Brand New Pandemic, Same Old White Supremacy

By Thu Anh Nguyen

Every August, it’s the same: I wake up in the middle of the night, heart beating wildly, convinced that my nightmare is reality. For almost a decade, the nightmare has been some version of me showing up to the first day of school without shoes. Silly, but petrifying for someone who prides herself on preparedness and organization. As a teacher for fifteen years, I am accustomed to these back-to-school nightmares and related jitters, and I always comfort myself with reminders of “you’ve been here before,” and “you’ve got this.” Up until recently, I have been able to wake up from the nightmares and reality has been soothing.

Since the COVID pandemic closed schools in my area beginning in March 2020, however, the reality has been anything but soothing. The difference for me this August is that I will not be returning to teaching full time. I have decided to leave the only professional career I have known, and I am not sure I will ever return. 

When people ask me if I left teaching because of the way schools have changed during COVID, I make sure to explain that schools actually have not changed. The country has not changed. I have deliberately chosen to stop teaching in a system that refuses to change. Schools, after all, are institutions. Like the United States, they currently exist under systems of patriarchy and white supremacy. While schools had to make significant t adjustments in order to continue to educate students who were at home and socially distanced, the systems under which they operate has not changed at all.

During the pandemic, all of us who teach have had to stretch ourselves in ways we could not previously imagine. We hastily went through technology trainings to learn new platforms that would forever change the way we engage with students. Many of us did this training over the summer of 2020 without pay because we wanted to be prepared for our students. When distance learning started up in the fall of 2020, we tried our best not to be discouraged by all the shortcomings and problems. The protective plexiglass that we had the luxury of putting on each desk meant that there was always going to be a glare on Zoom, and we would never really be able to see all of our students at once. Our cameras malfunctioned and zoomed in on plants instead of speakers, and our speakers were never perfect. In so many classes, we spent a great deal of time yelling, “Can you repeat that?” Still, we persevered.

For me, the main problem this past school year was not the technological challenges. It was that, as we worked tirelessly to serve students and schools, we got further and further away from actually serving students in an equitable and just way. As the pandemic raged on, I continued to be reminded that I was serving the white community of parents and students more than any other. At my school — and others, I’m sure — when teachers were told they had to return to in-person teaching, they were told it was the best thing for all students. Of course, we were not consulted on what was best for students. We kept hearing from administrators that schools were feeling pressure to return to in-person learning, but where was the pressure coming from? Not from communities of color.

Because the private school where I taught offered teachers an option to opt-out of in-person teaching for a few months, I opted out. By then I had been teaching on Zoom for months and felt I could still serve my students best that way. Most importantly, I knew that I was still going to have at least four students who would remain as distance learners. When teachers were told they had to go back in-person unless they wanted to risk losing their jobs or face a pay cut, I returned, but not all of my students did. Three of the four students who didn’t return were boys of color. They stayed home for a variety of reasons that are similar to the ones many families of color have cited for keeping their children at home: their own health risks, immunocompromised family members who live with them, parents who had high-risk jobs, and long commutes that did not make sense anymore if they could learn from home. 

As a Vietnamese-American teacher, I was particularly attuned to the challenges my Asian and Asian-American students faced. In a country whose President called the pandemic the “China virus,” and that turned Asian hate into escalating numbers of cases of violence against Asians, I was not surprised that one of my Asian students would choose to never return in person. And I was completely unsurprised by articles like this and this that cited the relief felt by students and families of color when students no longer had to suffer the daily microaggressions inside their schools. 

Still my school, and most others, pushed on for in-person learning with little to no concern for students and families of color.

Here’s the heart of the problem. At the same time that schools told teachers to innovate, white supremacy also reconstituted itself. White supremacy realized that the more nervous families felt about children “falling behind” academically, the easier it was to push through policies without consulting marginalized communities. Because of the pandemic, it was also easier to create sweeping policies and brand new schedules without asking who benefitted. Whenever I raised concerns about the inequities and challenges of hybrid teaching, I was told to take my students outdoors — as if fresh air was the only thing I needed to offer. I was told that everything would improve if we could all be on campus together. Meanwhile, school leaders ignored my students who could not return to school. We were never all together. 

Even in the face of a global pandemic, white supremacy has been relentless. The chaos of schools regrouping so quickly was used as a reason to cut budgets so that professional development was completely frozen. That professional development was often the only way to offer and hold teachers accountable for doing social justice work. And when many of us asked what will happen this coming year to reengage with this essential work, our questions were met with silence.

