BARLING WAS A LOW-INCOME AREA, BUT IT HAPPENED to fall within the school district of an upscale junior high school called Chaffin. Chaffin drew most of its students from the more affluent areas on the south side of Fort Smith; so when I began seventh grade in the fall of 1988, I found myself in a situation I had never experienced before: I was a poor kid surrounded by rich people—at least compared to me.
By the time I started, Jenny, Bruce, Yen, and Nikki had graduated from Chaffin and moved on to high school; only my brother Thai was still there, in ninth grade. At Chaffin there were very few minorities, which made everyone in my family feel glaringly conspicuous. There were only a handful of blacks, and the only fellow Asians we could find were two Vietnamese sisters and two Laotian brothers who all spoke fluent English, which made it easier for them to relate to the American students than to us.
What made us feel most conspicuous was our relative poverty. My brothers and sisters and I were part of a program that provided free lunches to students who otherwise could not afford them. Every Monday morning we had to go into the cafeteria kitchen to get a meal card for the week, and each time we received a free lunch, the card was punched for that day. We were grateful for the food, but it was humiliating to have to walk up to the cashier and pull out our little punch cards when everyone else was paying for their lunches with cash. When my older siblings were at Chaffin, my mother was doing laundry one Saturday and she found meal cards in their pockets that had been punched only once or twice that week. My father scolded them for skipping lunch and foolishly passing up free food, but coming from his background, he had no way to understand the shame they felt.
To the casual observer, we probably stood out most in the way we dressed because in junior high the label on your clothing was enough to determine whether you were in style or not. Our clothing didn’t even have labels; my mother bought most of our clothes at flea markets, and she never passed up a bargain. She once found T-shirts for my brothers that were very reasonably priced due to a minor flaw—the enormous number “2” emblazoned across the chest had been accidentally printed backward. She bought shoes for my sisters that cost four dollars a pair, and the other girls used to giggle and say, “Oh, look at your shoes!” I know how my sisters felt because my classmates were all wearing Nike Airs while I was wearing Winner’s Choice tennis shoes from Walmart.
My father probably had a coupon.
My mother always bought our clothing two sizes too large so we could grow into them. Bruce had a pair of jeans like that. Every year as he grew taller, my mother let down the hems another inch, and by the time he wore the jeans out, there were three lines on each leg that told the age of his pants like the rings of a tree. But Bruce was clever, and he knew how to improvise. He had a secondhand shirt with a little penguin on the front, and it was the only shirt with a logo that he had ever owned. When the shirt finally wore out, he just cut the penguin off and had my mother sew it onto a different shirt.
I wasn’t as creative as Bruce, but I was resourceful. When wealthier kids left unwanted clothing in the locker rooms, the items were put in a lost and found, and if no one claimed them after a certain period of time, anyone was allowed to take them—which I did. I once found a very nice girl’s jacket that I took home for Yen, and she wore it all the way through college and into her career.
That was my advantage: I had no shame. It wasn’t because I was so confident. I just couldn’t have cared less about clothing, and I couldn’t understand why anyone else would. Clothing was communal in my family. With eight boys it just was not practical for each brother to own his own clothes. When my mother took laundry out of the dryer, she just dumped it all in baskets according to category: all shirts went in one basket, all shorts in another, and all socks in a third. When my brothers and I got dressed each morning, it was first come, first served; we just grabbed a pair of shorts, found a shirt roughly our size, and picked two socks that sometimes even matched. We never fought over clothing, and none of us could ever claim, “That belongs to me!” Style was irrelevant, and the idea of trying to match colors or patterns never crossed our minds. The only thing that mattered to us was that it fit, and “fit” was only approximate. The first one to dress each morning got to be comfortable that day, and the last one to dress learned the virtue of rising early.
When clothing is handed down from brother to brother, it gets a lot of wear and tear, and my mother patched ours so many times that sometimes it seemed as if the original article of clothing had disintegrated, leaving us wearing a quilt worked of patches. And the patches didn’t always match the clothing. For my mother, the only consideration was durability, and if “durable” happened to come in a different color or pattern, that was what we wore.
