“Tag! You’re it!”
I fell forward, hard, from the unseen blow that struck me square between the shoulders.
“I’m not even playing!” I yelled. I picked the loose gravel out of my reddened palms as I looked up to see Derek Elkins running away.
“Doesn’t matter if you’re playing! You’re it! Phuc’s it, everybody! Phuc’s it!” The kids who were playing tag flew in every direction.
“I’M NOT EVEN PLAYING!” I went to the swings to look for Craig Fleckman and our X-wing squadron. I hopped on board a swing, and we took flight as Derek intruded into our airspace. He stood in front of us as we swung inches from his nose.
“You’re still it!” he mocked me from below, sticking his tongue out. Derek spearheaded the reassembling group of kids.
“I said I’m not playing!” I was too busy trying to destroy the Empire.
Derek made his eyes into slants, fingers in the outer corners. “Nyah, nyah, you can’t even catch me.” I ignored it. Big deal—my eyes were shaped different.
Words were meaningless. We were at a deadlock, but the group consensus declared that I was it. That was how democracy worked, how the mob ruled. Their game needed an it, and no one wanted to be it.
That language itself—being it—was our first exercise in dehumanization. It starts early. When you play tag, you’re not a person. You’re a thing, an it. In the English language we deploy that gender at an early age to create an it, an other, to dehumanize, to flee, to amuse.
“FIND SOMEONE ELSE!”
With his eyes still finger-creased, Derek tried to provoke me to catch him. “You can’t even catch me! Can’t catch me! Can’t catch me! You’re just a stupid gook! A GOOK!”
What was that? I didn’t know what that word meant, but I knew enough to read the crowd. Grace, Katie, Jon—they all froze. Their eyes widened. Disbelief. Alarm. Liza Lyons upbraided Derek. “You can’t say that, Derek! That’s a really bad word!”
I didn’t know any bad words besides various combinations of stupid/dumb/poop with the suffix head, but this word gook seemed like it needed a response based on Liza’s reaction. If it were a truly bad word, it needed a truly strong retort.
Derek persisted. “Well, he’s it! And he is a gook—that’s what my parents said! So he’s it!”
The game had changed—it wasn’t tag anymore. I leapt off my X-swing and ran toward Derek. None of the kids scattered as Derek turned to run from me. I hammered him three times, and his nose immediately gushed crimson as he fell to the ground. His front teeth cut into my knuckles, and my hand stung from the blow. I stood, tears streaming down my face (why was I crying?) when I felt an iron hand clamp down around my arm. It was Mrs. Boose.
Mrs. Boose was our second-grade teacher. Sporting a short sandy bouffant that looked more helmet than hairstyle, Mrs. Boose was a brawny woman who was just as comfortable splitting logs as she was hewing second graders.
She pulled us asunder. “What’s going on here?”
Derek whimpered, staring at the blood sprayed all over his yellow Mork & Mindy iron-on T-shirt. The game was over, and Derek, the shock wearing off, was furious. “PHUC HIT ME! HE HIT ME!”
Mrs. Boose glared at me as her vise tightened on my arm.
Per her schoolyard forensics, Mrs. Boose was asking questions of the who-hit-whom-first variety, reconstructing the crime scene. “Why did you hit him, Phuc?” Without the wisdom of legal counsel or the reading of my Miranda rights, I offered the provocation.
“Well, Derek called me a gook—a gook!” I said it twice, hoping that it would be grounds for my acquittal. To my own surprise, I started to cry again. Humiliated, I couldn’t look at all the kids who were still standing around us. I fastened my gaze only on Mrs. Boose. She was silent, and a frown flickered across her face. Her wattles tightening, her glasses twitched as she focused on me.
“Well … well, you don’t even know what that word means, do you? And besides, we don’t hit other people. You know what we say: ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’” The playground bell gaveled our due process over with the end of recess. “Everyone line up to go inside. We’ll get Derek cleaned up. And, Phuc, remember: ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’” She raised her voice so that everyone in the line could hear, a convenient PSA to us all.
