“THERE'S THE WAY you talk, and there’s the way you write,” I tell the kids I tutor in the crowded public schools of inner-city San Francisco. (Of course, crowded, public, and inner-city are code for mostly poor and not white.) I don’t want them to turn their backs on their way of talking, because they need it to stay tethered to themselves, to maintain an address in their neighborhoods so they’ll always have a place to call home. But I also want to teach these kids the language of school, jobs, money, and power; of filling out forms and applications and making reports and statements to the press. They need to learn this breakable and breaking and broken language of English, with its many coded ways to say one thing and mean another: The yoga code, in which we aim to “sit fully into our seats.” The business code, in which people get “transitioned” out of their jobs, and out of their dreams as well. The code of doctors, who have words that allow them to speak of sickness and dying without falling apart. The code of secretaries, who return your question (Is the boss in?) with one of their own (Who’s calling?).

The organization where I volunteer sometimes sends me into classrooms to tutor, and other times I meet with students at the tutoring center, which happens to be located on a sooty, Spanish-speaking street a few blocks down and over from the one on which I grew up. I attended an editorial meeting at this center with a half dozen volunteer tutors and a dozen high-school students, whom we were helping to produce a book of oral histories. A big topic of discussion — especially among the adults — was how much we should change the wording of these oral histories in order to make them accessible to readers. The students had conducted their interviews in many different languages: in English and Spanish and street English and Spanglish; in rural Southern and urban Northern; in Tagalog pure and Tagalog second-generation; in Samoan, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai, and Laotian; in the many dialects of islands and wars and cities, of ambition and survival and remembering and forgetting.

Finally one boy pointed out that he and his fellow students had to take classes to understand certain books, because the authors — guys named Twain and Shakespeare — wrote in ways that were inaccessible to many readers. “If we have to study them to understand their writing,” he wondered, “why shouldn’t people have to study us to understand our writing?” We, the adults, were silent. It was a brilliant question. No one had an answer.

But there is an answer: You’ve got to write right — i.e., white — in order to get ahead. At the same time, you can’t desert your natural way of speaking and writing, which is also your way of thinking and eating and sleeping, of fighting and kissing and dreaming, because you can’t burn down your own home. You’ve got to learn at least two languages: one to make it out of the neighborhood, and one to keep a foothold in it.

WHEN YOU VOLUNTEER, people assume you are well-off: who else but the rich could afford to work for free? Even the people working with you at the tutoring organization assume you fit into the category of financially comfortable, a term that makes it sound as if money were a fluffy bathrobe or a pair of slippers. This assumption is made even if you are (or once were, and maybe one day will again be) poor. Even if you are volunteering because you are lonely and looking for human interactions that go beyond “Next in line” and “Will that be all for you today?” Even if you just want a reason to return to the rowdy streets you knew as a child, streets filled with yelling and yearning, with people making do and making art and making catcalls at you. Even if you just want to help arm these kids — who are your peers, except thirty years younger — with the munitions of language, the native speakers and the English-language learners alike. You know (present) from experience (past) that they will need (future) an arsenal of words and phrases and paragraphs in order to maybe get somewhere in a world that employs this complicated, breakable English language. You also know, also from experience, how lonely it is to be stranded in that world without a place that feels like home.

In white parlance, urban is code for poor and nonwhite, which in San Francisco usually means black or Mexican. Mexican itself is really just shorthand for a native of any Central or South American country, and sometimes even of Guam, Samoa, and the Philippines. There are many Chinese students in the city’s urban neighborhoods, but they generally don’t get classified as “urban” unless they’re members of a gang. The newer and less-accomplished Asian immigrants, however, from countries such as Vietnam or Laos, are often called “urban,” though they are generally the most rural of us all, searching for something that feels like soil underneath all this pavement. The rich (white) people in this city live at the tops of hills, while the poor (nonwhites) live at the bottoms. You can be a city dweller all your life, but if you live at the top of an asphalt hill rather than in a valley, you will never be considered “urban.”

