PART 1 Summary
The birth of Trevor, a mixed baby whose biological father was a Swiss/German, was a crime under apartheid in South Africa. Consequently, he spent most of his childhood indoors.
Born and brought up in a religious family, Trevor was imbued with Christian culture. Every Sunday, the family had to commute between home and three churches. When South Africa's apartheid regime fell apart, two black groups Zulu and Xhosa jockeyed for power and triggered bloody clashes. One Sunday night, on the way back home from churches, Trevor's mother, a Xhosa woman, had a quarrel with a Zulu driver, who threatened to teach them a lesson. She threw Trevor out of the minibus and leaped out herself, with Andrew intact in her arms. Thanks to their excellent running ability, they escaped a near-death.
Trevor was raised in a world run by women, who had devout faith in God. They prayed all the year round. Trevor was often leaned on to communicate better with God by praying in English. Those women's loyalty to God sometimes bordered on superstition. A case in point: Trevor's mother once founded a turd in the rubbish bin which in fact belonged to Trevor and she suspected that a demon had insinuated itself into her house. In order to dispel the demon, she assembled the family and the neighbors and called upon them to pray.
Being a mixed-colored child, Trever was treated different by his family and other people. He once accidentally perforated the eardrum of his cousin but got away with it as his grandmother did not know how to treat a "white" child. Thanks to his multilingual mother, Trevor picked up English, German, Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans and contrived to bridge the race gap by replying to people in their language. At the age of eleven, he left Maryvale to go to H. A. Jack Primary, a government school where children of color were segregated from the whites. A handful of white kids made up the majority of the smart classes, the A classes, while almost all black kids were arranged in the B classes. Trevor talked to some black kids in African languages during a recess and they clicked straight away. He went to the school counsel and asked for a switch to the B classes where he had a sense of belonging.
As the second girl and tomboy in her family, Trevor's mother was unwanted by her parents and ended up being sent to her aunt's farm where she toiled and moiled until she got a job at a factory. The silver lining in that period was the access to a mission school where she learnt to read and write in English. She raised Trevor in a way opposite to hers. For example, she gave him a name with no meaning, taught him English as his first language and read to him constantly. When apartheid cracked, they moved to a colored neighborhood named Eden Park. They got a secondhand car and drove it to explore the country. Albeit materially poor, they were rich with experience.
PART 2 Expressions
1. What happened with education in South Africa, with the mission schools and the Bantu schools, offers a neat comparison of the two groups of whites who oppressed us, the British and the Afrikaners.
neat: formal, a neat way of doing or saying sth is simple but clever and effective
a neat summary of the main issues
In the end we found a very neat solution to the problem.
口语中neat可以表示good
That's a really neat idea.
I liked working for him -- he was a neat guy.
2. My mom was the problem child, a tomboy, stubborn, defiant.
tomboy: 假小子；男孩子的顽皮姑娘
When I got acquainted with Steve, I was real tomboy.
3. She’d tag along when he’d go drinking in the shebeens.
tag along/ on with sb: to go somewhere with sb, especially when they have not asked you to go with them
Kate tagged along with Mum and Vicky.
4. She was always being swatted away by his girlfriends, who didn’t like having a reminder of his first marriage hanging around, but that only made her want to be with him all the more.
All the more/ better/ easier etc: used to emphasize how much better, easier etc something is than it would be in a different situation
Clayton’s achievement is all the more remarkable when you consider his poor performance last season.
The job was made all the easier by having the proper tools.
5. The homelands were, ostensibly, the original homes of South Africa’s tribes, sovereign and semi-sovereign “nations” where black people would be “free.”
ostensible reason/ purpose/ aim: seeming to be the reason etc for something, but usually having the real reason or purpose
The ostensible reason for his resignation was ill health.
She stayed behind at the office, ostensibly to work.
6. For starters, despite the fact that black people made up over 80 percent of South Africa’s population, the territory allocated for the homelands was about 13 percent of the country’s land.
for starters: spoken, used to emphasize the first of a series of facts, opinions, questions
Well, for starters, you'll need to fill out an application form.
7. Back in Soweto, my mom enrolled in the secretarial course that allowed her to grab hold of the bottom rung of the white-collar world.
But the highest rung of what’s possible is far beyond the world you can see.
rung: 本意是梯子上的一级阶梯，引申为 a particular level or position in an organization or system
Humans are on the highest rung of the evolutionary ladder.
8. My mother wanted her child beholden to no fate. She wanted me to be free to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone.
behold: (v.) to see or to look at sth
be a sight/ joy/ pleasure etc to behold
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 情人眼里出西施
The beauty of the garden was a pleasure to behold.
feel/ be beholden to sb: to feel that you have a duty to sb because they have done sth for you. 受制于...; 对...负有义务
9. There came a point, in the months before Mandela’s release, when we could live less furtively.
furtive: SYN secretive, behaving as if you want to keep sth secret
There was something furtive about his actions.
She opened the door and looked furtively down the hall.
10. It was modest and cramped inside, but walking in I thought, Wow. We are really living.
cramped: a cramped room, building etc does not have enough space for the people in it
The troops slept in cramped conditions with up to 20 in a single room.
cramped muscles: unable to move properly and feeling uncomfortable because there is not enough space
11. We always had food. Mind you, it wasn’t necessarily good food.
mind you/ mind: used when saying sth that is almost the opposite of what you have just said, or that explains or emphasizes it
He looks very young in this photo. Mind you, it was taken years ago.
I love hot weather, but not too hot, mind.
PART 3 Reflections
Nelson Mandela once said, "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." Languages have served to help Trevor bridge the race gap, cross boundaries and navigate the world. As far as I am concerned, languages pave a path to different cultures and shapes me into a better candidate for practicing law.
I am a multilingual speaker of sorts. My mother languages are Mandarin and Shanghainese. I have acquired fluency in English and Korean as well as intermediate level in Spanish. I was once in the middle of an interview in a law firm, peppered with questions like, "What do you think makes you special? " "Why should we choose you over others who have similar backgrounds?" "Well, I can also speak Korean and a little Spanish" Darting over the countenance of the interviewers, I knew that I had screwed up the interview. One of the interviewers said it word for word "Okay, but that's not what we need." Upon reflection, if given another chance to reply, I would say that law, at its core, is the study of language and the in this sense, being multilingual gives me an edge over other competitors in the field of law.
I have viewed language as the vehicle for transmission of different cultures, the medium of expression for different thoughts and the basis for human society. I am enchanted by foreign languages as disparate as English, Korean and Spanish, which have given me a window into other cultures and taught me to value the shared, profound humanity. Law in essence is the study of the way languages can be used to establish and modify the framework for human interactions. The law codify the rules through language and use it as a tool to change society.