Sometimes my mother allowed me to buy my own clothing. When I was in seventh grade, she once took me to a clothing store that was going out of business, and I picked out some shorts that were extremely affordable. The next morning at the bus stop, one of my friends asked, “Vinh, why are you wearing boxers?” I had to ask him what boxers were; and even after he told me, I didn’t care. They were the most comfortable shorts I had ever worn.
Chaffin was not only our first exposure to comparative wealth; it was our first experience of real hostility due to our ethnic background. Surprisingly, the greatest animosity didn’t come from the wealthier students at Chaffin—it came from the poorer students who lived around us in Barling. There were kids in our neighborhood that cursed at us, made “slanty eyes,” and told us to go back where we came from. A couple of kids once even chased us with an axe. Sometimes when we answered the phone, a deep voice would say, “Let me come over there and kick your butts with my patriotic boots,” and then hang up. During a Sunday service at our Vietnamese church, someone spray painted Go home gooks on the church van, and there was nothing we could do but wash it off and turn the other cheek.
Then I began to learn a better way to deal with hostility. Thai and I had to walk about a mile and a half to our bus stop each morning, and the shortest path took us through the middle of a trashy trailer park, where unshaven men in grease-stained undershirts used to sit on their front stoops and glare at us as we walked by. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a very large, angry-looking man staring at us; and just as we were about to pass his trailer, he got up from his lawn chair and opened his mouth to shout something—but before he could get a word out, I turned to him, flashed a big smile, and said, “Hi! How are you doing?”
He sat down again without ever saying a word.
I didn’t say hi to be friendly to the man. I said it to prevent him from being unfriendly to me. I was launching a preemptive strike, and I was using a weapon I was just beginning to develop—words. Ever since arriving in America, I had felt powerless and out of control because of my inability to speak English. I got in trouble for saying the wrong thing and never knew the right thing to say to get out of it. Most of the people in Fort Smith and Barling were kind and gracious to my family, but hostility could erupt at any moment, and there was no way to predict the time or place. It was like living with a jack-in-the-box; most of the time there was pleasant music, but at any moment the lid could fly open and an ugly clown could pop out. We lived with a constant sense of nervous anticipation, a feeling that something could go wrong at any moment and that we were never quite in control. But I was beginning to understand how to control a situation with words. I was learning that if I said the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, I finally could be in control.
The hostility we encountered from poor students at Chaffin was blunt and direct, but with the wealthier students it took a subtler form; to them we were invisible. We tried to be as friendly as we could to everyone, but every time we smiled or said hello to people as we passed them in the hallway, they just looked the other way. We were just too different, and at that age everyone was too concerned about being cool to associate with the ragtag refugees. We felt isolated and ignored, and it just wasn’t fair.
It’s not fair might be the most common thought that ever crosses a refugee’s mind. The political climate in his country forces him to leave the land of his birth; that’s not fair. He doesn’t get to choose the city he will move to or sometimes even the nation; that’s not fair. He can’t get a decent job, regardless of his talents, because he doesn’t have a diploma from a school he could never attend; that’s not fair. He can’t learn the language any faster, he can’t change the color of his skin, and he can’t help it if his nation was formerly at war with yours. None of it is fair, and in the refugee it creates a longing for justice.
I found justice at Chaffin, but it came in two unexpected ways.
My brother Thai was the closest to me in age, and we were competitive in everything we did. Because he was two years older than me, he was better at everything. He was bigger, stronger, quicker, more popular—he even ate faster than I did, and in my family that was a big advantage. There was only one thing I could beat him at, and I discovered it in first grade. He was in third grade at the time, and one day when he was doing his arithmetic homework, he was reading the problems out loud, and I kept calling out the answers before he could write them down. I was thrilled to discover that I could finally beat my older brother at something, but I was even more thrilled that I had discovered something that actually came easily for me—math.
