My college dictionary

I didn’t have to buy it. The office people pooled the money and bought it for me as a birthday gift.

See, I was a volunteer interpreter for the Bureau of Child Welfare at Indian Town Gap, Pennsylvania.

It’s my first stop in America. While awaiting my own processing (getting my high school diploma and  birth certificate

translated and authenticated by the Red Cross), I might as well help unaccompanied minors to be placed in foster homes.

Nice social workers I dealt with: Greg, Steve and Mary Ann Pinskey.

They were nice and courteous, even if they had to commute all the way from Harrisburg, PA.

And the moment of decision finally arrived! Did I want to wait around to be placed in the Washington D.C areas, or just went ahead to go to Penn State. The choice was clear to me: I faced the challenges head on.

Armed with my Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, and a few change of clothes, I went to Penn State.

Of course, I wasn’t pre-enrolled, so while waiting around for Winter term, I started from the bottom:  working as a night janitor all throughout the Fall term.

When we face hardship in life, it’s good to go back to our roots. To see how far we have come.

I had a chance to be back to PSU in 1996 when MCI and CBS did some affiliated outreach together.

And it certainly felt weird to be on this side of the event tables while being on campus as a corporate rep.

Seeing how young the students, I could not help reflecting on my own college years.

Back then, everything fascinated me: from the first bite of a Mac Donald burger, to the taste of a Whopper (my blind- folded version of Coke vs Pepsi test), from an Arby’s roast beef sandwich to a  bag of Roy Roger’s french fries.

The snowy path on campus was so narrow that you couldn’t avoid saying “hi” a million times (Crocodile Dundee in NY)

in between classes. And of course, there was the disco fever, football fever and the Spring fever as displayed at the annual 3-day Spring Break concert.

I learned to analyze political speeches, deciphered all those acronyms like ICBM’s and even went out with nice Christian girls on the weekends.

But of course I had to deal with my long learning curve as a liberal arts major with no preparation except for that brief time working around the Child Welfare Bureau. Language did not come easy to me (but some previous French helped).

My language acquisition came via osmosis, in the language lab called Happy Valley.

And during my internship, I was thrown right away into the world outside, where nuclear reactors were on the verge of melting down (this reminded me of the monk immolation I had witnessed some years earlier in Saigon).

People in Middle town during the Spring of 1979 took as much cash as their ATM’s allowed, and ran out of town, while we, the media, rushed into town (for the scoop of the life time with WNEP-TV 16).

Choppers were coming and going to pick up raw footage, called dailies.

And our reporters delivered “stand-ups” to brief audience back home in Scranton about the scary development that

was unfolding. I finally headed home to Virginia where my family had resettled while I was attending Penn State.

But had I chosen VA from the outset, I wouldn’t have had all the excitement of a college survivor in  a place called Happy Valley. Those 4 years were indeed the happiest ones of my life: it’s when I learned to learn, with the college dictionary right besides me.