To the astonishment of all involved, especially me, nothing came of the fight. I was not sent to the principal’s office nor was I paddled by Mr. Van Zandt, and in the judicial system of second grade, Mrs. Boose sent an unspoken but resounding message: there were some transgressions for which you could punch someone with impunity.
Apparently calling someone a gook was one of them.
And apparently I was one of them. Whether I liked it or not, I was it—and I wasn’t even playing, was I?
Do we want words to be powerful or powerless? We can’t have it both ways. If we want them to be powerful, we have to act and speak accordingly, handling our words with the fastidious faith that they can do immeasurable good or irreparable harm. But if we want to say whatever we want—if we want to loose whatever words fly into our minds—then we render words powerless, ineffectual, and meaningless, like the playground bromide of “sticks and stones.” That childhood logic leads you to believe that suffering corporal trauma is worse than verbal trauma.
Nathaniel Hawthorne would beg to differ.
When I read The Scarlet Letter for the first time, in high school, it dawned on me how ridiculous Hester Prynne’s punishment is for having an extramarital affair and a child out of wedlock. “Oh, hey. We’re gonna sew a giant RED LETTER A on you.” The teenage snark in me said, “Yeah, right. Why not just tear the letter off? Wear a T-shirt over it? Or move to another town?” I couldn’t fathom how one letter of the alphabet could destroy a person’s existence.
But in the olden, golden days of colonial Massachusetts, it was a serious sentence. Public humiliation was tantamount to a death sentence because you were torn from the social fabric of the colony.
Nathaniel Hawthorne understood that language is a social contract. We all agree that dog means dog and cat means cat. In that simple agreement, we are bound together, and it’s the currency of our transactions. Hester honors that contract by staying in the colony where everyone knows what her transgressions are and what the A stands for (spoiler alert: it’s for adultery). She consents to being publicly shamed. She stays at the colony because it’s where she has a powerful (albeit negative) identity, and from that robust identity comes her purpose and meaning. Hester chooses to stay where she is Hester.
Even without knowing what the word gook meant, I was binding myself to the social contract of language, and in doing so, I allowed myself to be harmed by it. I was giving the word power. I could have ignored it or allowed my ignorance to shield myself, but that very ignorance would have further isolated me, and ultimately, dehumanized me. And that was the game of it. Ostracize and dehumanize.
But if I allowed myself to be harmed by words, I was showing them that I belonged at least by virtue of understanding their language. And all I wanted was to belong.
My mother had left the apple orchard and gotten a better-paying job at McCoy Electronics, a circuit-board factory. She worked the day shift on the soldering line, and my father arranged to work third shift and be home during the day in the summertime. With the hope of connecting his children to Việt Nam, he decided to use that time to teach me to read Vietnamese as I was reading in English now (Lou was luckily still illiterate in both languages).
My father and I sat at the kitchen table, just the two of us. In front of us lay a primer for Vietnamese, a thin paperback booklet with simple line drawings of kids and animals and single words.
“Say it again. This mark means the downward tone. This mark means the upward tone. Read it again.” The spelling didn’t make sense to me. I kept pronouncing the d as it was pronounced in English (a voiced alveolar stop for you phonologists in the audience).
“NO! That’s not how you say it. D is pronounced like y.” Right then, I decided that Vietnamese was a stupid language, or at least its alphabet was stupid. D pronounced like y? No thank dou.
I heard Lou playing with Tim and other neighborhood kids outside. They were running around throwing rocks and digging holes, having adventures without me.
I shrunk low in my chair and scowled at the page. There weren’t even sentences to read. Just the musical notations of the six different tones. Up tone. Down tone. Higher tone. No tone. Up-down tone. Question tone.
I said dơ wrong.
“NO! YOU’RE NOT TRYING! DO IT AGAIN!”
I said dơ wrong again.
“AGAIN!”
Wrong.
“AGAIN!”
Wrong.
