East Los Kindergarten

Los Angeles is a Mega-Pueblo and Your Life Has a Plot (If You Want It To)

I still hang out with my kindergarten teacher. I suppose I’m a middle-aged teacher’s pet.

Her name is Ms. Watanabe.

She has a first name, but I would never dare use it. Even though we eventually became colleagues and co-workers, I still never call her by her first name. Would you call Mr. Rogers, Fred? If so, you’re a terrible person.

I asked her if I could write about our relationship, and she said, “If it is helpful to you.”

She has always been so very generous to me.

I met her when I was 4 years old. That was more than 40 years ago.

Now that we are both retired from public school teaching, we lunch together every so often in San Gabriel Valley diners and cafes. We don’t live too far from each other. We gossip and share updates. She is always concerned with how I am doing.

She taught me the alphabet. Few things have been more important in my life than the alphabet.

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In 1979 I walked into an East LA kindergarten classroom and was immediately filled with both a love for school and a penchant for misunderstandings.

Meeting my new teacher, Ms. Watanabe, I thought I understood that not only do kindergarten teachers live and sleep in their classrooms, obviously, but they also make up silly professional names for themselves.

My ethnocentric logic went like this: as teachers receive permission to teach kids, they also string together a handful of random syllables and announce, “I wish to be called Ms. Nanu-Nanu-Boo or Mr. Jim-jam-fanny-bam.” My five-year-old misunderstanding of Japanese names was reinforced when Ms. Watanabe was followed by Ms. Akahoshi, my first-grade teacher. Early on in elementary school I thought I understood an unfolding pattern about school teachers. ¹

I didn’t see the two women as Japanese; I saw them as my teachers – they didn’t have families, cars, homes, beds, first names, or different cultural backgrounds from me. They just were.

I adored my early ed teachers.

I loooved them, obsessively. I remember going berserk whenever Ms. Watanabe was absent. Absent? What do you mean absent?! Was she kidnapped? Did you call the police? I can’t come to school if she’s not here. I would cry and throw a conniption fit (it was 80s, so we threw conniption fits not tantrums).

Back then Ms. Watanabe was a young woman with long black hair who also grew up on LA’s Eastside. I was 4^th generation Chicano, she was Sensei. Her parents had been in the camps. She attended Wilson High School near El Sereno. We were both OG Eastsiders.

Her kindergarten classroom turned out to be a wonderfully put together land of learning with equal amounts of joy and paper mâché. Her class of 26 Latina/o boys and girls danced the Loopty Loo daily, acquired the alphabetic principle over the course of months, and for Cinco de Mayo we dressed up as Aztecs in pastel-colored mesh capes and tissue paper feather headdresses. We marched to La Marcha de Zacatecas and shook rattles made of paper plates and pinto beans.

I suspect that particular celebration was where my proclivity for Chicana/o Studies was born.

Early 80’s Aztecs

I had a stupendous time in my early ed elementary classrooms because I was good at school. I am a schoolboy by nature, bookish and curious. But it was also because I had a amazing teachers, beginning with Ms. Watanabe.

Eventually, of course, I grew up and moved on as we all grow up and move on from elementary school. I would only rarely bump into Ms. Watanabe after elementary school was over. She faded from my life the way all our teachers usually fade from our lives especially kindergarten teachers.

Kindergarten teachers are bound to end up smudges in our memories, victims of an amnesia suffered by the young. Luckily, however, I live in Los Angeles.

The thing about the city we live in is that although it likes to put up the front of being a big, gritty, glamourous megalopolis, it really is just nothing but a pueblo. It was born a pueblo, and to this day reattains the soul of a small Mexican town. And when you’re born in a pueblo you never really, truly escape your fellow pueblo-dwellers unless they skip town.

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When I was 24 and fully graduated from university, I went job-hunting around Hollywood where I lived at the time. I applied to many teaching positions in the area but had no luck in landing a position.

The only geographical exception to my job search was Belvedere Elementary in East LA. I conjured up the romantic notion that I could maybe teach at my old elementary school despite having no car to traverse the 12-mile distance between my place and the school. Wouldn’t it be cool if I came back to the place where my education began and landed a job teaching at my original elementary? The barrio son’s return to the barrio bearing the boon of his bachelor’s degree. Oh, the magnanimity!

When I dropped off my resumé at the Belvedere Elementary main office, I asked the principal, who was my old principal, Mr. Quihuis, for the whereabouts of some of my former teachers. How’s Ms. Akahoshi? Is Ms. Johnson still here? How ‘bout Ms. Keys?

The only one that was still teaching there he said was Ms. Watanabe. In fact, she was in her room at that very moment if I wanted to stop by and say hello. My heart jumped.

What? Now?! Uh. Ok. “Sure,” I stammered. The principal directed me to the kindergartens.

As I approached her door, I was expecting to see some version of the tall, long-haired, young teacher of my memory. I imagined a reunion filled with gladness, mild surprise, and some tender sentiment. After knocking and then opening the classroom door, I encountered an old, squat, dark, short-haired woman. After confirming that she was indeed Ms. Watanabe, she said that she maybe, sort of, kind of remembered me.

I was confused and put off and so very embarrassed.

