Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [31]
Linh was born in a small village far from Saigon. Her dad was a teacher, but because he had helped the Americans, he was sent to reeducation camp and afterward forced to farm. Because of her dad's record, Linh and her siblings weren't allowed to attend the village school. She wanted to study but couldn't afford books.
Linh smiled remembering rice harvest. She was the baby of the family, petted and spoiled. The brothers would carry her to the fields and make a little camp for her. When they could, they would stop and play with her. Her brothers might get mad at her, but no one ever really disciplined her. They would wake up in the night and make sure she was covered with blankets. Shrimp was valuable and caught only to be sold, but her brothers fed her shrimp. Still, it was a hard life, and to demonstrate that point, Linh showed me the scars on her arms from leech bites.
Her second-oldest brother awoke at 4:00 A.M. to help her with math before he left for work. She smiled remembering how he would stay up all night and work the problems so that when she awoke he would know how to do the work. This brother wrote her often, admonishing her to study. He told her he didn't believe in destiny and that in America she could become whatever she wanted. She pulled his letters out of her backpack to show me. Linh said through her tears that she would obey anything her brothers told her. She looked at me wide-eyed and said, "I will never see my brothers again."
I asked why she came to our country. Linh explained that her dad had been promised a car, a house, and a refrigerator in Nebraska, but at the last minute, her parents didn't want to come. They came only so that she could study. When her parents said good-bye, everyone in their little village cried.
The first thing they noticed here was the snow. Flying into Nebraska, Linh asked her father, "Why is the ground white?" The second thing they observed was our haste. Americans all seemed to be rushing around. Everyone had to be someplace all the time. Linh said, "I wondered if people ever slowed down and talked to each other."
They were taken to an apartment by a man who had served with her father in the army. They couldn't talk to Americans at all and they felt crazy. They never left their apartment and they wanted to go back to Vietnam. In Vietnam, they'd owned nothing, no television or books, and they'd used kerosene lamps. But in Nebraska, they were even more bereft; they didn't know how to turn on lights or use a stove or faucet.
Linh's first day of school, she missed the bus and her dad had to call his friend to give her a ride. Her father said, "You must go to school. You don't want to disappoint us; we came here for you."
Once at school, Linh made friends quickly. Some of the American kids laughed at her accent and clothes, but the teachers loved her. She was bright, hardworking, and focused. In geometry the students who had laughed at her soon wanted to copy her homework. By the end of her first year, she had made all A's. She said, "American kids have no idea how lucky they are to have good teachers."
Linh chose Vietnamese friends. American girls talked a lot about dating and boys. She said, "If I talked that way in Vietnam, I would be considered a bad girl." She explained that Vietnamese teens are more private and conservative than American teens. She asked me, "Why do Americans rush everything?"
Linh's mother worked the night shift, overtime, and weekends, whenever she could. Linh said, "Mom will sacrifice anything for the family."
Her father was sixty-five and disabled from his years in the camps. He'd tried to work, but he'd fallen down his third day on the job. He stayed home now, bored and wishing his family could go back to their village in Vietnam. He wanted to see his ninety-four-year-old mother before she died.
Linh said, "Dad wakes me at 4:00 A.M. and I study before school. He drives me to classes at the university and to my volunteer job teaching