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June 16, 2016

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Home » Opinion » Foreign Views

Lasting lessons of university happen outside class

By Andrew Lam | June 16, 2016, Thursday | Print Edition

LAST week, while hobnobbing with writers at the Bay Area Book Festival gala atop Memorial Stadium, which overlooked the University of California Berkeley campus, I couldn’t help but give into nostalgia.

Exactly 30 years ago I, a pre-med student, graduated from that campus down below with a degree in biochemistry. But I didn’t become a doctor. I picked up the pen, dropped the test tube, and through some years of struggling, became a journalist and writer instead.

Yet if I didn’t learn how to write at Berkeley, it was certainly there that my literary life really began. As a refugee boy from Vietnam at age 11, I barely spoke a word of English. I lived in a crowded apartment full of refugees where Mission Street ended and the working class of Daly City began. It wasn’t until I was a junior at Lowell High School in San Francisco, when a few of my Vietnamese friends were applying to Cal, that I first heard of the school. And I thought that maybe I, too, should apply. Despite the odds, despite not having a perfect GPA, and the discouragement from a certain teacher — “Your English is not good enough. You’re much better off at City College!” — I somehow managed to get accepted to Cal, and afterward, I was never the same.

At Cal, I found my voice. I excelled in “electives” like political science classes, foreign language courses. I also took Asian-American studies classes.

Slowly I saw possibilities and opportunities far beyond what my parents could have envisioned for me; I saw a new narrative for myself. I didn’t necessarily have to follow family expectations. No medical school for me, thanks, I went to creative writing school, and became a writer.

Talking with an international literary crowd and looking down at that lovely campus at sunset last week, it all came back to me: how much my Berkeley education was really outside of the classroom. More than mere mixing chemicals and splicing genes and killing mice, my real education taught me how to deal and accept “the other” — and slowly my new self.

I remember making friends from all walks of life, many were scholarship students from the barrios, some were transfer students from refugee and immigrant communities, and others were privileged, worldly kids; a mix of economic, ethnic and social strata.

The Mexican-American boy whose parents were immigrants was also a guitarist for an all blond boy-band, and I was sometimes their roadie and number one fan. My roommate at the dorm during my freshmen year was a studious Jewish boy who loved sports and loved writing about baseball. Across the hall was a math genius who memorized lines from “Star Trek” episodes, and could recite them while watching the show nightly. The friendly, outgoing, down-to-earth sansei (third-generation Japanese-American) a floor below turned out to be the son of a Congressman. The Greek foreign student was a martial arts expert. I, the shy, inarticulate kid from high school, befriended them all.

But isn’t that what a college life is about? Besides the lessons of sciences, the stress in the pressure-cooker of final exams, worrying about grades and jobs, ultimately isn’t it a process of discovery?

Thirty years since I graduated, the world is a much changed place. Many of my friends from impoverished backgrounds who entered Cal back then have done very well. Many have become doctors, lawyers, scientists and executives. And they now watch their children attending and graduating Cal and other prestigious universities.

At the festival I participated in a panel called “Crossing Borders: Tales of Migrations.” What happens when a migrant crosses a border was the theme. This got me thinking: there are all sorts of borders to cross beyond national demarcations; like the one where you leave the insularities of home and hearth and community, and enter college and find love and heartbreaks, and ultimately your voice.

And for a refugee boy who became an American writer, his college life, which ended three decades ago, still provides plenty of material to fire his imagination.

 

Andrew Lam is a senior editor at New America Media in San Francisco and the author of “Birds of Paradise Lost,” a collection of stories about Vietnamese refugees in San Francisco, “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres,” a book of essays on East-West relations, and a memoir, “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.”

Foreign Views


 

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