Also the hilltops, and even the neighborhoods on the inclines, have a special parking system that works by code. If you speak the language and can afford to live in the neighborhood, you get a permit to prove it and can park wherever you want for however long. In the valleys and urban neighborhoods, however, parking is a free-for-all. This helps facilitate a kind of one-way tourism in which rich white people can travel at will into the lower, louder neighborhoods, buy a burrito and a cheap beer or maybe a bag of drugs, then drive safely back to their comfortable homes and ease into their robes and slippers. But the opposite is not so easily accomplished, thus helping to keep the riffraff sequestered in the valleys. (Most of us would rather be there anyway, because not only is it foggier on those bayside hills, but it’s too damn quiet as well.)

If you’re that rare combination of white and urban, you present a classification problem — unless you are a punk, which is a person who is poor on purpose; or an artist, which is a punk with a purpose; or white trash, which is certainly not something anyone is on purpose. But if you are white and educated and dress nicely, people are going to assume you are not urban. Other white people at the organization where you volunteer are going to assume you’re from the heights or the suburbs or a nice two-parent home back east or up north.

The fact is, if you’re going to be white in this type of hip arts organization, you’ve got to dress down and a little geeky in order to be taken seriously. You’ve got to look like you’re part of the group I’ve come to call the grungerati — writers and painters and performers who apparently feel it would be selling out to buy clothes that match or a sexy pair of shoes. You’ve got to wear unflattering cat’s-eye or rectangular glasses and dress in oversaturated, disagreeable colors, like burnt orange and pale puke green. Plaids with stripes are appropriate, and thick, colored tights if you are female, or a wrinkled madras shirt if you are male. Very important: do not iron your clothes; even mending is frowned upon.

But let’s say you happen to have dressed in this manner as a child in this very neighborhood in the 1970s, because your parents could not afford new clothes or keep up with ironing, and when you outgrew your dresses, your mother had you wear them over pants, as if they had suddenly become blouses. You may then have spent a lifetime coveting clothes that fit, that look new and sharp, as opposed to reused and recycled. You may have learned how to look nice without spending a lot of money. You may have adopted a certain urban style: sleek, closefitting, a little flashy. Rich and middle-class white folks might think it’s tacky, but at least it’s put together — no holes; no wrinkles; no big, fat, ugly shoes.

When I go on a tutoring assignment in the schools — the same schools my brothers and I once attended — the students compliment me on my clothes. “She dress good for a old person,” one girl says, pointing to me. Their mothers understand me, too. We nod almost imperceptibly to each other. We’re single women trying to get ahead and stay ahead. We’ve got to look good, take life seriously, be ready at all times to jump on an opportunity or avoid a rip-off or find someone to watch the kids if a date or a job interview comes up. My co-workers at the tutoring organization, who generally share my skin tone and hair texture, speak to me in polite code, feigning respect while simultaneously dissing me. Mothers who come in dressed like me get the bright, over-the-top smiles of the privileged to the underprivileged, or the advantaged to the disadvantaged, or however the social workers are putting it these days. I confound everybody: light hair, green eyes, tight blouse, big earrings, pants with flair and no wrinkles, talking about novelist Jamaica Kincaid’s economy of language and also conversing in fluent Spanish about where to get avocados on sale five for a dollar, not too bruised.

“What are you?” a white woman asked me recently. It’s a question I have heard in various forms throughout my life. “Are you black?” a young woman, whose parents were from India, wanted to know after I got off the dance floor. “Are you Brazilian?” a black semipro basketball player asked me after a game. “De dónde eres?” (Where are you from?) the Mexicans ask when I speak to them in their language, which I heard everywhere while growing up, wandering the streets of my neighborhood bored, lonely, and curious. Tantalized by this foreign tongue and wanting to break its secret code, I studied and practiced Spanish for years. And though I speak it with an accent that can fool even native speakers, it is still not anything I can call my own. Which reminds me: what I need besides a chair is a house and a family and a city and a language to which I belong.

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