would you assign to each of these attributes as particularly representative or especially symbolic?

15. What does Pipher mean by the term "JPI" (as she writes in Chapter 12)? How does this acronym reflect the ways in which most Americans perceive or imagine refugees today?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Excerpt
»	Publisher's Teacher's Guide
»	Author Interview

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