Writing Sample: You've Got Mail: Analysis of a Literacy Event

Troy Croom

English 832

Prof. Anne Whiteside

17 October 2014

                                                                You’ve Got Mail:
                                                     Analysis of a Literacy Event


         “How does life in a literate environment affect or change social relationships?
    How do social relationships influence. . . the way that literacy is acquired and used?”
                                                                                      -- Weinstein-Shr
  
Introduction
According to one source, the average American resident is inundated with forty-one pounds of junk mail every year.  If this is daunting for people with adept at reading the mail, postal literacy, it can be frightening for those still developing such skills.  In her analysis of the daily life of the Hmong in the U.S., Weinstein-Shr (Weinstein-Shr 1989) illustrates just how much is at stake for language learners struggling to decode their mail, especially if they depend on government assistance.  Moreover, millions of Americans who read well are taken in by many sophisticated direct mail ploys.  Thus, for language learners, just going to the mailbox can be intimidating.  This paper examines the sometimes bewildering process of postal literacy.

Topic Overview
Shizue “Suzie” Watson is a survivor.  Growing up in war-torn Japan, Suzie’s teacher shuttled her and her classmates away from the bombing of the city to the safety of the countryside.  Years later she would escape poverty-stricken, post-war Japan when an American soldier named Dick Watson courted, married and brought her with him to make a home in Northern California.  Still, she knew virtually no English and lived in fear, entirely dependent on her husband as her sole support -- mate, bread-winner, English teacher and chauffer.  Against significant odds, she would go on to bring up four little children and, after seven years, enroll in adult school to learn enough English to earn her driver’s license and her citizenship. 

 Her husband, Dick, made an excellent living in sales, but his vices  -- alcohol and gambling -- often left the family financially destitute, necessitating that Suzie take any job she could find to help pay bills.  This would find her running a small restaurant, then, later, cleaning the homes of wealthier people for some 25 years.  Because of her tenacity, even when Dick passed away prematurely at 49, she was able to pay off their mortgage herself, thus allowing her to maintain her standard of living and her sense of pride.
  
 At 79, Suzie has created an impressively independent life for herself in spite of her English, which, she says, is far from fluent.   She handles all her bills, her ikebana classes and the upkeep of her home, with its large backyard, bursting with an array of exotic flowers.  In fact, her spoken English serves her well: when unwelcome telemarketers ring, she’s not too shy to send them packing.  However, the one area where she lacks independence is in reading her mail, which is the focus of this paper.  Specifically, I’ll be looking at the ways that Suzie and her daughter, Judy, negotiate the contents of the daily mail, how their relationship affects this literacy event, and how the event impacts their relationship.

Problems With the Mail
Suzie frets about her mail for good reasons.  First, her deceased husband’s addictions at times wrought unforgettable damage to the family finances.  Just as often as he gambled away the money for the household expenses, he simply forgot to pay the car insurance, or failed to read the bills in the mail, forcing Suzie to turn around the family finances herself.  Ever since then, she’s been pro-active in paying bills, leading to her hyper-vigilance in confronting every piece of mail she receives.  A second cause for Suzie’s mail scrutiny appears to arise from her hope of discovering a lucky break that could save her money, a vital concern for anyone like Suzie, who is retired and dependent on a fixed income.  Yet another reason for her caution is the dread that stems from her own history of misreading the mail and succumbing to seductive and perplexing advertisements.  For instance, there was the time she began receiving a number of magazines she didn’t recall ordering.  She eventually realized this followed her response to a Publisher’s Clearinghouse ad promising to make her a millionaire; in fact, it promised that she’d already been pre-selected to win!  Then there was the ad for the record player housed inside a handsome, hand-carved wooden frame, a striking replica an old-fashioned radio.  However, when it arrived in the mail, they discovered the interior parts were “total junk -- useless!”  Clearly, Suzie has apt cause for concern with regard to the mail.  

Methods of Data Collection
Initially, I interviewed Judy and Suzie initially for over two hours.  On a subsequent visit, I broached additional issues that occurred to me in the interim for nearly as long.  Finally, realizing I hadn’t really witnessed the literacy event itself, I observed them discussing the mail piece by piece, and spent another hour discussing related topics. 

Mail Call: Analysis
Where some functionally illiterate, like a few of those in Weinstien-Shr’s depiction of the Hmong community, might need help understanding much of the mail they receive, Suzie has developed considerable skills and independence.  Her routine approach to the postal literacy practice is to carefully comb through her mail on her own, then set aside the more troubling pieces for Judy to unpack later when their busy schedules permit discussion.  The following is Suzie’s selection of the most confusing specimens of mail on Saturday, October 11, 2014.

First up, Judy reads through an ad appealing to homeowners whose houses, like Suzie’s, were built before 1933.  Suzie comments that home repair contractors are always trying to get her business.  “If I wanna, I call; don’t call me!” she says with gusto.  Judy explains that the company in the advertisement is trying to scare readers with the threat of bursting water pipes, which can lead to an expensive repair job.  In fact, Suzie recalls such a costly emergency that struck a few years back requiring that she pay, not only for the repair, but over $400 in overspill charges to the local water district.  Nonetheless, Judy concludes, “We don’t want this.  They’re just trying to sell you water pipe insurance!  We don’t live in fear.”  Suzie is very animated through Judy’s talk, emitting several “Ah-ha”’s of comprehension and gasping as well at the company’s gall, both of them laughing loudly in the end.

