I read a piece about the Iraq/Vietnam comparison over at Villainous Company, and posted a thank you for a reminder that the Democrats like Hillary, Kerry, Reid, Pelosi and the list goes on and on -- prefer a Jane Fonda version of Vietnam. It reminded me all of this:
One morning, back in 3rd grade, my teacher told our classroom that a new little girl was starting class mid year. She was a refugee. From war. From Vietnam. We were to be nice to her.
I had already heard of Vietnam. Not long before my teacher’s announcement, a gorgeous brilliant medically trained woman who played piano like an angel had arrived on our church’s doorstep with not a dime, not anything but the clothes on her back, from that war. My parents took her into their life.
As a little girl, I was awestruck by wanting to be as pretty as she was, to play piano as well, to understand. One evening, she sat in our kitchen, broken English, pulled the sleeve off her shoulder to show me the bullet lodged in her back. She explained: she was shot bloody in the Tet Offensive while she was running for her life. She said most didn’t make it. I could hardly pronounce Tet, much less offensive, I could barely read at the time. I was growing up with all brothers and had played with plastic guns, good guys bad guys. I knew bullets come flying while you run. But now I understood they killed people while you ran. She had a chunk of shot in her back, it still bled memories. She wasn’t smiling when she told me. I wasn’t smiling when I saw it.
Just trying to learn English, you could barely understand her when she spoke. But she had learned one English language distinction. While in the car one afternoon, I whined to my mom that I wanted lunch, “I’m starving!” My beautiful Vietnamese friend turned around to me and said sternly, “Why do you say that? You are not starving. You are hungry. Do not say you are starving.” She knew the difference and she had had enough of my whining. We were at the corner of Cleveland Avenue and Ford Parkway, I was sitting in the back seat, it was a sunny summer day. I learned very quickly, I was a spoiled American.
Then in third grade, this new friend arrived at my grade school. Stunned. Quiet. We spoke to her like she understood what we were saying. I invited her to come to my house to play one day. I don’t know how we arranged it, she didn’t speak English. Her mother definitely didn’t. My mom must have figured out a way. Or we just showed up at her house to ask. I don’t remember.
She was dazed, quiet, serious. While out and about in my neighborhood, we found a large neighborhood sale that had a big tall jar packed full of jelly beans with a sign. Whoever came closest to guessing the number of beans in the jar, would win an enormous cute pink stuffed animal, about 4 feet tall. Being the math geek I was and still am, I did some sort of creative multiplication and spit out a number. I had my new friend also write a number on a sheet of paper. I’m sure she thought I was crazy, writing numbers on pieces of paper and shoving them in a jar.
I got a call later. I had won.
I pretended she had won. I gave her the pink stuffed animal. She probably thought if you shove numbers in a jar, you get big stuffed animals. She hugged it. Cuddled her cheek up against its pink cheek. She smiled for the first time. I remember thinking, she can smile.
Not long after, she switched schools. I never saw her again. Not long after that, my high school was about 15% refugees from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Hmong and we learned to know the difference. All similarly stunned, dazed, trying to make a go in the new world.
I remember one young man who wrestled on my brother’s team badly blew out his shoulder during a match. He had no parents. He came to this country by himself. His family was back home, dead, brutally killed. My parents went to the hospital as his parents. The hospital said if he wasn’t eighteen they couldn’t help him. The boy overheard it. My father looked over at him. When the boy filled out his form, his age was 18. He had the surgery, got pins in his shoulder.
About that same time in high school I took a Creative Writing class. I remember I sat next to the good looking athletic boy who got perfect score on his SAT but became a cocaine user. Another boy, two rows over, also a perfect SAT score became a Rabbi. Then there was the party girl who lord knows where she ended up but at 16 she’d make Britney Spears proud. Then there was my friend who I’d pass notes to. And the star tennis player who had a drug addiction, broke it, spoke about it, then went back on. And so on. We had an assignment. Write a poem. I wrote a poem in the first five minutes. Then went back to passing notes. I got called on to read mine, a fluffy limerick. People laughed.
Then the teacher called on a young man, a refugee.
This boy sat in the front row every day. He didn’t mingle. The rest of us assumed that he, like many of other classmates, did not speak English. This day, the first time he had been called on to read, he sat up straight, stunned, nervous. He leaned forward in his chair, gripping the corners like he was hanging on for life. He could hardly start. I almost thought he wouldn’t, couldn’t. The room was noisy, kids weren’t paying attention, shuffling their feet, kicking the chairs ahead of them, whispering or working on other homework. The boy about to read his poem was just another kid they couldn’t understand, who didn’t matter to them, who they could ignore. I wish I had a copy of that poem. I wish I remember his name.
He began. The room went silent. Not a kid stirred. I remember even the teacher went still, jaw opened, in the front of the room. After it was over, the room didn’t move. No one could speak. I remember wanting to put my head down and cry.
I cannot do justice to his incredible command of a second language with a poem that gripped our hearts, pulled them out of chests and pounded the message in. The sounds of brutality, the blood that was not mentioned but you felt spilled from your own veins, the feeling of desperation as your flee for your life. When he took up a pencil, he took command of that room. It was like that bullet of the beautiful woman’s shoulder got wedged into mine. And it has never left.
I guess that is one reason why I wrote this below comment at Villainous Company. It is one of the many reasons I write this blog. We have so-called leaders that embrace the evil of others as their friend.
I was just a little girl at the time Jane Fonda was kissing the feet of brutal thugs and doing everything else those 60's spoiled kids were indulging in at the time. While I was learning to walk, giggle and laugh in a peaceful community, she was over there smooching that generation's round of brutal leaders, like they were her long lost lovers, as though they were angels of mercy.
Instead, she was simply evil's willing servant.
We will never look up to people like her, Kerry, and others who dismiss the gift of freedom that I was born into and instead relish the opportunity to disregard the violence that so many men and women suffered under during that era. They would prefer I was born into a community where my parents would be shot on a dime. They certainly kissed the men who did that to many children.
Hillary Clinton just recently asked for funding to memorialize Woodstock in a museum in NY. Clearly, Hillary, Kerry, Reid etc could care less about memorializing the men and women who suffered because of the "pull out". Apparently Kerry never heard of the Killing Fields. Nor understood that there were men who suffered horribly for years in POW camps.
Instead, Hillary wants a million dollars to memorialize the biggest filthy LCD muddy orgy fest of spoiled uncontrolled kids the planet has ever seen. Out of selfish expediency, their opinions and resulting policies fully disregard the dignity and goodness of those of that era who suffered and those who gave their life to stop the people who make violence and viciousness their guide. I don't call that arrogant dismissal, leadership. It's selfishness.
The liberals of that generation ought to start realizing that the generation coming after them isn’t much impressed with their recreated false versions of history. In fact we are disgusted.
Thank you for this entry. I felt compelled to let you know that you do have empathizers and support.
Posted by: John | April 30, 2009 at 02:04 AM