Learning a language at fifty: her resume gained a line

The year Chen Jie turned fifty, the textile mill laid her off.

She sent out resumes for three months and heard almost nothing back. The young people at the job center looked at her and said, politely, that they would be in touch. She went home and said to her husband, "At my age, is this it, then?" He didn't answer. The next day he came back from the flea market with an old tape recorder under his arm. "You always said you wanted to learn English when you were young. Now you've got the time."

At first she thought it was ridiculous. Learning English at fifty, and for whose benefit? But the machine was sitting there on the table, and sooner or later you have to press play. She started with the twenty-six letters, up at five every morning with the tapes, repeating after them. The old man downstairs who took his bird out for a walk heard her reciting day after day and asked what she was doing it for. She said, "Nothing. I just don't want to rust."

A year later a foreign-trade warehouse opened by the gate of the housing estate. It was hiring stock handlers, and the notice said applicants with basic English would be preferred. Chen Jie went. At the interview she stammered out, in English, that she could learn and she would work hard. The warehouse supervisor was a young man who had studied abroad. He paused, then asked, "Auntie, at your age, can you handle night shifts and heavy lifting?"

She said, "I stood on a factory floor for thirty years. If you can stand it, I can stand it. As for the English—" she took the old tape recorder out of her bag, "I've studied for two years, an hour a day. You can test me."

He tested her. When it was over he kept the resume on his desk and said one thing. "The most valuable thing on this resume isn't the English. It's this line: started at fifty, studied for two years."

She got the job and stayed eight years. In that time she moved from stock handler to documentation clerk, and the twenty-six letters turned into fluent English reconciliation emails, one after another. When new young colleagues complained that learning a foreign language was too hard, Chen Jie pointed at her old tape recorder. "I started at fifty. You're twenty-six this year. What are you panicking about?"

It is never too late to begin learning something, at any age. What comes too late is the moment you decide that this is all there is.

After she retired she started a free English corner in the community. Her students were all people like her, middle-aged and older. Someone asked her the secret of sticking with it, and her answer went up on the blackboard in two languages: "It's never too late."

On her seventieth birthday her daughter gave her a present: a printed sheet of paper, the daughter's own English resume, with one extra line added. "Mother's example: it's never too late." Chen Jie taped it to the wall beside the tape recorder.

The English corner is now a fixture in the neighbourhood. The oldest student is seventy-six. Someone asked her how a woman who had spent her working life teaching factory hands came to teach English, and she said, "I don't teach English. I tell the story of how I started to people who haven't started yet. The point of the story isn't English. It's that in the year I turned fifty, I didn't let the words 'this is it' make the decision for me."