There is a well-known stereotype that Asians always excel at mathematics, and like most stereotypes, it isn’t true. Some Asians excel at math, and some do not. There is nothing in Asian DNA that produces accelerated mathematical ability, but there is something in the refugee experience that draws us to mathematics: our frustration with the English language.
For someone who grows up speaking Vietnamese or Cháo zhōu, learning English involves far more than just memorizing a new vocabulary; it requires a completely different way of thinking. The grammar is different, the syntax is different, and the English language contains thousands of bewildering exceptions and rules that make no logical sense at all. Why is there a w in the word answer? Why doesn’t the word enough end with an f? Why do the words flammable and inflammable mean the same thing?
But mathematics is a language of its own. A number is a noun, and an equal sign is a verb, and if you know what those terms mean, you speak the language. The language of mathematics is a foreign language to everyone at first, so someone who speaks English has no advantage over someone who speaks Vietnamese. Even more important, it’s a language everyone begins to learn at the same time. When I started first grade, everyone else in my class had five years’ more experience with the English language than I did, which put them years ahead of me in every subject that required a knowledge of English. But the day we started to learn arithmetic, we were all beginners, and that meant there was finally a subject I could compete in.
By the time I was in eighth grade, I was a member of our school’s math team that won a statewide contest; in ninth grade I won the Arkansas state algebra competition as an individual—but at the same time that I was winning math contests, my verbal test scores ranked me in the 24th percentile. No wonder I found math so appealing.
But what really made mathematics attractive to me was it appealed to my desire for justice. Math had clearly stated rules. If you kept the rules, you were rewarded, and if you broke the rules, you were penalized. There were right answers and wrong answers, and they had nothing to do with the color of your skin or where you happened to be born. To me, math was an island of justice in an unjust world, and it gave me a way to finally stand out.
And then there was football. I signed up for football by accident. I thought I was just signing up for athletics, whatever that was, but when I showed up for the first practice in seventh grade, they started handing out shoulder pads and helmets, and I was scared. I had no idea what was going on. I wanted to run track, not run into someone else. My older brothers never played football, so there was no one to teach me about the game or even what equipment I would need to get started. At the first practice, I saw that everyone else had cleats, but all I had was a pair of Bruce’s old Avias that I had touched up with a white shoe marker, and the soles had been worn so bald, they had no traction at all. I didn’t own a cup either. I didn’t even know what a cup was, and no one bothered to tell me. It was two years before I found out, and I learned the hard way when I tried to hurdle an offensive lineman and he stood up unexpectedly. I went directly to Walmart after the game, and I didn’t care whether I had a coupon or not.
There was something about football that I found liberating. Ever since I had come to America, I had been biting my tongue and avoiding confrontation, and when I was finally given the chance to run over someone, I felt as if I were tapping into something I never had been able to use before. My entire life had been about restraint, and football was all about release. I was actually allowed to hit someone as hard as I possibly could, and it was completely legal and ethical—even my church approved.
In the classroom I was all meekness and restraint, but on the football field I was all energy and passion. I was fearless—I honestly believed I was invulnerable and that there wasn’t anyone that I couldn’t run over. Before long, there wasn’t. I got stronger and faster all the time, and by eighth grade I was playing on the ninth-grade team.
As strange as it sounds, I loved football for the same reason I loved mathematics: justice. Football took place on a level playing field. It didn’t matter where I was from or that I spoke with an accent, and it didn’t matter what part of town I lived in or what my father did for a living. What I put into the game, I got back. If I worked hard, I was rewarded, and if I worked harder than the guy lined up across from me, I walked back to the huddle while he picked himself up off the ground.
My mother and father had doubts about my playing football because they were afraid I might get injured, but my brother Bruce thought it was terrific. He even took me to the mall and bought me a thirty-dollar pair of Nike Sharks, the cheapest pair of cleats in the store. My brother was proud of me, and for the first time in my life, I was proud of myself—and it felt very, very good.