Culmination Address for the Class of 2016

Last year, after working with Lily, our school's speech and debate coach, I wrote a culmination speech for the class of 2015. We were using speech and debate guidelines and I like to model what I ask my students to do, so when we introduced the speaker competition this year, I started writing another sample. But I kept getting stuck. But when our eighth grade field day lined up with a shooting at UCLA landing my students and I in lockdown for hours, I sat down to write again.

I shared this with our speakers, and Lily paved the way for me to deliver this speech at our graduation. I wrote a graduation speech in 1988, when I graduated from eighth grade, but my speech wasn't chosen. This was my first opportunity to speak at a culmination and it was an honor to share the stage with our graduates.

To our students in the class of 2016,

I have been trying to write this letter to you for the last couple of months. I’ve started drafts, finished some, and even shared one with some of you, but here I am, once again, thinking about how to put our year into words.

What is the story of our year together?

At first I thought about writing about feminism, because this year more than any other, we have fierce young women who speak truth to power, and I have some young men who have learned about misogyny, privilege, and prejudice, and hopefully have thought about how to be advocates for justice. I thought about our study of refugees from World War II and the Vietnam War and the current refugee crisis. I thought about Black History Month and what you taught me about what it means to be an ally. And I thought about Harper Lee’s death and how with her passing we lost a mockingbird who used her voice to give us the story of Scout, Jem, Dill, Atticus, Boo Radley, and Tom Robinson. I thought about all of the poetry you penned where so many of you found your voice leaving me in awe.

I am writing about all of this, but I’m also writing a new story because now we had field day together.

This year’s field day is a day I will always remember. It was a day when all the work we’ve done together diminished in the face of a crisis.

As we sat together in silence, I called each of your names, or I skimmed over your name

if you weren’t on the trip with us, and in the quiet of that room, where the tension was still thick with not knowing, I wanted to say your names over and over again. I wanted to see each and every one of you. I wanted to hold each of you close and tell you that you were safe, and that I loved you, and your family loved you. And even though I couldn’t say it with 100% certainty, I wanted to tell you everything would be okay.

Instead, I simply called your names and hoped.

But that night, after field day, from the safety of my home, I realized we have shared something: we have shared the space of fear and it reminded me of Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien who wrote about truth and storytelling in The Things They Carried. He wrote, “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.”

And I think that is why it has been so hard to tell the story of this year because there is so much we have carried together. It is many stories and many truths. We have mourned Johnny and Dally in The Outsiders, and Ha’s Papaya Tree in Inside Out and Back Again. In To Kill A Mockingbird, we grieved for Tom Robinson and for Scout’s innocence as she stood on the Radley porch on Halloween night.

But more than just reading stories, we shared our own, in essays about poverty and taking a stand and in novels about friendship, family, immigration, and struggle. You have been funny, sentimental, ironic, and profound, and all of these stories have been ours.

Now we have a new story to tell. A shared story. And as each of you leaves for high school, college, and ... life, so many more stories will unfold for you: stories of perseverance and triumph, love and growth, and sometimes fear and death.

Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie says, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story, the only story. Stories matter. Many stories matter.”

So, as I send you off, as we read your names again, this time in a space of celebration, I hope you will tell your story. I hope you will share your truth. I hope you will share your many stories because your story matters. All of your stories matter.

I hope you will use the voice you found this year and that you will sing because the world needs to hear from you. You are our mockingbirds and the world needs your stories.

Tim O’Brien also says, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, and hope that others might then dream it along with you.” Keep dreaming and your story will follow.

The First Day of School

A few years after I started teaching middle school, I walked across the south field on the first day of school.  It was early, before students arrived, but my principal was there and she asked me, "Are you nervous?"

I was still fairly green as a teacher and attempted to sound seasoned.  "Nervous, no, but I'm excited."

"Really?" My principal responded.  "Oh, I still get nervous and I promised myself if I ever wasn't nervous for the first day, I should retire."

Almost a decade later, that principal has retired, but I imagine she's still nervous for all of us heading back to school tomorrow.

So, am I nervous?  Yes, and I'm bracing for the year to come.  I glance at the names on my class rosters. These students are strangers to me, and that is what I'm nervous for.  That is the suspense that will keep my mind spinning with the preparations I still need to make to start the year.  Because by the end of the week, those names will reveal faces and slowly, those faces will share their stories.

As the first day bleeds into the first week, month and semester, many of my 100 students will share bits and pieces of their lives with me and it is these stories that will keep me from falling asleep in the nights to come.  We will make it through that first semester and we will work through to spring. Then these students will graduate and head off to high schools across the city.  These students will fade away and they will take their stories with them.

That's one of the hardest things about being a teacher.  I get this glimpse into so many lives but I so rarely get to hear how the stories end.  Fortunately, I've had the summer to rest up, to reflect on the stories I've heard this past year, and to make room for new ones.

Tomorrow is the first day of school and I'm nervous.  I'm nervous, excited, and anxious to hear the stories of this new school year.

Cockroaches

I wrote this for The Moth live storytelling. I didn't get called up to perform and this is a little long for their five-minute limit, but here it is. My story on "the dark side."
http://www.themoth.org/

I've avoided the dark side my entire life. I come from stock that, for generations, has avoided the shadowy aspects of life. In fact, my parents were both born and raised in Los Angeles but chose to leave behind any dark side elements this city or their families might present: memories of poverty, alcohol, abuse, war-time internment. So instead of growing up in LA, I was raised in beautiful Bend, Oregon.

If you've ever been to that part of the country it really is gorgeous. The Deschutes river flows through the middle of town, the Cascade Range's snow-topped peaks gleam in the west and it's sunny and clear just about every day. Bothersome urban problems like pollution, gangs, homelessness, or racial diversity don't exist in Bend providing the perfect façade for a family like mine.

