Providence: Optional supplement (choose one of two)

For six years I was the only person in my house who could read a letter from the gas company. ¹My parents speak Tagalog and a careful, hard-won English, and somewhere around fourth grade the official mail started getting handed to me. I learned to translate phrases like "delinquent balance" and "proof of residency" before I fully understood them in either language. What I did not realize then was that I was learning to stand in the gap between two ways of seeing the same page. That gap is what I think people from different backgrounds actually bring to a community. Not a flag or a food or a single word of representation, but the daily practice of holding two perspectives at once and refusing to let either one win cheaply. ²When my mother heard the word "aggressive" on a doctor's chart, she heard an insult; the nurse meant a treatment plan. I have spent years living inside misunderstandings like that, and the work of resolving them taught me that most conflict is not disagreement about facts. It is two people standing in different rooms describing the same noise. So I have become someone who asks the second question. ³When a classmate said our town's new shelter would "lower property values," I did not argue. I asked what he was actually afraid of, and we ended up talking about his grandfather, who lost a house in 2009. We still disagreed about the shelter. But he came to the planning meeting, and he listened, and that was more than I expected when the conversation started. At Providence I want to bring that habit into a room built for it. ⁴I have read that the Development of Western Civilization seminars put students who disagree at the same table and ask them to stay there, to keep reading, to keep talking past the easy point where you would rather just leave. That is the table I have been sitting at since I was nine. I am good at staying. I am good at translating one person's fear into a sentence another person can finally hear. My background did not give me answers. It gave me patience for the long, unglamorous work of understanding, and a stubborn belief that the second question is almost always more honest than the first. ⁵That is what I would bring to a hallway, a dorm, a seminar: a person who assumes the noise in the next room is worth walking toward.