想不到，人過中年，母親節在家輔導娃寫中學作文，我說中文思路，娃寫成英文。學校的作文，老師給了美國大蕭條時期，加州移民工人的淒慘挨餓的境遇，有一個女記者拍了饑餓母親和孩子的照片，得到了聯邦政府的援助，老師要他們挑出課文裏的人物，用人物的口氣，寫關於愛和同情心之類的議論文。我看兒子寫的屁也不是，內容空空，趕緊幫他，你比喻也沒有，意象也沒有，義正言辭的分析也沒有，思想COMPLEXITY也沒有。你怎麽讓老師給分？剛陪娃考完AP物理，我又化身變成語文老師，給娃上作文課，寫議論文。手把手教他怎樣引材料，發議論，拔思想高度。娃寫完，我發愁，沒有我幫你，你自己寫怎麽辦？娃說他用AI寫。我想一想也不錯啊。以後官樣文章，誰還用手寫？隻要知道什麽是好的英文就可以了，讓機器寫。
看了美國大蕭條時代的農場工人記錄，似乎比中國老百姓也好不到哪裏去，不過二戰之後美國還是走上了上升的國運。
美國學校的老師也挺扯淡，發的一篇範文，是100年多年前，美國南方貧困的黑人農村，整個農村都是破爛棚房，黑奶奶的花被黑小孩故意踩壞了，因為黑小孩的父母沒有工作，她聽見她父親半夜哭訴，幾年沒有工作收入。那個孩子突然很憤怒，把社區裏唯一的花地給踩碎了。這是對自家貧窮和黑人處於社會底層的憤恨。也是要結合主人公口氣，寫愛和同情。老師的範文讓我笑不動了，老師以黑奶奶的口氣寫愛和同情，黑奶奶變成中產階級的白女，說社區不應該破破爛爛，要教孩子尊重社區的美麗和他人勞動成果。我跟孩子說笑，黑奶奶連完整的英文也說不出來，隻會朝黑孩子揮手杖，說幾個南方黑人俚語詞。這老師的範文，就像魯迅筆下的祥林嫂，孩子被狼吃掉了，她發言要關注兒童安全，呼籲社區集體防狼。這不著原著的調。我把老師的範文貼給CHATGPT，AI說老師的範文很好，RUBIC裏麵，該有的觀點和論據都有。我把上麵的話再貼給AI，AI承認這個問題，不過還是嘴強，欺負我不懂美國的學校標準，說打分模板就是這樣的，這樣就能得高分。我靠
貼娃的學校作文。
Mrs. Michels
English 1, Part 1 College Prep
1 May 2026
The Photograph That Pulled a Mother and Her Children Back from Despair
By: Dorothea Lange, “ Endangered Dreams”
It was difficult to imagine that the photograph I happened to take in March 1936, while driving past a pea pickers’ camp near Nipomo,California - later known as Migrant Mother - would become the most influential image of my career. The photograph was not only viewed by approximately 270,000 newspaper readers, but also prompted the federal government to take action. In response to the public attention it generated, twenty thousand pounds of food were rushed to rescue the starving pea pickers.
I must confess that, after initially passing the pea pickers’ camp, I spent the next twenty miles debating the merits of turning back. My experience as a journalist had taught me that the lives of migrant workers - people who could scarcely speak for themselves and were struggling merely to survive - were too often treated as invisible and undervalued. I doubted that my photographs would be welcomed by newspapers or attract serious public attention. At the time, all my fieldwork felt futile. We were living in a society that paid far greater attention to wealth and power than to poverty and the suffering of the poor.
However, in a sudden instinctive decision, I made a U-turn on the empty highway and returned to the pea pickers’ camp. As I later recalled,“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet.” (Lange, Endangered Dreams) “I made five exposures, working closer and closer. I did not ask her name or her history. She said they had been living in frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children had killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in the lean-to tent with her children huddled around her. There was a sort of equality about it.” I felt at that moment.(Lange, Endangered Dreams)
This single encounter taught me the true meaning of empathy. Empathy is not just feeling sorry for someone; it is the willingness to see another’s suffering as if it were one’s own and to act on it. Standing in that muddy camp, surrounded by desperate families, I came to realize that no individual can truly possess dignity unless they devote themselves to the welfare of their fellow human beings. In this sense, “there was a sort of equality about it.” (Endangered Dreams)
A good person cannot remain indifferent while others struggle with hunger and suffering. If someone feels nothing when others suffer, that person lacks both a sense of human equality and genuine compassion.
