February 12, 2004
Staff profile: Need for housing turns into learning experience
A need for inexpensive housing led Carolyn Apel to the experience that started it all. It was the mid-70s and she’d come to Seattle quite literally as a refugee. After escaping from war torn Iran, she went to Vancouver, British Columbia, only to be told she couldn’t stay because she was a United States citizen. Seattle was the closest city of any size so she came here.
“I checked into the Y at first and started looking for something more permanent,” Apel recalls.
And that’s how she found the boarding house on 19th Avenue N.E. She lived there a few years, and the owners, an elderly couple, said they wanted to retire, could she manage the house. Apel jumped at the chance to get free rent, but what she got along with it turned out to be more important.
The house, she explains, had always had student renters, but after 1980, when exchange programs with communist China opened up, it also had a certain number of professors from that country. With smaller stipends than European professors, they lived in boarding houses to save money.
“When I took over as manager I decided to phase out student renters and rent entirely to these Chinese professors,” Apel says.
And so began an adventure that lasted 10 years and led to seven books published in China.
“I learned so much about the Chinese culture,” Apel says.
The boarding house was organized so that the group would shop together for groceries and have meals together. Thus Apel had ample opportunity to converse with the professors and find out about their lives in their home country. And, she adds with a laugh, because she could never chop the vegetables to her renters’ satisfaction, they did all the cooking.
Apel helped the professors with their English and edited the papers they presented while they were here. And since they had no money to pay her, she prevailed upon them to teach her Chinese.
“I can speak and read Chinese enough to get along and have fun, but I’m not at a high enough level to be a translator,” she says.
So how did she wind up writing for the Chinese market then? It happened like this. Through her renters, Apel met a publisher, who showed her some books he was using in China to teach English.
“I told him they were boring,” Apel recalls. “I said even I could do better than that. So he asked me to write a sample story.”
She did and he loved it, so she’s been writing books for him ever since. They consist of stories that deliberately use parts of the language their reader needs to learn. For example, there’s one book called American Idioms that incorporates common idioms such as “break out,” “all along,” “cut in” and “cut it out” into stories using simple language.
The publisher provides a Chinese translation for each story and illustrations by a Chinese artist.
“The stories are humorous,” Apel says. “I think people should have something interesting to read while they’re learning.”
Apel has done a lot of her own learning under very interesting circumstances. A native of Michigan, she took a job in San Francisco immediately after graduating from Wayne State University because she thought California was the place where things were happening.
While working at an international engineering firm, she met many engineers from other countries and decided to go to Iran just because it would be an adventure. There, she learned Persian and taught English to Iranians, but the trip turned out to be more of an adventure than she bargained for.
“While I was there, war broke out between Iraq and Iran,” Apel says. “In fact, I was in a border town having dinner with a local family when Iraqui troops attacked. We had to flee through the desert. I thought I was going to die because we had to leave without getting water to take with us or filling up the gas tank.”
Fortunately they made it to safety, but Apel knew she had to get out of the country as soon as possible. She went to Canada, she explains, because of that country’s national health care.
“I was young, in my 20s and in and out of jobs, and I wanted to feel that I had some kind of security. I thought if I were in Canada where they have national health care that I’d be taken care of if I got sick.”
But the Canadian government argued that as a U.S. citizen Apel had no standing as a refugee. That’s when she came to Seattle. But she hasn’t forgotten about the health care issue. She’s currently president of Health Care for All-Washington, a group that advocates for affordable comprehensive health care coverage for everyone.
“In the past I’ve been stuck in jobs I hated, but I kept them because I needed health care coverage,” she says. “I decided that since I was forced to live in this country, I was going to fight for the things that affected me and health care was a big one.”
Apel is quite happy in her current job, however. She’s an office assistant in plastic surgery for Harborview’s burn center, where her contact with doctors is useful in learning about health care issues.
Meanwhile, she’s adapting her Chinese books for the American market. Their simple language, she realized, makes them suitable as children’s books. The first of these books to be published is called Dr. Jones and Carolyn. It details the adventures of a nutty professor and his assistant.
The assistant character, Apel says, is herself. But she hastens to say that the misguided professor is not from the UW.