The next piece of mail seeks money for the Veteran’s Memorial funeral service program.  “This doesn’t even apply to us,” Judy says.  Suzie says, while her deceased husband had been in the Army, he wasn’t enlisted long enough to qualify for such veteran benefits.  Judy summarizes, “It’s a scam: They’re trying to scare you, saying they’ll take away 50-60% of your veteran’s benefits check if you don’t cooperate.”  Suzie says, “I don’t even receive veteran’s benefits!”  Finally, Judy holds up an item from AARP.  “They want you to buy life insurance.  I guess they think you’re not gonna be around for long!  Toss it!” she says, adding that they’re not in the habit of buying unnecessary insurance.  With this, Judy chuckles and Suzie tucks the letter into the burgeoning waste basket, patting the kitchen table before her contentedly, as if to say, “Ahhhh -- closure!” 

Notable in Judy’s readings of the three letters is her ability to summarize the offer, point out certain drawbacks, choose a course of action and defend it with a justification.  Judy’s multi-facted break-down of the mail reflects Heath’s view that, in a literacy event.  
Speech events may describe, repeat, reinforce, expand, frame, or contradict written     material . . .  (Heath 1982)

If one of Suzie’s obstacles in postal literacy is her limited English, another is the challenge to see through a marketer’s sophisticated ruse.  Once Suzie told Judy with great excitement, “I think I won $50,000!”  Judy asked how she knew.  She exclaimed, “It says right here I pre-selected!”  After a close reading, Judy found there was a $12.95 fee.  “I told her: Mama, it’s a scam!”  Discriminating between the honest and dishonest is more difficult for some than others, but this is a vital function of postal literacy. 

Of course, it’s not easy to say how much of this is a reading issue and how much a sociological issue for Suzie.  As devious mail ploys are so prevalent in America, it bears questioning whether Suzie’s growing up in a different culture contributed to her tendency to interpret mail offers at face value, rather than viewing them with a suspicious eye as so many Americans seem to do.  Nor should we expect simple answers from complex situations.  Rather, this literacy event highlights the intersecting influences impacting the teacher, the student and the text that explain, in part, why Judy reads and dismisses lightly texts that Suzie has troubled over for days.  In Gee’s perspective, none of these factors can be analyzed apart from the others:

Literacy . . . only has consequences as it acts together with a large number of other social     factors, including a social group’s political and economic conditions, social structure and     local ideologies.  (Gee 2012)
  
 It may be that Suzie’s development in perceiving con-jobs has been limited by social circumstances.  Whisked away from her Japanese home at an young age, she was effectively sequestered by her husband from paying bills and reading the mail, resulting in what could be seen as a sort of stunted growth in understanding certain aspects of American culture.  Indeed, some might consider Suzie a product of the mechanized mindset of militaristic Japan, what Freire calls a “culture of silence.” (Friere 1970)  If so, this might account for her apparent difficulty in critical thinking. 

If breaking down the mail for Suzie puts her mother at ease, it seems to enliven Judy.  A devoted mother herself with an empty nest (two sons in their 20s), she’s a natural teacher -- in fact, she’s taught art classes professionally -- and, with Suzie as her student in postal literacy, she appears purposeful: class is in session.  Following Judy’s recent divorce, she moved into Suzie’s mother-in-law unit.  For both of them, living nearby and reading the mail together brings back familiar times when Judy acted as teacher and advocate, and Suzie offered a sense of purpose for someone who very much needed to be needed.  Weinstein-Shr speaks about the sometimes complicated nature of repaying others for services such as decoding the mail (Weinstien-Shr 1989).  In the case of Judy and Suzie, though, they’ve been so close for so long, and have helped each other in so many ways, when it comes to helping with something like the mail, the service itself would appear to be all the payment required.  This follows the idea tha "A person whose social network is comprised of kin is likely to have a rich pool of     resources that will be at . . . her disposal." (Weinstien-Shr 1989)

While Judy is explaining the mail, on the surface, it looks as if Suzie has surrendered a portion of her power, and Judy very happily appears to take charge of the moment.  Inasmuch as the issues in the Suzie’s mail selections revolve around demands for her money, Judy in is in effect assuming the role of financial advisor during the event.  Nor does she ask Suzie her opinion, but tells her the best course of action.  This is clear from the body language as well, Judy leaning forward in her chair forthrightly, Suzie hanging back in a submissive, unchallenging way.  Judy does the talking; Suzie’s echoes support, but rarely asks questions.  Yet, Judy and Suzie have a strong sense of trust, and it’s clear that Judy has no personal agenda.  Rather, what I’m witnessing is Judy speaking on her mother’s behalf in a kind of shorthand informed by an understanding of Suzie’s goals and limitations.  Moreover, if Suzie appears to surrender her power during the reading, I’m struck by how empowering the event is for both Suzie and Judy.  It’s impossible to miss the look of worry in her eyes before Judy unpacks the mail but, with each piece she reads, she adds a humorous comment, so that, literally and symbolically, they appear to laugh in the face of trouble.  By the end of the readings, Suzie’s look of worry is replaced with one of levity and optimism.  Thus, Judy’s close connection with Suzie, built on fifty-plus years of support, turns the reading of troublesome mail into an act of empowerment.