I didn’t notice this trend when we first moved back out to the suburbs. It wasn’t until my kids started school, that it started to hit me. This suburb has changed dramatically since I lived here as a boy. According to a recent story in the Chicago Sun-Times, many of the other Chicago suburbs are also changing in the same way.
And I, for one, think it’s great.
When my family moved out here in 1968, we were among the first immigrants to integrate this amazingly homogeneous suburban society. My sister and I were very young (5 & 4), and we didn’t even speak English in our household. My family had only been here slightly more than a decade, and had lived in a Chicago neighborhood with a circle of fellow German immigrant friends, none of whom spoke English in their homes either. Moving to the suburbs meant moving out of our comfortable German bubble and into America proper.
How German were we? My mother actually sent me to school in lederhosen because she had no idea how strange that looked to the other kids. I had to learn English in school. I played a sport, soccer, that the other kids in the neighborhood didn’t even know existed.
Every time I watch my sons play soccer now I relive those childhood memories. There are dozens of kids on these teams going through the same thing I went through in 1968. We have Polish kids, Mexican kids, Indian kids, African kids, Arab kids, Asian kids, and just about every other nationality you can name.
It’s not the similar experience, however, that makes me smile when I watch immigrant kids with their families. It’s the differences. For one thing, immigrant families are common now in the suburbs, and nobody bats an eye. The "normal" American kids don't consider it odd at all.
It was a little different in 1968. As my mother puts it now: "the school nurse was calling us every day." The bigger kids picked on me physically. They made fun of my name, my heritage, my sport, and our accents (Hogan's Heroes didn't exactly help, either). I felt like a freak...and I was a white kid. I can only imagine what it would have been like for an Asian kid, or an Indian kid, or an African kid.
I can point to the precise moment my life changed forever. The neighbor boy Stu rang our doorbell, and said: “Hi, I’m Stu, and I’m going to be your best friend.” Stu took me under his wing, showed me what it was like to be a normal American boy, and helped transform a dangerously shy German boy into just another kid in the neighborhood. By the time second grade started, it was effortless. I felt I belonged.
Kids today don’t need a Stu to rescue them anymore because they have a whole classroom of Stus. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. A Vietnamese boy named Phat (pronounced just the way you think it’s pronounced) moved into the neighborhood and none of the kids made fun of him. In fact, they embraced him. The “normal” kids were interested in learning about life in Vietnam, and they instinctively knew that it was their job to help him adapt to America.
That's the part that makes me smile the most.
