As the group discussion began, a classmate handed me his phone and asked me to type the question in English into Google Translate. When he saw the Arabic on the screen, he smiled and we started practicing in broken Swedish.
This is a typical moment of our SFI course, which may also explain its intention – to let people from all over the world learn a new language on a relatively level playing field and gradually acquire a new identity.
It gives me another insight that when you move to a new country and the locals speak their language to you, it might be out of respect rather than arrogance, because they won’t treat you differently just because of how you look.
Of course, it’s not all fairy tales. As an American classmate put it, this new government does not like a single person in this classroom.
I know our Swedish teacher better than I know the Swedish government. She asked another student to write her name transliterated into Chinese and copied the three characters in the upper left corner of the whiteboard. After each lesson, she would erase what she had written. But weeks later, her Chinese name is still there.