I was born a disabled boy in a poor and crowded family in Vietnam.
More sadly, I was also born to hastily grow up in the circumstances of
one of the most bloody and merciless civil wars in the twentieth
century, a “century of sorrow.”
Not surprisingly, my sensitive and tender childhood was fitfully
obsessed by fears of the war. However, this was just the tip of the
iceberg. Indeed, the war robbed me of precious, necessary innocence and
of an ordinary peace of mind as well. Like an invisible shroud of fate,
the war certainly wrapped up my first years under the sun. I saw the
pitifully maimed corpses, the almost constant anxiety reflected on my
parents’ faces, and heard the frightening war-related news and rumors
circulated daily around my hometown and sometimes at the dinner table of
the family. Sometimes at night when there would be an air raid my
mother would wake me up and urge me to quickly run out of the house . We
would hide in our sandbag-built shelter in the yard. Then, the
following morning I went to school and heard similar stories from my
classmates. From such situations I was soon mature enough to realize
that to live was the most important concern and that everything else,
from fairytales to dreams, gradually faded into nearly lost luxuries.
Ironically, the sudden end of the war brought about only successive
tragedies. My father was thrown into the forced-labor camps in remote
northern regions. My eldest sister was so hopeless that she managed to
escape from Vietnam. My persistent, courageous mother extraordinarily
struggled to support our remaining family with ten children. By that
time I was not yet thirteen years old.
Peace was, in my case, worse than the war. I could not study at any
college or university after I graduated from high school. I was
academically eligible but not politically qualified to study more. After
all, the Communist regime had already classified my family as
politically backward second class, the untouchables of a modern caste
system.
Ten year later, my father was free but already physically and mentally
withered. Soon I was accepted to study at a university after I had
passed a difficult entrance examination. My joy was, however,
short-lived. After the first month at the university, I bitterly came to
realize that it has been reduced almost to a rudely propagandizing
apparatus of the repressive regime. There knowledge and general truths
were readily distorted and manipulated to turn out the politically loyal
yet partly soulless cadres rather than the useful and motivated
persons. For instance, my major was English but, in practice, I had to
learn a heavily politicalized English language and only
Communism-related courses. I never had any chance to study courses
necessary to general education, such as the arts, humanities and social
sciences.
I managed to protect my mind and heart from all the ideological efforts
of the regime. Somehow, like a totally closed oasis, I became mentally
poorer, lonelier and rustier while waves of information and of
democratic spirit continued to wash over the outside world. After my
graduation I could not land any job due to the political “stain” on the
past of my father. During this period of confidence disorientation, I
wrote a couple of coded stories criticizing social inequalities and also
began to dream of Abraham Lincoln and of the Statue of Liberty beyond
the Pacific Ocean.
My family immigrated into the United States in 1992. Like the other
immigrants to America, we have started our new lives with a lot of hope
and optimism. Moreover, I have tried to forget my sorrow-laden past life
in Vietnam, a very poor and unlucky land which I will always love so
much. Nevertheless, I understand that I should live for the present and
the future in America, my second country. Obviously, to forget a part of
my life is far from easy. Like rediscovered tears, the past sometimes
sneaks on me in sleep.
At present, I have been diligently studying required courses of
business, my major, and, at the same time, interestedly filling big
holes in my knowledge. No wonder, the bitter experiences in the past
have helped me find the right path to follow in the present. I have
become a voluntary tutor in Math and English, especially for those
students whose first language is not English, such as the Vietnamese,
Mexican, Koreans and so on. Wonderfully, they also help me realize many
things through my listening to their stories . The first thing is that
our global village is not really as happy as some of us have thought.
Secondly, my story of past life is not an extreme one as long as there
are still poverty, war and ignorance.
For me, the American Dream is a good education. Once the dream comes
true, it will enable me to achieve something more positive in the
remaining productive years of my life. Your university is the next place
where I want to continue growing toward that lifelong dream.
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