01 July 2009
My Teacher, My Friend — Part I
Kindness greets young Vietnamese refugee on his first day in U.S. school
By Andrew Lam
Andrew Lam is editor of New America Media, an online collaboration of ethnic news organizations, and author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. The following essay, the first of a three-part series on America.gov, will be included in his next book, East Eats West, to be published in 2010.
(begin byliner)
The man who stood at the entrance to my new world passed away recently, and though I hadn’t seen him in more than three decades, the news of his demise left me unexpectedly bereft. I remember a warm voice, expressive eyes, and bushy eyebrows that wiggled comically at a pun or a joke. I remember someone who treated me with care, made me feel special when I — a stranger on a new shore — was terribly lost and bewildered.
Ernie Kaeselau was my first teacher in America. Having fled Saigon in spring of 1975 during finals in sixth grade, I landed in San Francisco a couple months later and attended summer school in Colma Junior High in Daly City, preparing myself for seventh grade. Never mind that I didn’t speak English, only Vietnamese and passable French, and that two days after my mother, grandmother, sister and I left in a cargo plane, communist tanks came crashing through the Independence Palace in Saigon, and the war ignominiously ended. Never mind that in between those few months I subsisted in two refugee camps and spent most of my nights in a tent praying for the safety of my father and other relatives and friends who remained behind.
I never knew what Mr. K’s politics were — liberal is my guess— and if I had any then, ours would have surely clashed when it came to the politics of Vietnam. But when it came to me — the first Vietnamese refugee in his classroom — his policy was plenary kindness.
Mr. K’s first question was my name and his second was how to properly pronounce it in Vietnamese. He would ask me to repeat this several times until, to my surprise, he got the complicated intonation almost right. A day or two later, he’d ask again and practice it until it was perfect, and soon thereafter, the Vietnamese refugee boy became the American teacher’s pet. It was my task to go get his lunch, erase the blackboard, and collect and distribute homework assignments. When I missed the bus, which was often, and sometimes deliberately, he’d drive me home, a privilege that was the envy of the other kids.
America was full of rowdy, undisciplined children. In Vietnam, we all dressed in uniforms — blue shorts, white shirt — and bowed to the teachers, but American kids wore colorful clothes, smoked in the bathroom and swore at each other, and sometimes, even at their teachers — something so unheard of in Vietnamese tradition.
At first, I was terrified, fearful of the big, rowdy kids of all races who had gotten into bloody fights in the schoolyard. But Mr. K’s classroom was a haven. Lunchtime and the “good kids” made a beeline for it. Away from the schoolyard bullies, we ate our lunch, played games and did our homework. I remember plenty of laughter, arguments, gossips and, yes, even budding flirtations, and Mr. K reigned over the chaos with ease, sitting behind his desk, reading a newspaper or helping one of us with our assignments.
For a while, I was his echo. “Sailboat,” he would say while holding a card up in front of me with an image of a sailboat on it, and “sailboat” I would repeat after him, copying his inflection and facial gestures. “Hospital,” he would say, with another card held up. And “hospital,” I would yell back, a little parrot. I listened to his diction. I listened to the way he annunciated certain words when he read passages from a book. If he could say my Vietnamese name, surely I could bend my tongue to make myself sound more American.
That first summer, he gave me A’s that didn’t count. He took our little group bowling, formed a little team, taught us how to keep score, and bought us soft drinks. Then, he took us on a baseball field trip, my first. He took his time to explain to me the intricacy of the game. It was followed by a trip to Sonoma to see wineries and cheese factories. I remember crossing the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, with Mr. K’s voice narrating its history, how it was built, and I remember asking him afterward, in broken English, if it was made of real gold, and the entire bus erupted in laughter.
Most memorable, however, were the books that came in a carton box. Along with a bowling team, Mr. K formed a little book club. And for a few dollars, we — children of the working class and immigrants — became owners of a handful of books. The box came one morning in the middle of class, and it felt a bit like Christmas in July. We jostled each other to be up front at his desk as Mr. K read the title of each book out loud, then matched the book with the name of its owner. My first book in America was The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, and I remember poring over its pristine pages in wonder. Perhaps it was then that the smell of fresh ink, paper and glue indelibly became for me the smell of yearning and imagination. I did not yet know how to read in English, oh, but how impatient I was to learn!
My Teacher, My Friend — Part II
My Teacher, My Friend — Part III
(end byliner)