My father struck the table with his fist. Tears streaked my face. “How are you going to read Vietnamese? Are you going to be a Vietnamese person who can’t read their own language?!”
The rhetorical answer was yes, but my father’s question implied a deeper logic: If I chose not to learn to read it, did that make me less Vietnamese? And if so, did that mean that I could be more of something else? If I read English better, did that mean that I could be more American? Already the answer seemed obvious to me: I wanted to be more American, to fit in. I didn’t want to be more Vietnamese. Vietnamese got me teased. Vietnamese got me into fights. Vietnamese meant not-American. A gook.
My father limped through a few more weeks of instruction, but his efforts did not budge my tight-jawed recalcitrance. I had made up my mind that I was not going to learn to read Vietnamese, that it was a waste of my efforts, and so I sat saturnine at the table, willfully unteachable. No amount of spanking or punishment was going to sway me.
Kids covet things. They see something that other kids have, and they want that thing. They see a cool T-shirt with Darth Vader on it, and they want that shirt, too. Soon they want the house, the hair, the skin color.
I wanted to be Ethan Alder. Ethan was popular. Ethan was tall, blond, athletic, charismatic. He was the first kid who was cool, which meant that he didn’t care. He didn’t care that he was bad at reading or that he was being sent to Mr. Van Zandt’s office. And he certainly didn’t care that we all thought he was cool.
Ethan wore distinctive Björn Borg–style wristbands. White terry cloth, with red and blue stripes. With his insouciance, he looked perpetually ready to serve an ace shot. I wanted Ethan Alder’s wristbands.
Ethan and I weren’t friends. I was still playing Star Wars with Craig Fleckman on the playground. However, I started to realize that Craig and I were the only ones who played with each other. Craig was tall and rangy. He laughed at the wrong time in story circle and would tease girls. But Ethan—Ethan, on the other hand, didn’t participate in the imaginary heroics of recess. He was the Achilles of wallball. Boys lined up to challenge him, only to be vanquished. Girls flocked around him at the end of every recess. He was sweaty, but I swore he sparkled.
Being Ethan was an impossible aspiration, and I decided that the next best thing was to look like him. And to look like Ethan Alder, I had to have Björn Borg wristbands.
One Sunday afternoon at Woolco, as I wandered the department store aisles, I found wristbands. Eureka—I might as well have discovered solid gold bullions. I clutched the wristbands, triumphant, and ran to my mother. “Má! Má! Can I have these? I want these!”
My mother looked at them and flipped them over. She couldn’t make sense of what they were possibly for. “What are they?”
“They’re wristbands. They’re for your wrists. You wear them.”
“Risk bans? What for? Are they like gloves?”
“I don’t know … but can I have them?”
“No, you can’t. No risk bans.”
I didn’t ask why. I knew that my parents calculated the family’s monthly budget weekly, if not daily. I pictured my father at the kitchen table. Bills in one pile, pencil and notebook in another. We had recently stopped taking hand-me-downs from our sponsors—a proud day for my parents. While rebuilding their lives, they were piecing together their pride, the blocks of their self-esteem mortared together with self-sufficiency and independence. We didn’t need free clothes anymore, and even if we didn’t wear the finest clothing, the clothes that we did wear we bought for ourselves.
There was no extra money for the wristbands. I didn’t even know what wristbands were used for, but I knew exactly what I would use them for: to look like Ethan Alder. And being more like him meant being less like myself. But we went home with new socks and no wristbands.
That evening, I closed my bedroom door behind me as my brother watched television in the living room and my mother made dinner. Scissors in hand, I rummaged through my drawers and pulled out a pair of new athletic tube socks, pearly white, with striped scarlet bands at the top.
I flipped them inside out and saw that their fuzzy interior looked like loops of terry cloth. The scissors clacked the elastic tube tops from the footlets. If the boy couldn’t have wristbands, then the boy would make wristbands out of athletic tube socks with scissors. See ya later, socks. Hello, wristbands.
I tucked my wristbands into my backpack, ready for their runway debut.
