01 July 2009
My Teacher, My Friend — Part III
The American man from Vietnam had rushed ahead — without looking back
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 third of a three-part series on America.gov, will be included in his next book, East Eats West, to be published in 2010.
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And that was that, as they say. And I sailed on.
For it turned out I didn’t go to Jefferson where many of my closest friends ended up. I went to Serramonte High, an awful, unchallenging school known for its smoking pit and frequent robberies in bathrooms. But thanks to a relative whose address was in a coveted ZIP code, I transferred to Lowell High School — a prestigious public school in San Francisco. Superior to any schools around, Lowell provided high achievement standards and advanced-placement courses. I made new friends and ended up at Berkeley. That is to say, I left the working-class world where Mission Street ended, and worked myself toward where Mission Street began — toward all the shimmering high-rises and the city’s golden promises — and in one of those shiny towers by the waters is where I live now.
I didn’t bother to look back, didn’t bother to keep my mentor and friend abreast of my progress. Several decades later, a seasoned journalist and essayist who had traveled the world a few times, I, on one whimsical weekend, decided to write an article about learning English, and Mr. K was featured promptly.
Did I know that Mr. K read and treasured that article? Did I know that he, in retirement, kept coming back to it, to my writing — to me?
No. Not until this note from his best friend, another teacher, informed me of his passing.
“Most of us know what pleasure Ernie got from your article. While he was proud he was also a modest man. … He sent copies to many relatives back East. I’m sure he couched it in pride for what you have accomplished, but he was deeply honored. What no one knows is he was a bit unhappy that there was no retirement recognition. He told me many times he didn’t want any big deal, but as the years passed, he would speak somewhat wistfully of the lack of acknowledgement. You gave him acknowledgement.”
To be honest, it never occurred to me to see the story from Mr. K’s angle. When I tried to see the classroom from behind his desk as the years streamed by — students after students, generation after generation — I could not see myself standing out. I might have been the first Vietnamese refugee to turn up in his classroom, but I was not the last. My cousins came, so did others, and surely, later on, other needy, traumatized refugee children from other bloody conflicts. I might have been precocious, but how could I have possibly stood out to a man who taught for decade after decade?
I had grieved for Vietnam, for my lost homeland, for many other things. I had traveled around the world many times, even back to my homeland to say my proper goodbyes to my interrupted childhood, but I didn’t go back to where Mission Street ended, to where that little junior high stood at the foot of the mountains amid cemeteries often veiled in the morning fog. Living so nearby, I had felt, unreasonably, that were I to drive down Mission Street and peek through the window of my mentor’s classroom, he would still be there — that Mr. K would always be there, making other needy kids feel special, and that there would always be little bowling teams and little book clubs in the summer and rowdy speed tournaments at lunchtime. And in dreams and reveries, haven’t I revisited him countless times?
But that’s the trouble with childhood, isn’t it, especially happy ones? Happy children don’t question their contentment any more than fish wonder about the river’s current; they swim on. My childhood, interrupted by war, was rekindled by kindness, and instead of cynicism and bitterness, my curiosity and imagination took hold and kept growing in the New World. And because I felt blessed and happy, I went on blessedly with my business of growing up. Mr. K opened the gate and ushered me in, and I, so hungry for all its possibilities, rushed through it.
“I think your leading off would be very appropriate unless it makes you uncomfortable,” wrote Mr. K’s friend. “Lord knows I heard him talk about you several times. He kept mentioning it near the end.”
The retired teachers sat on their pews to somber organ music. Wizened, gray-haired, they rose, one by one, moving slowly, some in arthritic pains, to speak with affection and humor of a man who was known as much for his aesthetic sensibilities and practical jokes and friendship as he was for his devotion to the art of teaching and to his students. Shared memories echoed inside the gilded columbarium like some ode to beauty itself …
He was a talented organist … loved driving cross-country … Spanish architecture and colonial history of California … this thing where he mimicked people while walking behind them … created beautiful stained glass objects … collected antique silver and botanical prints …
He was especially fond of orchids …
To all this I would say yet that his greatest talent is empathy: He intuited how one felt and, like a bodhisattva, performed his magic to assuage grief.
But if there’s a sad statement to the American scholastic experience it is that the passing of a beloved teacher is often not mourned by his or her students, but by, if he or she were any good, mostly peers. Drinking coffee and eating finger sandwiches afterward, I kept asking anyone younger than me if he or she had been a student of Mr. K. And the answer was always no.
The refugee boy not only led, as it turned out, he was the only former student of Ernie Kaeselau’s to cry at his memorial.
Suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. … All as a-shake and a-shiver — glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories.
I did not fully appreciate the beauty of Grahame’s words. Yet even then, not sure of what I read and typed, I knew that it had something to do with me — who, like Mole, albeit against my will, also left my insulated world and sailed toward the unknown. I also knew by the end of that first summer that I too, for having set out unflinching, would be awarded with friendship and new ways of seeing things.
A charmed life is one that goes down a river not knowing what’s behind the bend, but confident nevertheless that gracious strangers will be there in one form or another to aid and abet and be a guide through turbulent waters. Charmed was how I felt when I first came here and more than three decades later, charmed is how I feel today — and much of that, I will acknowledge, has to do with Mr. K.
And so — the river glimmers and sparkles and I sail on. Because I could not go back, I will send ahead to the further stretch where I will not go, to where the storyteller’s flesh crumbles to dust but his stories, when told from the heart, may live on yet. For this, tendered by enchanted memories, tinged with regrets, is one of requited love.
My Teacher, My Friend — Part I
My Teacher, My Friend — Part II
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