Compassion, in my view, is one of the noblest qualities human beings can possess. I am opposed to the system of society in which we live, not because society lacks sufficient resources for migrant workers and their children, but because I cannot make myself comfortable knowing that thousands upon thousands of my fellow human beings suffer for the barest necessities of life, many of whom are women and children.
When poverty invades a family, children are invariably the first victims to bear its brunt - the most vulnerable members whose suffering reveals the true human cost of societal neglect. In the camps I visited, the heartbreaking scenes unfolded exactly as other reporters described. “One three-year-old child , his belly swollen from malnutrition, sat on the ground in front of the house while little black flies buzzed in circles and landed on his closed eyes until he weakly brushed them away. ” He had not had any milk for a long time. “He would die in a very short time.” (The Harvest Gypsies)
Women in the camps fared no better. Conditions aligned closely with reports from fellow observers: “Four nights ago a mother had a baby in the tent, on the dirty carpet. It was born dead, which was just as well because she could not have fed it at the breast; her own diet would not produce milk.” (The Harvest Gypsies) This harrowing scene lays bare the brutal reality of maternal suffering - the mother’s physical exhaustion and quiet despair. Such accounts force me not only to witness the pain, but to feel it through empathy, imagining myself in that desperate mother’s place.
These descriptions reveal a profound truth: Mother Nature has generously spread a great table for all her children. There is a place for everyone, and there are plates and food for all. Yet any society that denies even one person the right and opportunity to share in Mother Nature’s provisions is a deeply unjust society that cannot truly call itself civilized.
People were often misled by the outdated ethic that a man’s business upon this earth was merely to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle, the ethic of wild beasts: take care of myself, no matter what may become of my fellow man. In a civilized society, however, I bear a moral obligation to others. How could I judge myself if I were capable of seating myself at a table, indulging myself in food, while around me the children of my fellow human beings were starving to death?
Some people fall into hardship because of natural disasters, misfortune, accidents, or illness - yet this does not mean that they deserve to suffer.Such experiences were vividly echoed by other reporters. One journalist described how “the father of this family once had a little grocery store. When the drought set in there was no trade for the store anymore. This is the middle class of the squatters’ camp. In a few months this family will slip down to the lower class. Dignity is all gone.”（The Harvest Gypsies) It reminds us that today’s middle class can become tomorrow’s penniless, highlighting the fragility of social position. Indifference toward such people is especially dangerous: should we one day face the same unfortunate fate, we too may be neglected and disregarded by society. A society built upon such indifference possesses neither dignity nor any true victors.
Indeed, humans living in poverty can possess neither material security nor human dignity. Poverty, like a disease, not only harms the physical body, but also strips away the human spirit and may even pass its suffering from parents to their innocent children. Sometimes this humiliation remains silent and unseen. During my fieldwork, I observed children wearing ragged clothes who would not go to school, exactly as other reporters had documented “they hide in ditches or wander off by themselves until it is time to go back to the tent, because they are scorned in the school” and “ the better-dressed children shout and jeer. The parents of the ‘nice’ children do not want to have disease carriers in the schools.” (The Harvest Gypsies） The children’s shame and isolation demonstrate the damage of poverty extends far beyond hunger,making genuine empathy even more essential. In my view, diseases caused by the lack of sanitation may perhaps be cured, but human indifference is a far more terrifying disease, one that is much more difficult to heal.
Seeing the thousands upon thousands of starving victims, one might conclude that an individual's effort is utterly insignificant. Yet my single photograph powerfully demonstrates the opposite: one image, born of empathy and compassion, can ignite a nation’s social conscience and drive meaningful social change. As a result, it was precisely this rescue effort - the rapid delivery of twenty thousand pounds of food- that reinforced my belief in the collective power of human compassion, the combined force of countless individuals across a nation suffering through the Great Depression.
Social conscience has the power to turn an entire society away from its seemingly inevitable decline. Just as I made a U-turn on that empty California highway in 1936 to document the migrant mother’s suffering, our nation, through united empathy and moral courage, can still make a profound U-turn - away from indifference and toward a brighter, more just future.
