W. E. Heginbotham House

Transcription

(soft music) (applause) - Teachers are my first fans, and they're the reason I became a writer, and they're the reason I tell the stories I do. So it's really a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me. But I'm gonna begin with a reading, actually. Tame came to my house and we talked about what I'd be talking about, and this is not what I said I'd do, but I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do. (audience laughs) 'Cause, you know, there's tremendous power in holding a microphone in your hands. (audience laughs) So this is from my forthcoming book. It's called The Song Poet. It's gonna be out April of 2016 for Metropolitan Books. Our mother and father were talking about a Hmong woman they knew who was dating a white man. The white man and the Hmong woman had gotten into a fight and he had beaten her up, badly. Dao and I grew quiet in our talk and started focusing on theirs. Our father said that the Hmong woman should have never been with a white man in the first place. It was dangerous to cross cultures and to pit a Hmong woman's small fist against that of a much larger white man's. I thought the conversation was interesting. Dao did not. Dao's book closed. She slammed it against the carpet. I watched as she got up and moved toward my parents. She pointed a finger at our father's face. She said, "Racist." Our father slapped Dao. The sound of flesh on flesh hung in the air. The force of his hand turned her head. In the seconds that it took for Dao to turn her head back toward him, my mother was in between them. Our mother and father hardly ever resorted to physical punishment in our home. When it happened, it was restricted to the occasional rubber band across the butt. Usually only when one child has purposely done something hurtful to another, or something dangerous to themselves. After a series of verbal warnings, there was a process in our family. We gathered as witnesses, it was a conversation. A parent asked, "What part of you do you want the rubber band to hit? "Do you know why I'm using the rubber band? "Are you going to do that again?" This time there were no rules of engagement. Dao and I had stopped getting punished for our actions years ago. We were part of the adult world. We interpreted for our mother and father. We took care of the children. We had access to their bank accounts. We bought groceries. No one expected Dao to respond so fast to a conversation we were not part of. No one expected our father to respond so painfully to Dao's voice in our parents' talk. Before this point, education had always been a path full of light. The direct road to becoming doctors and lawyers. In the past, we shared things we had learned to our mother and father about Christopher Columbus and slavery. The civil war and affirmative action. It had all made sense, the American story that we were entering, the place we were in. Never before though, had the lessons in school penetrated so deeply and applied so emotionally in our home. The problem of education had entered our lives. No one had told us that education could change the way we felt about the world and the people in our lives, that it could give a person words to use and actions to take, not in support of the people who love us, but as a response to them. That education in America would make our father and our mother less educated in our eyes. Even then, I recognized my father's action for what it was. It wasn't an effort to discipline. It was an unmediated reflex, an instinctual response to Dao's finger in his face, her one word, and all that it implied. "You're ignorant, uneducated, and wrong." (applause) I came to America when I was six years old, July 27 1987. I'd never been to school before because I didn't qualify to go to school in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp where I was born. I couldn't do this, and I couldn't do this. And there were lots of kids and not enough seats so I wasn't in school. When we came to St. Paul, Minnesota we went to Battle Creek Elementary School to register, and a lady in a red reindeer sweater... I'll always remember because I'd never seen a reindeer before... (audience laughs) She set us across from her, and she said, "Say your ABCs." And I said A, B, and C. And she said, "Say your ABCs." And I said A, B, and C. That was all I knew. When Dao was tested, she said every color was yellow. And every English word ended with an S. I was placed into first grade and she was placed into the second grade. A week after we were enrolled at Battle Creek Elementary School we were kicked out. I was in the playground, I had a ball in my hands and I was bouncing it up and down. I had never owned a ball before, I had only seen it on TV. A bigger boy came and he pushed me down and he took the ball and all I remember is my older sister. One of her legs shorter than the other because she had polio in the camps. I saw her running toward me. And then I saw her push the boy down, and she wasn't even up to his chin but she was beating him up and yelling, "Why are you beating my sister? Why did you push her down? "Why did you do that?" The teachers came and they expelled us. They said that Battle Creek didn't have the teachers in place to teach kids like us. So we were sent to Ames Elementary School. We were there for a month. My dad went in for parent-teacher conferences. The teacher said that-- We were in the same classroom because we were in... There were all of these refugee kids. But the teacher said I'd been there and that I was a good student. I didn't say anything, but I was a good student. But they said that Dao wasn't a good student. That she hadn't been there all 30 days. But she had been. She was sitting right beside me the whole time. My father decided to transfer us to North End Elementary School. A school that would change Dao's life forever because of a teacher named Mrs. Castanya. Her third grade teacher with beautiful green eyes. Mrs. Castanya taught Dao how to piece together the English language and how to pull it together, to pull it