by Jun Lin For a year I spent my Friday evenings tutoring at the Children’s Home. It was a volunteer job that I had signed up for because, like my classmate, who had been a tutor there a year before me, I just wanted to help. The home had then been a three-building (now four) complex that sat in a quiet neighborhood in the West District of Taichung City, just a few blocks away from my school. So every Friday after school, I’d walk those few blocks and get there by 7 pm, and I tutored till 9. The full name for the home is Central Region Children’s Home, an institution under the Ministry of Health and Welfare that takes in children, aged from 2 to 12, who have been commended by the government to institutional care. Most of the children here are not kinless; their parents are missing from their lives for various reasons: some because of indigence, others because of child abuse cases or family emergencies. The kids live here until their families can bring them home; others will stay until they move out after finishing school. By day they attend school just like any other kid, and so just like any other kid they have questions about homework, and that’s where the tutors come in.
My job description was simple: I would be assigned to a child and help them with their homework. Back then I had an almost childlike enthusiasm, and immediately began dreaming of giving them bonus lessons. I thought about teaching English, the only subject I did well in high school and something I was excited about because English meant literature, and literature was fun and opened up to the endless possibilities of worlds where the imagination was allowed to roam. I thought about picture books and reading stories like how my teachers in kindergarten used to. I scratched off a list of reading materials that I had read as a child and was thrilled by the prospect of these books becoming part of another kid’s childhood. On my first day I arrived fifteen minutes early with butterflies in my stomach and cracked the door open before tiptoeing in. The home is divided into houses, each house resembling a large classroom divided into several areas. The one I tutored in had two bedrooms on the inside, one for boys and one for girls, a small separate room where the teacher could rest, a living room with a TV, wooden benches and stacked bookshelves, two large dining tables in the back and a kitchen with a conjoining balcony. In the common area stood rows of small wooden desks topped with green desk mats, lined up in a fashion that reminded me of school. The teacher welcomed me warmly and assigned me to one of the kids. He was a gregarious eight-year-old and shot a skinny arm up into the air when he heard his name called. That evening he taught me how to write his name and demonstrated how to write all the Chinese characters he knew, and told me about his other home while erasing and rewriting every single line in his exercise book because his teacher at school had thought his handwriting careless, and tried to hide the tears pouring from his eyes when he was told to rewrite the parts he’d just done rewriting again. I didn’t really tutor him on anything that day. I watched helplessly as he erased his writing angrily and rewrote it. I told him his handwriting was fine. Every Friday evening after that, I more or less had the same feeling as I watched them do their homework: despite volunteering to help, I wasn’t sure how much I was actually helping. Really there were only a few instances when I had really explained math to them. It took twice the time for them to finish their homework that way than it did when they copied straight from the answer key, so most of the time they just copied. On the other hand, my kid was an independent learner and was doing great on his own. He spent a lot of time coloring in pictures and writing book reports, and still managed to finish early. And so I thought, hopefully, about the reading list. One evening I ended up sitting at a round kitchen table, sandwiched between two kids: a sulking eight-year-old scribbling away at his writing exercise book, and a pouting fourteen-year-old vexed over eighth-grade math equations. They had been arguing heatedly about who got to ask questions and had been unsatisfied when I told them it was important to share. Another evening I looked under the tables and chairs while my kid went asking around the house whether anyone had seen his mechanical pencil: lost, or stolen, within the same hour I’d given it to him. We never found it. Some evenings I only had to color in the blank spaces on a worksheet; on others I was surrounded by an overwhelming amount of questions at once. Some days I sat next to the kids as they copied essays as punishment for breaking a house rule. Some days the kids had simply come back from school in a terrible mood and refused to talk. Some days they were more concerned with fighting over who got the tutors first than with their homework, when I really just wished they could all sit down in peace and finish their assignments. I felt my part as a tutor shrinking smaller and smaller, until I wasn’t so much teaching them as I was learning from them. I learned a few