Alliteration. When the thin line was almost stepped over

I am living in Paris now. It is not to flex, it’d rather to remind myself about how far I have come in life. In many layers of meaning.

I never went to kindergarten. I could never fully understand the system, but at some point, I had heard that it was mandatory for children to attend kindergarten before being admitted to primary school. Maybe that was just some unverified news, or maybe it didn’t apply to the rural village where I was born. In remote parts of Vietnam, children were encouraged to go to school at any age, by any means. I don’t think the primary school admission process required much back then.

When we were kids, the world always seemed bigger. For children in a poor village like mine, the journey to school was the entire world. Until I turned six, my world was only the path from home to my mother’s small kiosk. Every morning, as I followed her “to work,” I would hear children singing in the kindergarten across the pond. Their songs sounded totally unfamiliar to me. My mother had taught me different ones, songs from her time, some even from her military service days. Those kindergarten songs, with their fancy lyrics, were as advanced to her as they were to me. We knew nothing about that.

I longed to be part of that world. I asked my mother several times to send me to that kindergarten, but her response was always the same:"They won’t take you with that skin. They don’t know how to take care of you. They’re afraid something bad might happen. They think your skin condition is contagious."

Sometimes after school, when the neighbor kids came home, we would gather and sing songs I didn’t know. I felt left behind. I pretended to hum along but quickly picking up a few lyrics here and there so I could be part of the gangs.

Believe it or not, I don’t really think that song or no-song days were a big deal. I always had event-full days with my mother at her kiosk. During slow moments, she taught me to sing (I still blame her for how badly I sing karaoke now). She told me the stories of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Tam Cam (Vietnamese Cinderella) thousands of times. We were talking about the future, the day when my sister and brother would go to universities, I would go to highschool, and she wouldn’t have to work so hard anymore.

But the most important thing that shaped my life was that my mother taught me to read.

To make a long story short, she used flyers and newspapers to teach me. I picked it up quickly and was able to read without any problem within a couple of weeks. The villagers called me a genius. Over time, I started believing it myself. I was convinced that I was destined to change the world. I was four years old.

But as in every kind of drama show you watch on the television, there was always an obstacle.

On primary school admission day, no teacher wanted to take me into their class. Because I hadn’t gone to kindergarten. Or maybe for some other reason. I could never know.

I do remember that, when all the other children were led into their assigned classrooms after the general assembly, I found myself left standing alone in the middle of the schoolyard. Some teachers passed by and looked at me with pity in their eyes. Pitiness was the last thing that I wanted to receive from any stranger. I tried not to cry. “A warrior does not cry.” I stayed cool. Trying to digest the feeling of thousands of ants crawling inside my stomach. I almost cried.

My confidence about changing the world has faded as I know more and more about real life. Still, I think that those thoughts, the belief that I was capable of something extraordinary, did more good than harm.