et les filles, de mon age…..
Before going to the Re-union of my all-boys school, I made sure everything was set for the long weekend: foods in fritz and floor vacuumed.
Whatever happened at Re-union stayed at Re-union, I thought.
I just gonna press Reset and back to my routine: kid off to school, bills paid and floor vacuumed. Again???? Then it hit me. This time it’s different.
This time, I vacuumed AFTER I had seen many long lost friends, and for a mysterious reason, I missed them (perhaps because I had said I loved them – which should carry with it a load of responsibilities.)
Not to take it lightly. The humanities teacher reminded us he was there when us young eagles needed a push, to be initiated and introduced to Vietnamese writers and poets e.g. Thanh Tinh, Vu Hoang Chuong etc…
I myself received ( today’s equivalent of stickers) books on cities in Vietnam e.g. Vinh Long, which opened my mind beyond my northern refugee slum of Saigon.
Now, it’s like going back for a software update.
A few observations: people with jobs attended it, people with great jobs organized it and people with no jobs played spectators along with wives. The later is yet another story (Tour les filles).
I was reluctant to show up to the day. Then I found out my friend Hung “con” showed up even later. That’s when it struck the chord, figuratively speaking. Hung went on to jazz and software testing, both not seemingly are in conflict at all, ” but not because …chang phai vi em”.
I am just a populist crowd-pleaser while Hung forges his own path and discovers his own style, musically and socially.
He reminds me of George Harrison with his double hit “Something” and “Here comes the Sun” in that he rises above himself and circumstances.
Hung seemed pre-occupied (lots of chips on his shoulders???). Back to the rest. We’ve got a taste of a variety of talent from photography to journalism, from theater to speech.
None impresses me more about our wholistic school experience than the teacher’s sharp and focused mind. He stressed “Ton Su Trong Dao”….i.e. we’re in for a make-over, having been contaminated with “wtf”, “fy” and other twittering acronyms in the age of Trump.
In all, I am glad I got nudged into it without which I wouldn’t otherwise have met a bunch of new friends : same age, same school, and many of same class. They were with spouses, some even went “footloose” that night.
When I turned left at the Hwy 290 fork to head back, it hit me that although I have felt in love with many books, “I read so I won’t be alone”, yet someone somewhere and somehow had introduced me to the love of literature, of belonging to an extended family stretching through time and geography (Northern and Southern VN), whose decency and magnanimity rose above difficult and depressing circumstances.
We were all-boys once, on our first day of school, all locked up (Bit Tat) after the drum beats…for hours, restless and rumble.
Today we are free and floating like balloons tied together at the bottom by the trembling hand of our teachers. But we chose to come back, to be a bunch of colors, converged, to make one single light, a (Fire) which illuminates and shines on one and only truth: those who are educated and enlightened should at least live a different life than others, even in darkest hours. I am mindful that not “tous les garçons”are alright. Many are battered but not broken, hard-hearing but not hard to please.
That hurried walk to first day of school was a journey of a thousand miles. It began with that single step across from the Jeanne d’Arc Church, with a reading of that 1st single line each of us had copied from the blackboard: “Tien Hoc Le, Hau Hoc Van”.
And I wasn’t alone in that self-effacing and stripping process. I wish I could learn to trust and love again as I did there at Chu Van An 1.0. That passion for life-long learning is still here, burning and unput-out-able.
Thang Nguyen 555 