That Monday morning, amid the bustle and rustle of backpacks and lunchboxes, the squeaks of chairs and flip-up desktops, I reached into my backpack and slipped on my wristbands (aka my decapitated tube socks turned inside out). They looked exactly like Ethan Alder’s. I eyed his Björn Borgs from across the room as he gesticulated wildly about something cool. I looked just like him now. It was a proud new day.
I played it cool, not drawing attention to myself, but looking around to see if anyone noticed my new accessories. Craig looked at them but didn’t say anything. I didn’t see this as a setback, because Craig didn’t notice a lot of things—he was still sneaking paste under his desk and eating it, which he had been doing since kindergarten.
As we lined up for the first recess of the day, I positioned myself behind Ethan. No one had said anything all morning, and I realized that I was going to have to seize the day because the day was passing by without any acknowledgment.
“Hey, Ethan. Look.” I held up my wrists. “Wristbands.” I said it just in case it wasn’t obvious to him that he and I were the same.
He eyed my wristbands suspiciously. “Those aren’t wristbands. What are those?”
Grace Hazelwood, who stood behind me, butted into the conversation. “Are those socks? They are socks!” She and Ethan giggled as the recess line processed outside. “THOSE ARE SOCKS! Oh my God, Phuc is wearing socks on his wrists!”
As soon as we got outside, I distanced myself from them even as I heard them sniggering on their way to the wallball area. My mind began a furious debate. Should I take them off? I wondered. Leave them on? Give them the satisfaction of humiliating me or persevere? I decided that I would show them. The wristbands stayed on.
I kept the dismembered socks on all day, enduring taunts until the novelty of it wore off. Craig, in true-friend fashion, said nothing. That was the extent of his friendship—not participating in sock-mocking, a neutrality that was good enough for me.
After school, Lou and I played outside until my parents called us in for dinner by yelling out the window for us as they always did. We bolted in and up the stairs, sliding across our chairs to bowls of rice and stir-fried vegetables. A heap of rice was half in my mouth when my mother noticed my wristbands. I had forgotten to take them off.
“What are those? I didn’t buy risk bans. Whose are those? Did you cut your socks up? DID YOU CUT UP PERFECTLY GOOD SOCKS?!” My mother kept yelling as she pulled me from my seat to confirm her suspicions, but my father didn’t wait for the results of her inspection. The mere accusation that I had cut up brand-new socks was enough for him, and his hand struck my rear with several sharp blows. My mother provided the blistering soundtrack to my father’s assault as I ran off to my room, mid-dinner. “We just spent money on those socks—brand-new socks!—and now you cut them up? Are you a fool? Do you think we’re making so much money that you can do that? Why don’t you just throw money away?!”
No more risk bans. No more scissors. Lesson learned: humiliated at school, beaten at home. The wristbands had not been worth the risk.
My father’s rage would erupt in primal and unpredictable ways. Our spankings (beatings, in fact) were regular and, as I later realized, vicious. It was not until my adulthood that I understood his abusive behavior. As an adult, I can explain and even understand where his anger came from (PTSD as a refugee, his own abuse as a child, the cycle of abuse that can perpetuate itself in a culture that equated obedient children with great parenting). As a second grader, I knew this violence as my only reality. If I spilled something, disobeyed, did something too quickly or too slowly. The violence that pelted me bore no morality or judgment, amassing like storm clouds that darkened the sky only to disperse in vapors. My mother would warn me, “Wait until your father gets home,” and I would go into my room so I could put on two pairs of underwear in preparation, in the hopes that two pairs of my favorite Spider-Man Underoos would deflect the blows and deafen the bellows.
But did my uncouth behavior merit beatings? I was a sassy, mouthy, overly energetic kid, always on the go, always talking. My report cards regularly said: “Talks too much.” Infractions of all sorts precipitated a variety of punishments. Sometimes it was a slap on the ass, sometimes it was the ol’ kneeling-in-a-corner-on-uncooked-rice, and other times it was being beaten by whatever my parents could get their hands on. Brutality bore ingenuity.