apart. In third grade, Dao won the North End Elementary School spelling bee. She got $50. They asked her what she wanted to do with it, and she said, "I wanna buy my father a pair of shoes that fit." Because he had only gotten his shoes from the church basement, so every time we went to parent-teacher conferences my father's nice shoes would slap on the ground because they didn't fit, so he was always self-conscious. And that's what Dao did. She took my father to Kmart and she bought him his first pair of nice shoes with her $50. In the back of my mind I made myself a promise that one day it would be and not Dao who would buy something nice for our father because of my education. But that didn't happen for a long time. I became what was called a selective mute. My mom and I were at Kmart. My mom pointed to the ceilings, and she said "I'm looking for the thing that makes the world "glitter." She had a thick accent. The clerk did this... And then walked away. And my mother and I stood there. My mother was far younger than I am now, and I thought she was an incredibly beautiful woman and very brave. She kept on waiting, nobody came back. At some point she started looking at her feet, and I decided that if the world we live in did not need to hear my mother and my father, then surely it didn't need to hear me. So the next day I became a selective mute. At first, it felt like a rebellion. It felt like I was taking control of the situation. But slowly, the rust built up in my throat, and then I lost hold of the English language. Every time the teacher would say Kao Yang and I would whisper "Here," all the other kids would look. And the silence... It grew all over me and it started holding me back and holding me down. I got through the same public schools by doing thumbs up and nodding. Every time somebody said "Are you okay?" Every time somebody said, "Do you understand something?" it's what I did. So now whenever I go to talks, I give talks and I do readings. If their teachers, my teacher's in the room, inevitably they weep because I have the same face I did as a kid. But they don't know my voice. I graduated from Harding High School and I went on to Carleton College because Dao said that education was still the key, and that if she was the first tier of the ladder that I should be the second. So she went to Hamline. She read somewhere that Carleton was the Harvard of the midwest, and so she told me to apply. And I did. I remember what I wrote on my purpose statement for Carleton. I went to my cousin's green bedroom. The light was green, the walls were green, she was the only person in the family with a computer. And I typed, "I wanna become a good person. "If Carleton believes that it can help me become a good "person, then it's the right place for me. "If it doesn't, then it's not." (audience laughs) And I was surprised when I got in. I didn't use a lot of words. But then Carleton started making me feel sad for not speaking. I wouldn't talk in class. I would read and I would attend, but eventually a teacher took me aside. A professor, Rich Kaiser, and he said, "You can't just consume knowledge, that's selfish. "You're here because one day you're expected to become "a producer of knowledge." The first time the idea that the things I had to say, that the life I was living could become part of the stuff we were learning. 'Cause all along the way, I hadn't learned anything about the Hmong. When I learned about the Vietnam war, it was America and the Viet Cong. The North Vietnamese Army. There was no mention of the Hmong anywhere. I hadn't learned anything about what we were doing here. As a kid, people used to ask me "Where are you from?" And I'd whisper Mongolia because that sounded like Hmong. And I knew that they were nomadic, and I knew that my parents had fled through the jungles of Laos, that they hadn't had time to build a home. So I'd whisper that and eventually my cousins... Bran, my cousin got his citizenship. He changed his name to Bruce Lee. So people would say "What are you?" and I said, "I'm Bruce Lee's cousin." You know? That was how it went down. But at Carleton all of a sudden, I was supposed to become a producer of knowledge. I told my dad that I was gonna become a doctor 'cause Dao said that she would become a lawyer. 'Cause my parents taught us that... They said that every family needed a doctor and a lawyer to survive in America because lawyers can protect the rights that we've never had enough of, and doctors so you can heal what is broken in the human body. Everybody I knew was broken. All the adults in my life. There was shrapnel embedded in skin. In the heat of summer, my uncles don't wear short sleeves because they're embarrassed they don't have the words to explain the scars on their body. And I don't have the stories to tell either. And so I told parents that I was gonna go to Carleton to become a doctor. I was studying American Studies, Cross-Cultural Studies, and Women and Gender Studies because I thought it would be really important to becoming a good doctor. But then my grandma died. She died on February 18th, 2003. Just a few months before my graduation from Carleton. Grandma had told me that education was the garden that I tilled in America, and that one day we would reap the harvest together. And I started dreaming about her being at my graduation. How we'd walk on the sidewalks, and how impressed she would be when I explained to her that the person who had designed them had designed them following natural patterns. That the path was on the ground before the cement was laid. My grandma would love, I thought. But my grandma died just before I could harvest my garden. And so I started writing about her for of course, Jane McDowell's Women and Gender Studies course. I wrote endlessly and I wrote long, and I started writing about all the things that I wanted to remember about her. And then I started realizing that when we try really hard to remember someone, that's when we know how much we're forgetting. You know, (stuttering) my grandma only had a single tooth all my life with