Unit 1 Identity Listening task 1 The neighborhood children my age played together: either active, physical games outdoors or games of doll-and-house indoors. I, on the other hand, spent much of my childhood alone. I’d curl up in a chair reading fairytales and myths, daydreaming, writing poems or stories and drawing pictures. Sometime around the fourth grade, my “big” (often critical, judgmental) Grandma, who’d been visiting us said to me, “What’s wrong with you?” I remember being startled and confused by her question. I’d never been particularly interested in playing with the other children. It hadn’t, till then, occurred to me that that was either odd or something wrong with me. Nor had it occurred to me that they didn’t “want to play with” me. My first conscious memory of feeling different was in the forth grade. At the wardrobe, listening to classmates joking, chattering and laughing with each other, I realized I hadn’t a clue about what was so funny or how to participate in their easy chatter. They seemed to live in a universe about which I knew nothing at all. I tried to act like others but it was so difficult. I felt confused and disoriented. I turned back to my inner world: reading books, writing and daydreaming. My inwardness grew me in ways that continued to move me further away from the world of my age peers. The easy flow of casual social chat has remained forever beyond my reach and beyond my interest, too. Listening task 2 The greatest difficulty for me is that as a person of mixed origin I am at home neither here nor there. Wherever I am, I am regarded as being foreign, either “white” or “black”. It happens to me when I live in my mother’s c...