That fall of second grade, however, I received a beating that eclipsed all others, so savage that I don’t remember what it was for. I could make something up, but to what end? Would the cause matter or somehow justify it?
My father had started using a metal rod that he brought home from the tire factory. He couldn’t hit me as hard with his hand anymore (the manual spankings had stopped hurting me), and even a wooden spoon did not inflict enough pain: hence, the metal rod, dark gray and about the length of a yardstick, pitted with bits of ruddy corrosion. The rod was a piece of machinery that had been thrown away, and my father, eyeing it in the scrap heap, immediately saw its domestic potential. The rod was more efficient because it hurt more. And as a result, it required less effort while achieving maximum results. American efficiency, meet Vietnamese ingenuity. With the metal rod, two or three cracks across our buttocks or the back of our thighs sufficed. Message received, loud and clear.
In that particular incident, however, I was beaten with the rod across the rear end and legs with a dozen or so blows. I remember crying into the floral velour pattern of our brown couch and hearing my father counting off the blows. (He counted upward from one, so I never knew when he would stop.) Một. Hai. Ba. Bốn. Năm. Sáu. Bảy. Tám. Chín. Mười. Ten. I lost count after mười.
What I also remember vividly was that I was not able to sit down the next day. I could barely move my legs to get dressed the next morning, my hamstrings and butt were so ravaged. My aching thighs carried me to school slowly, and the neighborhood kids ran ahead while I trudged along, falling behind.
In class, when the Pledge of Allegiance ended, we pulled out our chairs to begin our schoolwork. The chairs and chair backs were hard plywood riveted to gray steel legs. Everyone assumed their positions, but I couldn’t bear the touch of the seat on my rear, so I stood at my desk, leaning over my worksheet.
“Phuc, you need to sit,” Mrs. Boose directed.
“Okay,” I said as I put my feet on my chair and crouched with my butt hovering over the seat.
She walked around the room to check our spelling worksheets, circling back to my cluster of desks, and she saw me squatting in my chair. “You need to sit down,” she said.
“I know, I’m sorry, Mrs. Boose.” She walked away to another group of kids as I sat crossed-legged on my shins with my feet underneath me, but that still hurt too much.
I was still hovering on my knees, shifting from leg to leg, fidgeting. Mrs. Boose came back to my desk. “Phuc, do you need to go to Mr. Van Zandt’s office?”
“No, Mrs. Boose. I’ll try to sit. I’m sorry.” I pretended to sit, floating over my seat, putting my weight on my forearms. My seat might as well have been a bed of nails given the way it needled my backside. The squat made my thighs burn, so I stood again. Mrs. Boose saw me and her thin lips quivered. Her voice had a tautness, trebled with aggravation.
“Okay, Phuc. You need to come up here and see me right now at my desk.” I stood straight and pushed my chair in before limping toward the front of the room. The kids at my desk group had stopped their writing exercises and watched me walking toward Mrs. Boose. She smelled like old Christmas candy and sweat. My face smoldered flush and hot. I dreaded getting sent to the principal’s office because my parents would find out and then there would be another beating. Or even worse: What if I got paddled at Mr. Van Zandt’s office? I could barely walk as it was. And I would get spanked at home again. The thought of my father thrashing my already swollen backside was unbearable. I had been beaten as much as I could physically bear, and the prospect that I might get paddled, beaten, or spanked again cracked the fragile shell of my composure. When I was within arm’s reach of her, Mrs. Boose sat in her chair and swiveled it so that we were square to each other.
“Phuc, why are you disobeying me? Why are you refusing to sit in your seat? I think you’re going to need to go to Mr. Van Zandt’s office.”
