Jessie Lee: The Human Puppy

One of the reasons I love puppies so much is because they seem perpetually happy. They could be battling a dandelion stem or chewing up a stick and their tails wag like they discovered a goldmine. For puppies, the simple things are treasures.

I never expected to find the same unpolluted joy in a human, but that’s what happened. Three months ago, I met Jessie Lee at the Nashville Adult Literacy Council, where I teach English for a few hours a week. Jessie is twenty-five-years-old but looks twelve, stands maybe five-feet tall and wears her hair loose around her heart-shaped face. She moved here from China nine months ago.

The first time we met, after exchanging only a few jumbled words, I knew I was interacting with someone special, but I couldn’t understand why. I just found myself smiling whenever I was around her.

As the weeks went by, I learned that Jessie had had a dog in China but someone stole him, and she had been so upset she didn’t eat rice for a year. When she was sixteen she had worked in a toy factory, sitting all day at a big table with a group of women, getting paid by the toy not the hour.

It finally dawned on me that I was drawn to Jessie because like a puppy, she’s perpetually happy. She enjoys – with genuine pleasure – everything from the sight of a squirrel darting across a park to her job waiting tables at the Lucky Bamboo.

She doesn’t care that she lives in an apartment with five other people, that she rides the bus to and from work, or that she sends her mother in China $200 a month. She doesn’t care about the snow or the cold or if the sun doesn’t come out for a week. She just says over and over again, “I so happy.”

Yesterday afternoon I decided to make Jessie a.k.a Little Miss Sunshine smile even more than normal. I wanted to bring her some of the happiness she spreads around anyone near her, so I took our foster puppy Tony down to the literacy council and introduced him to his human doppelgänger. Here are the results: