Miracle

 

 

 

“Every day is full of ordinary miracles. You don’t have to look far to find them,” said Lisa Cleypas at the end of her novel Sugar Daddy, which I finished reading at exactly 10 p.m. on August 22, 2007. Though I don’t like the novel on 10 CDs as a whole,[1] I do like that quotation. It has a great deal of truth in it.

Let me tell you two “ordinary miracles” that happened to me on that very day.

The first is related to the class that I taught that morning. It was the last but one day of the summer session, and my students were going to go online for registration for the fall semester. I hadn’t planned for the class in great detail. Before I went to the classroom, I photocopied “Getting Sick? That’s ‘S.O.S.’ from Your Cells,” an essay I had translated from Chinese into English several days earlier. “My students could read it,” I told myself, “when other students were registering.”

I was ready to do the photocopying when I found a sheet left in the copier by some other teacher. It turned out to be a song by Bette Midler, one of the most popular singers of the country today. The song was entitled “The Rose.” When I saw the song sheet, I thought to myself, “I might as well have this song photocopied too so that my students could read it for fun.” And so I made 20 copies of the song.

In class I explained a few words and expressions in the song to my students, and I told them what Prof. Helen Hayes, retired chair of anthropology department at Los Angeles City College, had said when I met her in her home last Sunday. “Reading poems helps the students to develop a feel for the language,” she said.

Unexpectedly, two Spanish-speaking students, Tatiana and Mariela, told me that we could listen to the song by going to the website of YouTube. I had read about YouTube a lot, knowing that it is one of the most popular websites for downloading music, but I had never visited it. So I invited one of them to help me go online. Immediately Tatiana went to the computer, found the website of YouTube at www.YouTube.com and typed in “The Rose by Bette Midler.”

Earlier, I had already had the big white screen rolled down in front of the class. And the overhead projector, which was linked with the computer, began to operate: we saw a beautiful Bette Midler swaying a bit and heard her singing “The Rose.” It was such a beautifully soft and pleasant voice that some students began to clap. I, too, felt excited about the fun the class was having. “I owe you a big debt of gratitude,” I said to Tatiana later. Some students wanted her to write down the website of YouTube, which she did.

 

The second miracle happened when I was driving home after class, my wife sitting next to me. She told me – for the second time – that she had planned not to tell the students the results of their exit test until Wednesday, but that some students urged her again and again to do that on Tuesday. She acquiesced in the end. “You have to ask to get what you want,” she said to me. “You will never get what you want if you don’t ask. That’s American culture.” She repeated the two words “American culture” for emphasis.

“Do you know where that ‘culture’ is from?” I asked my wife. She didn’t seem to know. “It’s from the Bible, the Book of Matthew, to be more exact,” I said. And I went on to tell her that I did exactly the same thing in my class that she had done in her class.

Andrea, a student form Mexico, wanted me to tell the class the test results the moment she stepped into the classroom, and she did it again when we were midway through the class. I relented and did some quick calculation [2] before I announced the scores.

Then I told the class about the acronym “ASK,” which stands for ask, seek, and knock, a basic teaching of the Bible. On the blackboard I wrote:

 

“Ask, and you’ll be given;

Seek, and you’ll find;

Knock, and the door will open for you.”[3]　

 

Additionally, I told a true story out of my own experience. Back in 1985, when I was working in Zhejiang Provincial Foreign Affairs Office (ZJPFAO) as a department chief, I was invited by the US Information Agency (USIA) to visit the US for one month together with my superior Mr. Cai Shun (蔡舜), [4] the then deputy director of the ZJPFAO. During a visit to Houghton Mifflin in Boston, we had a chance to visit the CEO in his office, whose book shelves were filled with all kinds of books HM had published. When I took a quick look, I was attracted by a newly published American Heritage Dictionary for children. I would love to have it, but like most Chinese, I was not bold enough to make my desire known to my host explicitly. It was not until the end of the visit that I thought of what my wife called “American culture” – you will get what you want if only you ask for it  [5]– and thereby I plucked up my courage to make the request. Sure enough, my host gladly made a gift of the dictionary to me.

The day’s second ordinary miracle, however, was that my wife, who usually doesn’t want to hear me talk about the Bible, heard me through when I explained the acronym “ASK.” This, indeed, was the first time in years when she had the patience to hear me through.

 

I know who made the two miracles happen to me. Thank God for all this.

 

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August 23-24, 2007

 

 

 

 

 

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