My face burned even hotter, and I disintegrated. My pain, humiliation, and fear of further reprisal ruptured, exploding into sobs of agony and trepidation. I found myself weeping in the front of the classroom, telling Mrs. Boose why I couldn’t sit, leaning forward and hiding my wet face in her stale hair. I blocked out my classmates while I cried, locking my attention on Mrs. Boose and the immediate consequences. I told her that my father had beaten me the night before and that my legs and back were too sore to sit. I told her about the metal rod. I blew my nose and wiped my face on my sleeve.
She listened intently, her face softened, and she leaned forward. “Go back to your seat and do the best you can. Thanks for telling me about what was hurting you.”
I walked back to my desk, holding my eyes fast to the floor, stinging from the degradation of crying in front of my classmates. But I just wanted things to go back to normal, so I busied myself with my worksheet. The rest of the day was a blur while I stood at my desk awkwardly for the remainder of school, trying to focus and pretending that my class hadn’t witnessed me sobbing. Recess was painful, as was the walk home.
It turned out that sticks and stones did hurt. So did words and metal rods. Everything hurt.
That night, my parents answered a phone call from Mrs. Boose. She wanted to visit us at home and talk to them.
I fretted over the intent and outcome of her visit, uncertain about what she might say or do. My father ruled our household with an iron rod. This was how he compelled order, discipline, compliance. In my childish logic, if my mother were stronger than my father, her will would have been the way of our home. If I were stronger than my father, I could have imposed my will upon him just as I physically prevailed upon my little brother with farts on his head, punches in the arm, shoves and noogies.
Might made right under our roof, and Mrs. Boose would not be able to assert herself physically. No good would come of her visit for me—I was sure of that. I anticipated a beating immediately after her visit since my father instantly asked me why she was coming over and if I had misbehaved at school. I told him that I didn’t know and neglected to tell him about my confession to her.
The next day, after school, Mrs. Boose’s yellow Mercury pulled into the parking lot of our apartment complex. I had been watching for it all afternoon since I had gotten home. In her mustard overcoat and a flowered scarf, she swayed back and forth, scanning for our apartment number before she headed toward our front door. She did not walk like a woman who was ready for a fight. She dressed as she did for school: wearing polyester floral, gold necklaces, helmet hair, and rogue lipstick that went a little farther than her lips actually were.
The doorbell rang, and my brother and I sat while my parents let her in. “Thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time, Mr. and Mrs. Tran. I won’t be long.” They offered her water or tea, which she declined. “It’s nice to see you. Phuc, would you and your brother wait in your bedroom?”
Sequestered from the adults, Lou pushed a Matchbox car around on the carpet, but I didn’t want to play with our toys. Huddled against the door, I parsed the muted murmuring of their adultspeak, noting the change in tone of different speakers. I didn’t hear my mother and presumed that she yielded her minutes to my father. No yelling. No fighting. I didn’t hear any sign of a match of physical strength. My father did not wield the iron rod, and their talk seemed to end amicably.
After several minutes, our bedroom door opened, and my brother and I came out to say goodbye to Mrs. Boose. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Phuc. Thank you for your time, Mr. and Mrs. Tran.” She lumbered out and into her car, leaving a faint smell of her candied perfume in the room. Her arrival and departure felt even more mysterious because of its calm.
I didn’t want to ask but was unable to quell my interest. “What did Mrs. Boose talk with you about?” I interrupted my parents Vietnamesing with each other quietly. “Am I in trouble?” I anticipated another spanking.
“No, you’re not in trouble,” my father intoned flatly.
I was amazed to hear his reply. “So why was Mrs. Boose here?”
“She said that she learned that I was spanking you a lot. She said that you couldn’t sit at school because your legs hurt so much. Mrs. Boose said that here, in America, parents can’t hit their kids as much as they do in Việt Nam.” He didn’t go so far as to say that he wouldn’t spank me.
I was surprised to hear Mrs. Boose’s message to my parents, particularly since Mr. Van Zandt, our principal, paddled kids in his office all the time (and by paddling I mean beating kids with a wooden oar). What was the distinction between beating kids with a wooden oar and beating kids with a metal rod?
More frightened than relieved, I reiterated. “So I’m not in trouble?”
