Doug McDonald, Dorchester
Math and science were always a struggle for him. But languages, Doug McDonald loved—Greek, Latin, anything high school sent his way. In the 60s, as a Jesuit priest in Iraq, he studied Arabic; he can still recite the Lord’s prayer in that language today.
Last year, at the age of 75, after retiring as an administrative judge, Doug decided to learn a language that had always intrigued him: Chinese. Here, in Doug's own words, is his story.
“I went to the office and I knocked on the door, and someone opened the door and there were four or five people sitting around the table, all Chinese. And they looked at me in a curious way, you know, ‘Who is this person?’
And I said, ‘I’m here to learn Chinese.’
And they were very gracious, and basically said, ‘When do you want to start?’
And I thought that was great. So I signed up for a course and have been studying it since January. It’s very difficult. I can read the words in a lesson, like ‘I’m going to take the train to the city,’ and then my teacher will come in and say it in Chinese, and she’ll go, ‘Now you say it,’ and I’ll go, ‘(gibberish).’
And I keep saying to myself, babies learn how to speak Chinese. Anybody in this country who comes from another country has learned to speak English, and so you have to go through the phase of learning. I can’t beat myself up for not being fluent. I’m learning and I’m enjoying it and they tell me that I’m a good student, so I can just take encouragement from that.
Two months after I started, my teacher said there’s an essay contest that the national Confucius Institute has, and they want the students to write their experience of learning Chinese. So I said, ‘Okay, I’m a team player.’ So I wrote an essay and gave it to them, and it said that they would announce the finalists on June 1st, and the winners get an all-expense paid trip for two to Washington, DC, and an awards ceremony held at the National Press Club. I mean, this is not low budget stuff.
So I sent it in, and June 1st came and went, and I figured I threw my two-cents in, and it was fun. And I was coming back from Virginia last week—we were down to visit my niece’s high school graduation—and we’re having lunch at a restaurant, and my phone rang, and it was my Chinese professor. And she was just like champagne bubbling over with excitement and enthusiasm: ‘I’ve got good news, I’ve got good news, I’ve got good news! You know that essay contest? You won!’ (Laughs)
I was floored. Floored! My essay on my experience with learning Chinese and why I’m doing that, they deemed to be meritorious!
My thinking is, a lot of energy gets put into gearing young people to learn languages and culture and cultural exchange and careers and that’s all good, you know. But one of the things I said in my essay is, ‘I’m 75, so I’m still eager to learn and willing to learn.’ I’m waiting on the details of the trip now. I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before, so I’m very excited.
I’ve always loved languages. The use of words and phrases is unique and special, and it’s a way of understanding the culture.
In my mid-twenties, I went to teach school (as a Jesuit priest) in Baghdad, Iraq, and while I was over there, I studied and learned Arabic for a year or so. I was able to carry on a conversation, you know, if I went on a bus or into a store, and could read the newspaper, and catch the gist of what was being said on television. Once I became more fluent, I became more comfortable, you know, going out into the city.
I was in Baghdad for two years. I was there in 1967 when the Israeli government attacked Cairo, Egypt. I remember walking from one of the campus buildings into the back of the residence and you could hear the air raid sirens going off. Our campus was here, and the major army base was there, and the city, Baghdad, was up here. So you could see the jets taking off.
In very short order, the American embassy, they encouraged all the Americans to leave Baghdad. Most of the Americans left. (But) we stayed.
It was a little bit tense in the beginning. Right across the street in the big field, they’d set up anti-aircraft guns and so forth. When we were going around the city, we didn’t announce that we were Americans, and people didn’t think that we were Americans because they knew that all the Americans had left.
So we were German, we were Danish, we were English—whatever they thought, you know. That school had been established in Iraq for over 30 years at that time, so we were known by the people and respected.
The war was over in six days because the Israeli army was much stronger than the Egyptian and Jordanian army, and the ordinary people tried to go about their life as best they could. They were not directly involved in the war.
One day, (after the war), we were going to an archaeological site across the Tigris river, and the only way to get there was by a row boat—one of these big row boats, like a ferry. And toward the (back of the) boat there were three, four, five Iraqi soldiers.
So the old man’s rowing the boat and he asks us where we’re from, and we say, ‘America.’ And we see the soldiers’ ears perk up. And one of them says to another in Arabic, ‘They’re spies.’ (Laughs).
So fortunately, at this point I was studying Arabic and could say, ‘We’re not spies. We’re teachers. We’re teaching at the school up the road.’ And the old man who was rowing the boat, he said, ‘Your government and our government, if they want to fight, go fight. But we’re people, so we can be friends.’
We had one experience, we were going between two cities across the desert at night. And we lost the road ’cause the road is hard desert, it’s not paved, didn’t have streetlights or anything like that. So, we had two vehicles. We parked one with its headlights on and started driving around with the other to try to find out where the road was and couldn’t find it.
And then off in the distance, a light appeared, a single light. And we said, ‘We have to make a move for that light.’ It was a lantern of some kind. So we gradually picked our way towards the lantern, and we get there, and it was a small house right beside some railroad tracks.
This is now ten o’clock or so at night and there were eight or nine of us—all foreigners—and we came out, and again I was able to carry on conversation, and he said, “Are you the ones that were going around down in the desert? I saw that; that’s why I put the light on the house.”
It was a guide for us to go there. And he then invited us all into his house. His kids are there; it’s a one-room house. He made us tea, welcomed us. He told us exactly how to go—directions and so forth.
And you could imagine ten foreigners showing up at your house. (Laughs). But it was just very typical of the people there; they take you in.”
Doug with some of his students at Al-Hikma University.
Doug was interviewed over cookies at his home in Dorchester by story ambassadors Nuriana Chaves, a senior at Excel High School in South Boston, and Jamarri Young, a senior at City on a Hill in Roxbury; both students declared that they had never tasted such good cookies in all their lives. Here is Doug’s essay about learning Chinese, one of 10 that won awards at the 2018 Confucius Institute US National Honors Gala. Doug has since gone on to travel to China, courtesy of the Confucius Institute; the image at the top of the story shows him attending the Confucius Institute International Conference in Chengdu, China.
Doug’s interview was transcribed by Kendall Schutzer and edited for length and clarity by Everyday Boston.
