Fumiko Schaub
SEATTLE, WA, April 15, 2024 By FUMIKO SCHAUB
“How do you pronounce your name?” “Where are you from?” Even after having lived in the States for over 30 years, people still ask me these questions. But being different, being a minority person, is nothing new.
I was raised in a Christian home in Tokyo, Japan where Christians account for 0.5% of the entire population. My sister and I weren’t allowed to participate in cultural events tied to either Buddhism or Shintoism. Consequently, I felt like an outsider in my own country. Plus, my unruly natural curly hair always stood out in a crowd and was an easy target for teasing in a culture where most people have straight hair. In the U. S. I still get stares from people at random places. Ironically, however, they look at my hair with admiration, exclaiming how lucky I am. I write these amusing moments revolving around my cross-cultural experiences in my poems which I have shared in The Licton Springs Review, now that I am a Page One tutor and English teacher at North Seattle College.
I first came to the U.S. to go to college. As a non-native speaker of English, it took me twice or three times longer to read the assigned books for classes and write essays. But I have always loved reading and writing, and so I was happy with my decision to major in English literature. I loved literary analysis, and my English professors commended me for my unique perspectives and thought-provoking ideas. I try to do the same when I read my students’ writings now.
After graduating from California Lutheran University, a small liberal arts college, with a BA in English Literature, I returned to Japan and worked in the Tokyo office of a Saudi Arabian company for two years, translating petrochemical-related news and reports from Japanese into English. When I saved up enough money, I came back to the States to go to graduate school with the hope to teach in college. I earned an MA in English literature at Portland State University. I met my husband Nate while I was in Portland. We spent two years in Tokyo after we were married, and we returned to the U.S. when his work contract in Japan expired. He was ready to come back, so I tagged along. This time as an immigrant.
I did not start teaching and tutoring until years after Nate and I moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but I did some interesting work using my language skills. I worked for a research company in Portland, Oregon. I interpreted during business meetings and presentations and translated various reports from English into Japanese for Japanese clients. Around the same time, I worked as a hospital interpreter at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City, Iowa. I served in situations ranging from pediatric cardiology, to dermatology, to the orthopedic department. Once I helped an OB/GYN
communicate with a woman who was in labor. Another time I interpreted for a hospital social worker for a domestic violence concern.
I enjoyed hospital interpreter work but it was quite sporadic and didn’t give me much chance to meet more people. SoI decided to pursue teaching seriously. In 1998 two days before fall semester started, I was hired to teach two developmental English classes at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids: No syllabus. No reading assignments selected. With only the class roster in hand, I walked into my classroom. After class, the writing center director approached me and asked if I would be interested in tutoring. I continued to teach and tutor for the next four years at that college. I still don’t know how I managed to survive the first semester. But at the end of the semester when two Iowa farm boys came up to me and shook my hands, saying, “It was a great pleasure having you as a teacher,” I became swelled with joy and gratitude. I might have been the first Asian teacher they had encountered in person, and yet they didn’t treat me any less just because I was a foreign-born immigrant.
A majority of my students grew up in tiny, rural towns, and they taught me how it could be scary to leave their hometown and move to “a big city” like Cedar Rapids. They taught me to put myself in someone else’s shoes, to look at situations from another person’s perspective. It turned out to be an ideal place for me to develop my teaching style. Besides teaching and tutoring, I joined the creative writing group among English faculty.
While living in the middle of vast corn fields in Iowa helped me grow tremendously, both professionally and personally, I knew I was a city girl at heart. One day I flew to Washington, stayed with my former housemate from Portland, and found an apartment in Kirkland and a teaching job at Lake Washington Institute of Technology. I taught English 100 and 101 and tutored for three years. Many students were those who had been laid off by Boeing after having worked for the company for 20-25 years. They started to work right after high school and never went to college, and their humble attitudes and writings based on their immense life experiences were inspiring.
In 2003 we bought a house in Seattle and I started to look for a teaching position at a college in Seattle. One day I stumbled onto a video clip of Pappi Thomas, the director of the NSC Loft (now named Page One), promoting the writing center. I had met Pappi in Iowa City when he was a student in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He had remembered me and offered me a job right away. That was fall 2007.
Through my tutoring job, I was offered the chance to teach two English classes in Winter 2008. I have been with North since then, though I took several years off from teaching and tutoring when we adopted our daughter, Syriana. Her birth parents are both White; being an Asian parent to a White child has again made me different. People often mistook me for a nanny at a playground. But it just helped me recognize how easy it is to make assumptions about others. Once we take the time to get to know others on a personal level, I believe we just view them as a person with many unique features.
Just like my hair symbolizes, my perception of being different has shifted: I now see it as my strength instead of something I despise, because it allows me to empathize with international students and immigrants who might have difficulty expressing themselves in English. It also helps me understand minority people who struggle with their own identity or feel isolated, as well as non-traditional students who may feel insecure about fulfilling their goals. This, I bring in my class and Page One, as I interact with each student.
I would like to continue teaching and tutoring at North at least for the next 5 years. I would also like to self-publish a book of poetry. My husband and I fantasize about living in different parts of the U.S., like Santa Fe, New Mexico, or other countries, like Finland. Who knows?
My advice to students who visit Page One? There are numerous tutors at Page One who have different tutoring style and approaches. Find tutor(s) that you connect well with, to have a positive experience.
Student Learning Center at North Seattle College 