“No, you’re not.”
I nodded and went back to my room, unsure of what the ramifications of Mrs. Boose’s intervention were. I didn’t dare to hope for the beatings to cease—I had already hoped for that before, only to be sorely disappointed. I assumed that the worst outcome would be that nothing would change. That was the wildest hope that I allowed to flutter free in my mind: that things would stay the same.
But they didn’t.
My father didn’t beat me that week. Nor the next week. And he didn’t beat me for the rest of that school year. It was a long reprieve for me, and I was thankful for it. Thankful for Mrs. Boose and for her words.
Maybe words were powerful—maybe even magical.
Derek hadn’t called me a gook since we’d gotten into the fistfight, but I was still the bull’s-eye of his schoolyard taunts. During recess, when we were free to fly, I escaped his focus, running as far and as fast as my X-wing legs carried me.
I was most exposed and vulnerable when we lined up for the beginning and end of recess, and in the line, I couldn’t put enough distance between myself and Derek and his coffle of lunkheads.
One day Derek slithered up, two kids behind me. Caught in the line, I was trapped, wriggling and writhing, gasping to get away. “Hey, Phuc! Why is your nose so flat? Did you guys ever notice how flat his nose is?” Laughter. Humiliation. Words still hurt me, but at least he didn’t call me a gook.
Even Craig was laughing, my Chewbacca. There’s betrayal, and there’s the stinging betrayal by your loyal Wookiee friend.
Karen Larkin, who had never participated in any taunting, was next to Derek and jumped in, too. I didn’t blame her. The train of second-grade taunts was always on the express route, and if you didn’t get on board, you got run over. “Yeah, why is your nose so flat?”
Immediately I fired back. “Oh, when I was a baby, I got run over by a bus in Việt Nam, and then—SQUISH—my nose got flattened!”
Karen’s eyes saucered wide. “WHAT?!”
“Yup. A bus went right over my nose—just like this!” I smacked my hand against my face hard, mimicking Curly from The Three Stooges. And then the laughter pivoted. Grace was laughing with me. Craig laughed, too. My joke was the proverbial and metaphorical bus under which I had thrown myself. Just for emphasis, I had hit my own face for laughs, a gesture of things to come. At least everyone was laughing with me, and I didn’t have to punch anyone. I preferred laughter with me more than at me. That was the power of prepositions.
As the line processed inside, Derek hissed from behind me. “You’re still a gook. I don’t care what you say. Still. A. Gook.”
And he was right. I couldn’t change his mind about that. I wielded no control over how he saw me. I would always be a gook to him.
That I couldn’t take off. G was my scarlet letter.
The first week of November, as the Halloween skulls, hissing cats, and green-warted witches came down from the walls of the classroom, Mrs. Boose announced the Thanksgiving writing contest. The school-wide competition was to write and illustrate a sentence about what you were thankful for, and each grade would have one winner chosen.
The five winners would get to have lunch with Mr. Van Zandt, and the lunch was no ordinary lunch. Mr. Van Zandt took all the kids—in his own car—through the McDonald’s drive-through for Happy Meals, and then they all returned to Mr. Van Zandt’s office to eat their Happy Meals. This was an annual tradition, and we all knew other kids who had won and come back to tell the tale from the luncheon. The fabled Golden Arches. Hot french fries. A milkshake. For those of us whose parents seldom bought fast food, the McDonald’s prize luncheon for the Thanksgiving contest was the gold standard of prizes.
On contest day, Mrs. Boose handed out beige composition paper. She was sweatier than usual as she circled the room, squawking out the instructions. “Okay, class—please write a sentence and draw a picture of what you are thankful for. Remember: the teachers will be getting together to look at all the drawings and will pick one winner from each grade. And as you remember, the winner will be having a McDonald’s lunch with Mr. Van Zandt.”