things about how to be a tutor at the home. First, you had to be adaptable, because children were unpredictable. Then you had to push back your lesson plans sometimes to deal with present matters, like a missing pencil or a small fight, in which you had to play the peacemaker. You had to watch soap operas and One Piece so you could join in their conversations. You had to manage your time better, because you were falling behind at school and studied two hours less than everyone else in your class. You had to learn to read their actions, which was really becoming a more sensitive person. A kid once said to me, “I have a special mission for you,” and asked me to rearrange his books, three times in less than ten minutes while he copied his “punishment essay”; I’d finish doing it and he’d shuffle them around and tell me to put them back in order again. I only realized what he was trying to do, belatedly, after checking the time. It was five to 9 and he was keeping me busy so I’d wait until he finished his work before I left. It didn’t seem to matter to them that I wasn’t teaching them anything valuable or even really tutoring that much, as long as I went every week and sat beside them. But when I kept falling short of my own expectations, I burned out easily. Things like midterm exams became convenient excuses not to go that evening. It was easier just to make a call and cancel the lessons, though I knew that one occasion would lead to the next, and that avoidance was a dangerous habit. What pushed me to keep going, in the end, was not my enthusiasm, which had then died down to but a flickering flame in the wind; it was patience. Patience was not a kind of passive endurance through frustration, but the tireless process of coming back every time after you felt defeated. It wasn’t about sitting through a sluggish two hours when you’ve failed to be a good tutor, it was about coming back for another two hours that might or might not prove to be as sluggish the next week. Patience was about persistence, about how you built your tether out from looking within you and finding love to give. Patience was when you came back for the kids you cared about, week after week, despite your failure, your helplessness, your disappointment; patience was a promise you made. It wasn’t until the second semester that I’d started bringing books to the home: The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Where the Wild Things Are, and the Up-and-Away books. Before I knew it, it was our last lesson. My term was up and I was quitting because I needed more time to study for college entrance exams. On our last day my kid finished his homework early and went to sit in the living room to watch TV. I wrote him a card and said good-bye, and the Up-and-Away books were put away, almost good as new, in the drawers. A few months later when I revisited the home he took it out from his drawer and said he’d like to pick up where we left off. It broke my heart. I realized that I’d made a promise and then left. Volunteering is a little bit like having a relationship–falling in love with it was the easy part, building the relationship and staying devoted to it was hard. There are plenty of volunteer clubs at university, and every time I see them I think about the home and think about how I’d eventually broken my promise to them when I left to study for my exams, and then to study in Taipei. And even though I thought about them from time to time, I couldn’t find a way back into their lives. I didn’t know how I could support them, or tell them that I cared about them, when I was so rarely present. I’m sure new tutors will have come in by now, and they will be patient and enthusiastic people. Most of the volunteers I met back then were students, but I knew that there were volunteers who were retired school teachers, who usually had a more fixed schedule and no exams, and so they spent more time with the kids each week and could really make a difference. When I later asked Mr. Lin what he thought was an essential quality to the volunteers at the home he replied, “A great deal of patience. If you’re patient and stick with them till the end, they always know.” Mr. Lin is a social worker who has worked at the Children’s Home for more than a decade since 2002. “The kids are stronger than you think,” he added. One time I’d met another student volunteer like myself, and she’d said to me, “The kids can be quite vulnerable actually. So it’d be nice if you wrote them things like a message or a card.” And I think they are both right. The children’s sensitivity makes them vulnerable, but their resilience makes them strong. With such qualities they will grow up to be great adults. I always said I didn’t want to be one of those people who came and went, but the truth was perhaps I had. I had left the home on a Friday night feeling proud of the kids and sorry that I couldn’t and didn’t stay longer. Then for a long time, whenever I looked back on this year I’d always come to the same conclusion that I’d gained more from them than I could ever give. a
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May 2024
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