What Professor Um means to us

When war washed over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, our families found themselves like driftwood, fleeing sodden and splintered, to countries whose names they couldn’t pronounce, to camps and trailer parks where the closest place to eat was this place called McDonalds, lost not just for words — simply lost, floating like hunched phantasms of who they once were, in lands where no one wants refugees, treated like dirt, gazes bowed to the ground. Bụi đời, the dust of life, we are.

There is always hope, as we are reborn through our children. It’s said that when your children are born, get ready to worry for the rest of your life. I imagine what my mother’s first words were to me: Vietnamese exhalations of joy and relief, that she got this 8 lbs. 9 ounce burden exorcised from her, then wondered, what should she be saying to this thing? The human capability to speak, is what separates us from animals, or what makes us more glorious, however you want to look at it. What does it mean to be American, a glorious American? We all know: the ability to speak English. I imagine, my mother and father wanted to tell me so many things: that I would grow up strong, that I would not only survive, that I would thrive. That they love me. But while I had the ears, they didn’t have the words.

You think you know yourself, until you get to University. I thought I knew who I was until I took my…