Boys on the bus

I know where they will someday go: to see Ellis Island, to see the One-World Centre, to visit Ground Zero.

But for now, they are escorted to Ft Dix on the bus, to be “processed”.

Future unknown, uncertain. Your guess is just as good as theirs. But safer, for now.

The children of 9/11 are entering college. To talk of “bringing the fight to Afghanistan” was already in past tense. FEMA got their work cut out for them, with Ida aftermath and a host of “claims”.

The boys on the bus. Heading to an US Army base, stationed deep in the country, where de-commissioned troops are de-briefed and de-compressurized. I can hear the hissing sound of a hydraulic jack lowering and unloading containers from a C-17 plane. Like changing a flat tire and letting the jack come down by the force of gravity.

I was among those boys not too long ago. Harrisburg airport-Ft Indiantown Gap (destination). The Susquehanna River that winds along or around Hwy 22 or 283. Adopted names and places of Native American.

The psychology of refugees. (Why didn’t you pronounce the “P” in “psychology”? they would wonder, yet too ashamed to ask).

I rolled up my sleeves, figuratively speaking, since I had with me only two short-sleeves as carry-on (one hung to dry overnight, the other on me) and signed up as an interpreter volunteer for Bureau of Child Welfare, with HQ in Harrisburg, PA.

Get to work the next day still with a jet-lag. My brother got his sponsorship near Mt Holly, NJ to start as a pharmacy tech (not too far from Ft Dix where the Afghan kids are arriving).

“Would you like to accept this family as your foster parents? Is this your correct birthday? – ” No one is pressuring you into a decision. Sign here, acknowledge here. You are clearly briefed on your rights….”

At lunch, the case workers talk shops, talk football and talk Thomas, Tommy (since “Thang”, sounds like women tongs ). How about “From Sir Thomas with Love” (sounds like a British Bond film). Later, at Penn State, I would print my personal business cards with both spelling and pronunciation – to pre-empt awkward situations.

I was homesick. It had never happened before, since for the first 19 years of my life, I was up and down the same Saigon street: running some errands, and seeing some female of interests (who wouldn’t).

Evacuation can turn Boyz-2-Men overnight. Anglecized names, adopting strange habits (like getting to work on time, with alternate set of clothes). Some wisecracks – who incidentally, played tennis on Wake Island in complete aristocrat’s tennis-white at the US tax payer’s expenses – tried to show off his “savoir vivre” : “you hold a fork like this, squeeze the ketchup on the fried fish sticks”. (Two years later, it’s me who was in and sang with the Penn State Choir, Mahler # 5 at Carnegie Hall with the Pittsburg Symphony Orchestra, Andre Previn – conducting. How is that for “savoir vivre”, schmuck!)

Boys on the bus. Peeing into clean toilets that were very likely cleaned from the night before by those night-shifters who had given their fathers a job. Mine was paid $3.30 per hour. A decent wage to start college.

The rest was history all from that janitorial debut.

Boys on the bus would agonise over many split decisions: to stay with a large family or splitting up, to follow the career path or stick with mom, to marry outside the race or inside the Islamic law, to date or not to date (what’s “date”?).

Then before you know it, boys on the bus become busy men at work, at construction sites, to build back better. To heal the wounds on both sides of the world, of the war on terrors. To mutate and evolve, like the very virus currently on a rampage. There shouldn’t even be a minute of their lives to look back. The thing about newly arrived immigrants : they are eager for the next step, then the next…from zero to 60 miles in 6 seconds. Fast, furious and forwarding. Playing catch up.

When I feel like cutting corners, slacking of, I think of these boys on the bus. They were looking out from those charter buses to a strange and hostile world. I, on the other hand, saw myself in them, in their eyes, which to me, are filled with hope and possibilities.

America is what you made of it. Just like life itself, 400 years ago in Cape Cod, 20 years ago in lower Manhattan or seems-like yesterday in Mt Holly. From boys to men, from Child to Adult, like a saying, all it takes is that first step. In my gut I know they will make it. In my heart, I fear for their loss, which already show in their thousand-yards stares.