陳白菊 《 Boarding School 》 美國

        As time went on,  my  father started to have a change of heart about education.  He felt  that  some  of  us  should  learn  Chinese,  his  mother  tongue.  A  quality  Chinese education meant that we needed to be sent to the city.  My  sister  and  I  were  sent to a boarding school in  Biên  Hòa,  known as Dục Đức  Elementary  and High School.  My sister was nine and I was seven. Truth is, we loved Dục Đức School but we didn’t want to be far away from home.  We  loved  learning  Chinese  and did well in school, but we were homesick. We missed our home and we missed our mom a lot. On weekends, from the fourth floor looking down at the gate,  I  watched parents picking up their kids and I cried, feeling sorry for myself.  My  family couldn’t afford to send my sister and I home every week,  and seeing those other kids going home made me even more homesick. To console me,  my sister would take me to the movies.  We watched many of Bruce Lee’s Kung Fu movies in those days.

        Dục  Đức  School was a private school,  but it was not rich.  All of the teachers and students  who  boarded  at  the  school  lived  on  the  fourth  floor.  Our  lives  were like clockwork:  every  morning,  we  woke  up  at  6:30,  brushed   our  teeth,   and  did  our exercises. Breakfast was served on the fifth floor. In the center of the dining   room  was a humongous pot of porridge. It was always porridge. Porridge with salted radish on one day,  porridge with salted peanuts on the next day,  and porridge with scrambled eggs on the following day, porridge, porridge, and porridge 365 days of the year.  When we were tired of porridge,  we went to the kitchen and begged the cook (we called her 姐 (Jiě) for some leftover cơm cháy (rice at the bottom of the pot).

        In the evening, we had to shower quickly so we could get to the study hall on time. When there was a long waiting line on the fourth floor,  we  had to use the bathroom on the fifth floor.  Hardly  anyone  used  it  because  everyone thought there were ghosts in there.  Many times,  I had to find other girls to shower with because I didn’t want to use the haunted bathroom on the fifth floor.  Three  or four of us would share one bathroom.  To make it worse,  every night,  Chị 仁秋 (Rén Qiū),  our  roommate,  would  tell ghost stories. I was really afraid to close my eyes for I imagined a tall ghost in black robe with green eyes staring at me.

        Rumor  was that our school was  haunted.  The  story  was that during the school’s construction,   a   construction  worker  had  an  accident  and  died  onsite.   His   spirit supposedly  haunted  the  school  grounds.  Often times my roommates and I associated unexplained  yelling  or  scratchy  noises  from  the  ceiling as evidence that he was still haunting the school.  We  walked  up the stairs from the first floor one day and someone screamed  “Ghost!” From the first floor, we all ran back up to the fourth out of fear. My legs felt heavy and weak and because I was slow,  I  was always the last one left behind. I really hated it…

        There were also tender moments at Dục Đức School.  Even though my sister and I were  far  away from our home and  family,  the  staff  and  students  there  became  our second family. When my sister and I arrived,  Chị 仁秋 was very nice to us. She treated us like little sisters and we looked up to her. We thought she was a rebel;  I believed she snuck out after curfews and we admired her for her bravery.

        When one of my teachers, 劉志華 got paid, he would take me out and buy me fruit drinks with his meager teacher’s stipend.  It  meant  a  lot to me when I think about how generous he was even when he had so little to give.  I also remember when my right leg had a serious infection,  郭老師,  another  teacher,  took  care  of  me.  She  cleaned  my wound  with  alcohol  to  disinfect  the  area,  sprayed  the  white  powder to keep it dry, covered it with a bandage, and then wrapped my leg with gauze.  I was so  thankful and touched by her kindness.  Whenever I look at the scar on my leg,  it  reminds me of her.  These days, decades after I’ve left the school, I often wonder where she is and how she is doing.

        When  the  war  ended,  my  sister  and  I had  to  come  back  home.  The war had destroyed  our  neighborhood  and  our  store,  and  there  was  no  money  left for us to continue Chinese school.  We came back home to find our grocery store, along with the marketplace,   burned  to  the  ground.   We  searched   the   rubbles  hoping  to  salvage something but all that was left were four charred brick  walls.  Everything  had  gone to ashes.

陳白菊 (Laura Tran)