The class scribbled furiously for what felt like an hour. I spied elaborate compositions. Flourishes of loop-the-loop clouds, saltbox houses with lemon-yellow suns shining down. At the end of the allotted time, Mrs. Boose collected our papers and tacked them to the bulletin board at the front of the room. I handed in my drawing, and as I looked at my classmates’ illustrations, I realized I had drawn the wrong thing. My classmates’ pictures were idyllic and joyous: they were thankful for new puppies or a trip to Disney or skiing at Roundtop Mountain. My drawing did not herald any of this. As I looked at their gratitude for magic kingdoms, ski slopes, and puppies, I knew then that I had misunderstood the assignment. I hadn’t drawn a vacation or a spectacular gift. I had drawn something so basic, so simple, and I knew that I stood no chance of winning.
After school, I didn’t mention the contest or the drawing—I didn’t bother my parents with it. Who cared about a second-grade Thanksgiving writing contest? It was 1980, and the Trần family was bustling and bursting with the arrival of my father’s parents, his youngest sister, and younger brother in Carlisle.
The four of them—my paternal grandparents, Ông Bà Nội; Cô Bảy; and Chú Năm—had been left behind in Sài Gòn in 1975.* My grandfather, Ông Nội, planned their escape, and in 1978 he put their plan into motion. They acquired falsified documents which said that they were Chinese nationals. My uncle Chú Năm had secretly installed a tractor engine onto a local river barge, and under cover of night, they stole the barge and chugged away from Sài Gòn across the Gulf of Thailand. My teenage aunt was disguised as a boy to avoid being raped in the event that they were boarded by pirates. Several days later they arrived in Malaysia and bribed local officials with ten gold bullions, and in Malaysia they languished at a refugee camp for six months while they tried to contact my father. They finally arrived in America in January 1979. Photographers met them at the Harrisburg airport. A grainy black-and-white photo appeared in the local Carlisle paper along with a story about their harrowing months-long odyssey. The front-page article read “Boat People Find Refuge in Carlisle.” The arrival of more Trầns was headline news for our drowsy town.
My parents rented for Ông Bà Nội a vacant apartment across the parking lot in Colonial Square. My aunt Cô Bảy was enrolled in the high school immediately, for her a bewildering reentry into a routine that should have been banal. They had so much to learn about Carlisle, about America, about their new life. My parents didn’t have time to pay attention to Lou, me, or Mooreland Elementary School’s Thanksgiving writing contest—not when they were helping my grandparents adjust to their new life in Carlisle. Even I forgot about the writing contest.
Two weeks later Mr. Van Zandt came on the loudspeaker to announce the winners of the Thanksgiving contest. I heard clapping from the other classrooms as winners were announced. Oh right—the contest. The one that I had gotten wrong because I didn’t write about puppies or ski vacations. I looked over at Grace, haloed with her radiant blond hair and rosy elven features, and assumed that she would win. She had written about a Florida vacation that she and her grandparents had taken: snorkeling, stingrays, sun-bleached sands.
“… And from the second grade, Phuc Tran.”
I was stunned. Hello, Happy Meal and an awkward lunch with Mr. Van Zandt.
Before I left school that afternoon, I strode down the hall by the library where all the drawings adorned the walls. I scanned the patchwork assemblage of art to look for the yellow winner ribbon pinned to the lower right corner of my drawing. I gazed upon my scribbly masterpiece that had won me a Happy Meal.
My drawing was of a rudimentary airplane, and below it were my grandparents, my aunt, and uncle as stick figures, limbs akimbo, dots for eyes. My sentence was scrawled in block letters under the picture. “I AM THANKFUL THAT MY GRANDPARENTS ARE SAFE IN AMERICA.”
To me, it was the most obvious thing that I could have been thankful for. My grandparents—who spoke no English, who had fled Việt Nam on a stolen boat—had bested my classmates’ new puppies and Disney World vacations and ski weekends.
I hadn’t misinterpreted the assignment. It was my words that got me a Happy Meal. Words were powerful. They could destroy you, and they could save you, too. And maybe earn you a hot Happy Meal—thankfully.