We exchanged awkward salutations and superficial updates. The reunion lasted all of a couple of minutes. I left disappointed, knowing that Ms. Watanabe had just pretended to remember me. How could I have even expected anything more than that? Kindergarten was nearly two decades prior and hundreds of pupils had passed through this woman’s classes by this point. Why would I stand out in her memory after so long? And she was so different now, chubby, short, old. Why had she chopped all her long hair off? I wondered

After that disappointment, I went back to my job search.

Week by week my financial situation grew dire. Bills were collecting. Rent was due. Student loan repayments had started.

While down his house, my boyfriend Miguel, sensing my desperation, finally suggested, “Why don’t you just apply at the school across the street?”  He lived in that area where East Hollywood transitions into Koreatown and Little Bangladesh. There was a loud, sprawling elementary right outside his window. Because it was closer to his apartment than to mine, I never considered it on my list of possible worksites.

Now his suggestion seemed obvious. The first place I should have looked was out his window, across the street from where I spent more than half my time. I was so preoccupied looking for the perfect place, the best situated for my mailing address, not where my boyfriend lived, that I didn’t see what was right in front of my face.

His suggestion turned out to bet a jackpot. It worked. I was interviewed and hired at A. Elementary almost immediately.

My first week at A. Elementary I felt lost and like a bother.

I constantly pestered the principal for supplies, guidance, and the locations of seemingly hidden offices. She was the only person I knew on a campus of 2000 students and over 100 staff members.

One day I walked to her office to ask her yet one more annoying question. I paused before entering because another teacher was busy speaking to her. An older Japanese woman sat in a chair, at ease. She had long black hair and wore a sundress. The principal interrupted their conversation to introduce me to my new colleague, a preschool teacher named Ms. Watanabe.

 “Nice to meet you,” I shook her hand, paused a second, and asked, “Is Watanabe a common Japanese name?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I had a kindergarten teacher named Ms. Watanabe,” I added.

“Where did you go to school?” she asked.

“Belvedere Elementary in East LA.”

“Is your father a cop?” she continued with surprising immediacy and precision.

“Yes!” I confirmed, “Ms. Watanabe!?!”

“How could I forget those eyes,” she added.

She remembered my eyes! And my parents, too.

My kindergarten teacher remembered me! And she was right there, just sitting, chatting with my new principal at my new job— the school my boyfriend suggested I apply to. We hugged and celebrated the serendipity, the coincidence, the odds of ending up in the same place inside this big, big mega-pueblo of a city.

The fact that there are over 500 elementary schools in LAUSD stretching from Pacoima to San Pedro, from West LA to South Gate, over an expanse 960 square miles and, then, there is this one location where two people, a former student and his teacher, meet again after a 20-year hiatus is remarkable.

I realize other people’s coincidences seem boring and mundane and explained away as not too unbelievable, but this one for me was far too cosmic.

Afterall I had gone on a deliberate search for her, and I never found her. Instead, I met some bizarro-fake version of Ms. Watanabe (turns out there were actually 3 Watanabes teaching at Belvedere at one time) who pretended to remember me out of politeness.

The real Ms. Watanabe had been across the street from my boyfriend’s place all this time! She was always just across the street from me teaching in one little preschool tucked into this vast mega-pueblo of four million souls. And due to some choices I made we had been reunited. And it felt good.

Ms. Watanabe and I taught together at A. Elementary for the next 12 years. One year I even taught preschool across the hallway from her. I was always running over to her room asking for help and advice and ideas. She even gave me the template to the bunny ear-ed Easter baskets she used when I was in her class. The year she retired she did so with the intention and hope that I’d take her spot in preschool (but then I was transferred to another school under controversial circumstances).

This woman who knew me at four, then again at twenty-five, and now still in my forties, has never failed to help me.

I don’t know if our re-connection means anything. But as human beings we get to make meaning. We get to look up at the stars and see connect-the-dot constellations, and we get to look back at our lives and see plots.

Kindergarten and Ms. Watanabe have always been part of my plot— a conniving of the universe that promised if I paid attention lovely things would happen.

1. Not being taught about cultural differences explicitly can leave children open to misunderstandings that verge on cultural egocentricity, at the very least, and racism at the worst because the cultural default in our society is always whiteness. Harris, Todd, Crabtree are “regular” names, Watanabe, Akahoshi, Sampaio are not.

Similarly, years later, when I asked my own class during a health lesson why they shouldn’t drink too much Coca-Cola? I expected someone to say something about the 39 grams of sugar per serving. Instead, little kindergartener Karen raised her hand and answered that children shouldn’t drink too much soda “because then you’ll turn Black.” She said Black like it was the word gangrene. She was obviously repeating her Latino parents’ weird combination of healthy eating habits and white supremacy. I corrected her but who knows how long that little racist remained superstitious about soda pop.

These misunderstandings that can occur are one reason it drives me up the wall when new whippersnapper teachers traipse into classrooms and decide that they rather be called Mr. J or Ms. M as if they themselves are the actual letters of the alphabet making guest appearances on Sesame Street. Using your entire last name carries a host of useful curriculum on history and phonics. I’ve insisted on children learning the cornucopia of surnames found at my schools from Armenian Vardanyan to Philippine Cabonbon to Chinese Ng to European Vanwinkle. If kids can name Pokémon characters, recite dinosaur nomenclatures, and repeat Tchaikovsky, they can wrap their tongues around the syllables of their teachers’ proper surnames.