Today is the third class in your current four-class set. We will discuss our reading. Our reading is about taking the same vacation every year. Our listening material is a Story Corps story. I will introduce some phrases.
Click HERE for the reading
Lan Cao (LC): There was so much fighting very near our house. You could hear automatic gunfire, the sky would be lit up with explosions at night. And then my grandfather was a landlord and was captured by the Viet Cong. They killed him and my father found that my grandfather had been beheaded, and they had put his head onto the body of a pig.
Harlan Van Cao (HVC): What do you remember about the day you left Vietnam?
LC: My parents told me that I’m just going on a short trip with Papa Fritz. He’s sort of like a second dad for me. And he was gonna take me to Connecticut to be with his family for maybe a few weeks. So, so I packed up my stamp collection and some books and that was it.
HVC: What was something you really wanted to bring but you couldn’t?
LC: I wanted to bring my dog, Topaz, he was a German shepherd. But they killed the dog.
HVC: Why?
LC: I don’t know why, they killed the dog.
HVC: Was it hard for you to adapt to your surroundings when you arrived?
LC: Well, I would watch the American nightly news and see that each city was falling. That was when I realized that, oh my God, I’m not going back to Vietnam, and I’m going to be stuck living in this country without my parents. I was only 13. So, that was when I began to seriously learn English. And I started going to the library, reading books, taping shows on a cassette tape and then putting it under the pillow and playing it overnight so that I would just absorb the language. You know, life is like a lotus flower. The lotus flower lives in mud and is open and blooms. If you come as a refugee with nothing, no matter what trauma you went through during the war, no matter what you have lost, you have to have the mental toughness to start over and to succeed. That’s what I’m most proud of: that I did not collapse and I’m able to pass that on to you.