Debut novel delves into cultural friction to find compassion

By the time Janet Hunter -- “Mees Janet” -- encounters her Asian refugee students in the Missoula, Mont., high school classroom where she teaches English as a second language, she knows they’ve seen more tragedy, violence and desperation than should be required of anyone. She asks them to write about themselves for their essay assignments as a way of working on their compositional skills. “Teach me something new,” she prompts.

And they do.

Her quiet, earnest students, Vietnamese and Hmong, are scarred physically and emotionally, she quickly learns. They’ve come from their home villages to the rural Montana town by way of jungles and wars, crossing seas in fishing boats, using weapons or prostitution to make their way there. They’ve done whatever it takes to survive. And now they’re expected to fit into the world of a white Montana high school with its cheerleaders and “beef-fed teenagers,” many of whom are willfully ignorant of the refugees’ backgrounds. Janet’s students are asked to put the scars and cultural rituals behind them in order to blend in.

Unfolding through Janet’s clear-eyed narration, Kate Gadbow’s quiet first novel, “Pushed to Shore,” explores the fascinating terrain of cultural friction as Janet teaches the students, day in and day out, and is taught by them. As if she had stepped into quicksand, Janet is pulled into the mysteries and obstacles of their vulnerable lives.

Playing counterpoint to the students’ efforts to build new lives in Missoula are Janet’s efforts to make peace with her past: the divorce from her college sweetheart, the emptiness that inhabits most of her days, the legacies of her family and how they’ve played out in her life. During her divorce, she’d imagined the life that would await her: “I had an idea of myself as someone who might become a part of an intellectual community.... We would have dinner parties and consume bottles of excellent wine.” But things didn’t turn out that way. “So far,” Janet admits, “my community has failed to materialize.”

Her students write touching, disturbing essays of their lives prior to Missoula and through these essays are able to hold on to the preciousness of their past. One young man, Vinh, writes of his escape from Vietnam in a fishing boat, together with three other 12-year-old friends, all of whom left home without their families’ approval. Vinh’s essay is marred by grammatical errors and misspellings, Janet notes, but is also dazzling in its descriptions, like the time all four boys slept, faint with hunger and pain and were “ ‘pushed to the kind shore by a finger of God.’ ” Stirred by Vinh’s use of language, Janet shows the essay to the creative writing teacher, Ted, thinking he’ll want to publish it in the school’s literary magazine. Not only does the essay offer artistic merit, Janet believes, but it might educate the rest of the student body about the refugees’ plights.

Ted, like many of the locals, is unable to see the gifts the refugees offer. He terms Vinh’s work simply a case of “accidental poetry.” Vinh hasn’t learned the correct English equivalents for some of these words, Ted explains to Janet, and is translating directly, “so that what he does strikes you as fresh and clever.” Ted reassures her: “The better [Vinh] gets at English, the more that stuff will disappear.”

The metaphor suggested in that interaction -- lack of appreciation by the dominant culture for the refugees’ unique paths, the way Montana society will strive to remake Vinh in its own image -- resonates throughout the novel. The more the refugees acquiesce to the melting pot, the more their uniqueness is washed away, the clever and fresh parts of themselves watered down to fit the homogenized culture. This act of blending in, though, Gadbow makes clear, is not limited to refugees. The home-grown Montanans do it too. Indeed, we all sacrifice parts of ourselves in order to find a place in the larger society; it’s just that the sacrifices are more visible in the lives of her students.

Gadbow steers clear of over-romanticizing Janet’s students or making them sound overly exotic. Rather, she depicts the commonalties that bind us all. Whether immigrant or native-born, well-fed or accustomed to hunger, we, as humans, strive for a sense of community, to find a space of belonging without having to sacrifice the deepest, most original parts of ourselves.

Written in spare prose, “Pushed to Shore” explores what happens when cultures run up against each other and the American dream is sold as the restorative for whatever ails. Gadbow’s story suggests that the American dream fails to materialize for many -- locals and newcomers. And yet, life goes on. We make peace with the imperfect nature of our existence and form communities wherever and however we can. Perhaps we learn compassion or allow ourselves to be taught something new. Maybe, we simply learn to keep our hearts open to the next unfamiliar person we meet.