Monday

I had helped him earlier. He asked me if this train was going to DC in Spanglish and I said, Si, vamos a DC. And as I walked off the train at Chinatown he clapped.

My mom told me about the time my dad and her took a bus in Boston. They had no idea if they were on the right one, or when it would arrive. And they did get lost. My mom cried because they weren't sure how to get back to Dorchester. They look back on that story now and laugh, but once you conquer a cities public transportation system, the city is at your feet. That's how I felt in DC, Richmond, London, Nice, Amsterdam (well almost. We were so high we had conquered the world at one point).

I leave you with an except from my law school essay:

My name is Dat. It is Vietnamese. The correct pronounciation is Dak with a short and hard a. However, at the age of three, I had a Italian woman named Lucy in the Italian nieghborhood of East Boston as a baby-sitter who called me Dat with a Boston accent - Da-t. And being that it was the first time I heard my name in English, Da-t with a Boston accent, stuck.

My name is a small, but significant, metaphor for the life of a Boston born Vietnamese-American with immigrant parents. I would go to the bank with my mother, who came to the United States by way of a small fishing boat, a six month stint at a Maylasian refugee camp, an asylum rejection from Australia, and finally a flight sponsered by a small Boston organization that helped refugees of the Vietnam war. I would explain to the bank teller that the address on our checks were wrong, or that my mom wanted to deposit fifty dollars of her check and cash twenty-five for groceries. Sometimes I would go with her to the Doctor's office and helped her fill out all the administrative forms and explain to her the doctors advice. This was before they set up a translating service.