And if the sky isn't clear, if the sun isn't gleaming through ponderosa pine and juniper trees then the town is buried beneath several inches of pristine white snow. Snow: the antithesis of the dark side, a light, fluffy, glittering blanket burying all that is dead or ugly or dark.

But I pledged to be different. I didn't inherit that bright-shiny, passive-aggressive Asian thing. I wouldn't walk around pretending the outside world didn't exist. No, I would embrace the dark side and confront issues head-on.

So, I went to college on the dark side of Oregon where it rained every single day and under those gray and soggy days I explored my shadow. I became despondent, listened to Morrissey and Counting Crows all night; drank a little too much. But I kept it real. I wasn't one of those hippies you see around U of O pretending that life is all sunshine and flowers.

Then I moved to LA. Urban grit? Loved it. Tagging? Got it. Pollution? Awesome. I embraced the poverty of the city so much I started teaching for LAUSD. I loved LA and I couldn't understand why my parents left. I failed to notice that I'd managed to follow my parents' pattern. I left my family and all of its deeply buried baggage far behind.

I fed off of LA's blue skies even if they were a little smoggy. I fell in love with a guy from another anti-dark-side family, and we got married.

We bought a condo and then a house and in living out that American dream the house we bought put me back in touch with the dark side.

It was a small house in Highland Park, in the heart of Avenues gang turf and it was old. Those walls held history, but fortunately I had lots of practice ignoring the past, ignoring any problems that might impact my future, that ARM mortgage that could have us teetering on the brink of financial ruin, those strange phone calls my husbands kept getting late at night, I was the master of avoiding these problems. Even though my family lived a thousand miles away they had taught me exactly what to do.
We got the keys to our new house but before we moved in we wanted to clean and paint, to start fresh and new. I was mopping on our first night in the house when I saw a cockroach skitter across floor. I stomped on that big, fat, crunchy roach so fast and then convinced myself that the previous owners must have left that roach behind. We wouldn't have a roach problem.

I cleaned those hardwood floors over and over and over to remove all the possibility of dirt, or grime, or roach tracks. We painted and repainted every wall and every bit of trim. We white-washed that house so even though the roof had a leak and the windows weren't properly framed, from the outside it looked all right. And our marriage didn't look too bad from the outside either.

But, every so often I'd spot another cockroach scurrying across a counter or I'd find a dead one lying on it's back in the living room. Those cockroaches started to freak me out. If David was home I'd scream and make him find it and kill it. If I was home alone my heart would race. It was me or it was the cockroach and there was no way they would win. I learned how to hunt down and kill roaches with the intensity of an assassin.

We talked to a friend who was an exterminator and he told us these particular roaches actually live outside so you can never get rid of them. Apparently Highland Park isn't just gang-turf, it's roach-infested gang turf and no matter how clean I kept the house, no matter how air-tight we made the door jambs, roaches snuck in.

I'd come home from work and scan the floors and counter-tops for roaches. I'd step out of bed with the fear of something crunching beneath my bare feet. All of the energy that should have been looking my real life problems, my husband and I were hardly seeing or touching one another this point, all of my energy was focused on hiding our roach problem from myself and from our family and friends. They didn't know our marriage was in trouble and there was no way they could find out the roaches.

After a while though, I managed to keep most of the roaches at bay. I'd see one or two a month but it seemed bearable.

Until the night the power went out. LA was in the middle of a heat wave so the AC was cranked up and David was out of town. The Dodger game was on and I was reading a book in the living room when everything went dark. In inky darkness I lit a few candles, grabbed a flashlight and moved to the bedroom with my book.

When I was ready for bed I blew out the candles and grabbed the flashlight for one last trip to the bathroom. I slid my feet into my flip-flops and then, in one flashlight's sweep I saw the floor move.

Cockroaches. Everywhere. I felt them all over me even though when I brushed my shoulders and hair there was nothing there. I shone the light across the floor again and a straggler scuttled across the floor and into the darkness. I grabbed a magazine and it was on. I would kill. I would kill them all.
With the flashlight in one hand, a magazine in the other, and a roll of paper towels under my arm I started in the bedroom and made my way through the darkness shining the light and slamming the magazine on floor with each step. Smack, smack, smack. Then I swiped away the disgusting, crunchy cockroach bodies and guts. It was frantic. I'd shine the light and there were more. Slam, Slam, Slam. I killed and cleaned in the darkness with sweat pouring down my body.

It was so hot and dark and I couldn't see my way out. I made my way through the house shining my beam of light into a darkness that was alive and creeping and unstoppable. It was worse than any horror movie I'd ever seen. Alone in a black out, surrounded by cockroaches hiding just outside the flashlight's beam.

And then the lights came back on and the ac kicked in. I could see the hardwoods and the walls. I made one more trip through the house to make sure the roaches had retreated into the night, washed my hands, tried to cleanse my body of the cockroach evil and climbed back into bed. I tried to sleep but every time I closed my eyes I saw roaches everywhere.

David came home the next day and I told him how I'd survived my darkest night. We talked about selling the house and three months later we did. We also agreed that there were problems in that house besides the cockroaches, and the commute and drive-by shootings. There were problems that we couldn't ignore anymore if we were going to survive.

Maybe I should be grateful to those cockroaches. They saved my marriage. Because no matter how hard I tried to keep them out, no matter how much I wanted to pretend they weren't a problem, those roaches didn't quit.

My husband and I are in a new place now and it's taken a long time for me to stop scanning the floor for roaches. Even though there aren't any roaches in our new place, I know about my tendency to white-wash life, to bury my problems under a layer of cold, brilliant snow. But the dark side is there. It survives and it thrives. And the more time I spend with it the less I have to fear.