EDUCATION | Driving tomorrow’s achievements
13 February 2008
The Good Immigrant Student
By Bich Minh Nguyen
The author's family left Saigon on April 29, 1975, when she was eight months old. After staying in refugee camps in the Philippines, Guam, and Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, they settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This piece is excerpted from her book Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and her essay “The Good Immigrant Student.”
Nguyen is an assistant professor teaching creative writing and Asian American literature at Purdue University in Indiana. She is the author of the memoir Stealing Buddha's Dinner (Viking Penguin, 2007).
We arrived in Grand Rapids with five dollars and a knapsack of clothes. Mr. Heidenga, our sponsor, set us up with a rental house, some groceries -- boxed rice, egg noodles, cans of green beans -- and gave us dresses his daughters had outgrown. He hired my father to work a filling machine at North American Feather, one of his factories. Mr. Heidenga wore wide sport coats and had yellow hair. My sister and I were taught to say his name in a hushed tone to show respect. But if he stopped by to check on us my grandmother would tell us to be silent because that was part of being good. Hello girls, he would say, stooping to pat us on the head.
It was July 1975, but we were cold. Always cold, after Vietnam, and my uncle Chu Cuong rashly spent two family dollars on a jacket from the Salvation Army, earning my grandmother’s scorn. For there were seven of us in that gray house on Baldwin Street: my father, grandmother Noi, three uncles, and my sister and me. Upstairs belonged to the uncles, and downstairs my sister and I shared a room with Noi. My father did not know how to sleep through the night. He paced around the house, double-checking the lock on the front door; he glanced sideways out the taped-up windows, in case someone was watching from the street.
***
I came of age in the 1980s, before diversity and multicultural awareness trickled into west Michigan. Before ethnic was cool. Before Thai restaurants started popping up in every town. When I think of Grand Rapids I remember city signs covered in images of rippling flags, proclaiming “An All-American City.” Throughout the '80s a giant billboard looming over the downtown freeway boasted the slogan to all who drove the three-lane S-curve. As a kid, I couldn’t figure out what “All-American” was supposed to mean. Was it a promise, a threat, a warning?
***
When my father married Rosa, when I was three, she wanted my sister and me to take bilingual education classes. She believed not in total assimilation but in preservation; she was afraid English would take over wholly, pushing the Vietnamese out of our heads. She was right. My sister and I were Americanized as soon as we turned on the television.
I knew a lot of immigrant kids who tried to have it both ways: keep one language for home and family; use English at school, with friends, and anywhere out in the world. Somehow, I couldn’t manage that double life. I spent most of my school years trying to go unnoticed. Because I couldn’t disappear into a crowd, I wished to disappear completely. Anyone might have mistaken this for passivity.
Once, in second grade, I disappeared on the bus ride home. Mine was usually the third stop, but that day the bus driver thought I wasn’t there, and she sailed right by the corner of my street. I said nothing. The bus wove its way toward downtown, and I got to see where other children lived -- some of them in neat and clipped neighborhoods, others on streets where windows were boarded up. All the while, the kid sitting across the aisle from me played the same cheerful song over and over on his boom box. Pass the doochee from the left hand side, pass the doochee from the left hand side. He and his brother turned out to be the last kids off the bus. Then the driver saw me through the rearview mirror. She walked back to where I was sitting by myself and said, “How come you didn’t tell me you were here?” I shook my head -- don’t know. She sighed and drove me home.
Later, in high school, I learned to forget myself a little. I learned the sweetness of apathy, of forgetting my skin and body for a minute or two, almost not caring what would happen if I walked into a room late and heads swiveled toward me. I learned the pleasure that reveals itself in the loss, no matter how slight, of self-consciousness. These things occurred because I remained the good immigrant student, without raising my hand often or showing off what I knew. Doing work was rote, and I went along to get along. I never quite got over the terror of speaking up in class, but there is a slippage between being good and being unnoticed, and in that sliver of freedom I learned what it could feel like to walk in the world in plain view.
I would like to make a broad, accurate statement about immigrant children in schools. I would like to speak for them (us). I hesitate; I cannot. My own sister, for instance, was never as shy as I was -- she chose rebellion rather than silence. We had an arrangement: I wrote some papers for her and she paid me in money or candy; she gave me rides to school if I promised not to tell anyone about her cigarettes. At the same time, I think of an Indian friend of mine who told of how, in elementary school once, a blond classmate told the teacher, “I can’t sit by her. My mom said I can’t sit by anyone who’s brown.” And another friend, whose family immigrated around the same time mine did, whose second-grade teacher used her as a vocabulary example: “Children, this is what a foreigner is.” And sometimes I fall into thinking that kids today have the advantage of so much more collective cultural wisdom, that they are so much more socially and politically aware than anyone was when I was in school.
But I worry that I am wrong, that some kids will always want to disappear and disappear until they actually do. Sometimes I think I see them, in the blurry background of a magazine photo, or in a gaggle of kids following a teacher’s aide across the street. The kids with heads bent down, holding themselves in such a way that they seem to be conscious even of how they breathe. Small, shy, quiet -- such good, good kids, immigrant, foreigner, their eyes watchful and waiting for whatever judgment will occur. I reassure myself that they will grow up fine, that they will be okay, that things will work out for them as they somehow have for me. Maybe I cross the same street, then another, glancing back once in a while to see where they are going.
Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen. Reprinted from “The Good Immigrant Student,” by Bich Minh Nguyen, by permission of the author.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