her. With that single tooth, we took down Jolly Rancher and ice cubes, we gnawed on bones. I loved that tooth, but I forgot which side it was on. My grandma always told me that if nothing else in my life worked out I could become an ear model because I have almost perfect ears. Because as a little girl, she was chased by a tiger in the jungles of Laos and one of her earlobes was torn, so she never wore earrings. My grandma with her single tooth, when I really wanted braces and we couldn't afford them, she smiled at me and said, "Is my smile not beautiful?" On a hot summer day, an ice cream truck, I could hear it ring. All the kids running. I didn't have any money and she didn't have any money to give me. She spread sugar on my tongue and put an ice cube and told me that that was sweet and cold coming together in the mouth of a child. I promised her that one day I would have a house and that in my house there would be a room, and she wouldn't have to carry all of her stuff from the house of one son to the next. She could place them in that room, in that house for her. I knew when she died that the promise would remain unfulfilled. But I started writing, and I turned in the pages and Jane McDowell said, "Wow, I only wanted five, how come you're giving me 30?" And I said, "Because I don't know what to cut out." And then I told my dad, my dad asked me one day, "What are you doing?" I said "I'm writing a love letter to my grandma." And he said "If we dream in the right direction, "we never wake up. The dream only always grows bigger. "Never wake up." And so I fell in love with the dream. Instead of going to medical school, I told my mom and dad that I wanted to become a writer, that I wanted to tell the stories that mattered to our lives. That the stories that lived with the stuff of which knowledge was made. The stuff that I had been yearning and hungry to hear and to learn. And my mom and dad, they looked at me and my mom said, "It's not surprising. "You've always loved stories." My dad, after The Song Poet, said to me, "If the sky that I live under can fall on me, "if the earth that I walk on can throw me off, "who would I be to stand in your way?" And so I became a writer, thinking that all I needed to do was write books and that they would go into the world, and that I could live life. I didn't know that when you come from a people like me, a people that is new to the written language. Because it wasn't until the 1950s that a written language was devised for my people. That you had to stand up and speak those words for the world to hear you. I didn't know that when you write and you write on paper, but that when you get an opportunity to hold a microphone like this, to hold it up to your mouth, that you have an opportunity to write on the fabric of the human being. I didn't know then what I know now. That in order to become a writer I would also have to become a teacher. And a process. So that's what I am before you. I'm a young writer, I'm a young teacher. But I've taught all over the place, from Columbia University right through Stanford University and many places in between, and I've learned a lot of things. I've learned that if you can, you know when you're talking, if people can hear you, you can also hear them talking about you. Audience members didn't know this, and I had to point it out many times in the beginning. You know, especially high schools. I hear people say, "Oh my god, she's so boring." And I said "Well I can hear you. It's really hard "to be up here. Can you please, you know, give me "some support?" I had to ask for that support. I had to demand that support. I've learned that no matter how good you are, no matter how well-versed you are on a topic, no teacher can anticipate what a student needs to learn. That all we can do, all we can be is companions for the journey, the adventure that they're on. That we can only teach if we know that we have something to learn from that one student. If you're looking at a student and you don't know that you have anything to learn from them, you are not equipped to teach him or her. I've learned a lot of things, but I'll end with this 'cause I think my 20 minutes are up soon anyway. I never keep a watch. I rely on internal clock. (sniffs) My brother Maxwell, when he was five years old, we were living in Andover, Minnesota, and he was going to Andover Elementary School, and he spoke English with a thick accent. (speaks Hmong) In school he would speak English with a thick accent and so none of the kids wanted to play with him. And on the bus no one wanted to sit with him. He usually sat by himself, but one day there were no empty seats so he saw, he said a boy with beautiful blue eyes and he went to sit with the boy, and the boy's eyes turned black and the boy said "Get up." There's a rule, you cannot move on, you cannot stand up on a moving bus. So Maxwell crouched all the way home. That day I had been doing teacher trainings all day for the Annoka school district. I'd given them everything I had, my whole and my heart, everything I had. 'Cause I know that as a writer I can't force you to participate in the reading experience, I can only inspire you to do so. I know as a public speaker I can't force you to understand my words. I can only gift you with them. So I came home and I was really tired and I said "Max, how was school?" and he told me what happened. I was so sad. The next day he went to school and he came back, and I said "Max, how was it?" He looked at me and he said, "Kalia, I sat by myself, "but I didn't put my bookbag on the seat. "I left it on the ground in case one day a little boy "or a little girl will sit beside me." That's why I'm here before you. Because of that little boy who keeps his bookbag on the ground so that one day somebody will sit beside him. It's why we teach. We teach so that we can teach each other how to love, how to believe, how to open hearts, and how to open minds. And I have so much respect for the work that you're all about, and the thinking that you do. That is all I have to give you. Thank you so much for having me.