And now the country and its schools are caught in the debate about critical race theory. In so many states, legislatures have proposed bills or passed laws that now ban teaching about the ways racism has shaped American public policy and, thus, the society. Critical race theory isn’t new, of course. But white supremacists have been actively misrepresenting it and using this misrepresentation to strengthen their grip on society and control what is taught in schools. It has come clear to me that this tactic is a symbol of how white supremacy, like the Delta variant, can mutate to be more effective. 

I have taught English Literature and Social Studies my entire career to date — and have always included critical race theory as an essential lens through which to understand literature and society. How could I teach any book written in the United States without discussing racism? How could I be asked to teach books written mostly by dead white men without honestly and openly criticizing the curriculum? 

The key argument against teaching critical race theory in schools, especially in the primary and secondary schools, is that students are not developmentally ready for a discussion of racism or that the discussion itself is divisive. The question that needs to be answered, however, is who is not developmentally ready? My students and families of color have lived with racism their entire lives. When people talk about critical race theory being developmentally inappropriate, what they are really saying is that white supremacy uses white fragility to keep us from making the institutional changes that will lead to racial justice. It is not a coincidence that we are talking about critical race theory now when the country is exhausted from the pandemic and reeling from police brutality and attacks on Black and Asian lives. The pandemic has isolated all of us, so that marginalized communities have even less power, and white supremacy has found a way to capitalize on this. 

When I woke up at 3 a.m. from my last school nightmare, I realized that it was not the usually trivial one about being shoeless. This one was more realistic. In the dream, my white male head of school approached me with concerns from white parents that I was teaching too much about current events. The truth was too heavy a burden for kids to handle, he said. But if there is anything I have learned in fifteen years of teaching, kids are not the ones who cannot handle the truth. I have watched kids be the most resilient during the pandemic while adults have tried to catch up, or worse, actively work against change. 

I woke up from my nightmare wondering, are we going to learn anything from this pandemic? Who pays the cost of keeping things the way they are? Students and families of color certainly pay a huge toll. But in our unjust system, we all pay a cost. As teachers head into another unprecedented year, full of uncertainties caused by the Delta variant, are we going to change everything from health protocols to technology and classroom setups, but leave white supremacy in place? Are these the kind of schools we want to support?

The Things They Made Me Carry: Inheriting a White Curriculum

By Thu Anh Nguyen

It was a dream job: teaching ninth and twelfth graders English Literature at the first racially inclusive school in the nation’s capital. I was told that 70 percent of my curriculum was predetermined by the department, but that I’d have control over 30 percent of the curriculum. I was excited to choose my texts, and to make really brave choices. Surely the school knew who they were hiring: an Asian female who went to an all-women’s college, who wrote her Masters thesis in poetry as a study of Asian-American and immigrant identities. I imagined I was hired because I was bringing my unique self to the English department, a self that was in stark contrast to the almost all-white faculty.

Before I could be my brave self, I had to settle in. The first year teaching at any school is challenging. You are trying to master the curriculum, and also understand the students and faculty. You are trying to understand where you fit into all of it.  I was already nervous about the fact that I was not only the only Asian person in my department but also the youngest person. Too many parents tried to slyly slip questions about my college and graduate work into conversations. I felt like I needed to prove myself, so I tried to lay low. I accepted the 70 percent of the curriculum I was given, and even let others dictate the 30 percent that was supposed to be my choice.

In English 12, which was a coveted class that typically only senior members of the department got to teach, I accepted teaching texts such as Beloved, Paradise Lost, The Sound and The Fury, and The Things They Carried. I have loved William Faulkner since reading him in high school, and I learned to love teaching Milton because I like rising to the challenge of teaching difficult texts. But then there was Tim O’Brien’s novel about the Vietnam War. I tried to tell myself that The Things They Carried was hard too, and that therefore I should also love it — all of my colleagues who taught it chose it because of the figurative language, the book’s Bible references. The book allowed them to impress students with words like “chiasmus.” With so many reasons that the book should be taught, whenever I fumbled at teaching The Things They Carried, I thought it was my fault.

My sense of not being good enough to teach that text propelled me to learn more. I spent most of that first year diligently auditing my department head’s classes even with a full schedule of my own, hoping that her love of the novel was going to magically infect me. I took copious notes, and then I tried to teach my classes exactly as she had taught hers. My students were generous and thoughtful, and I honestly don’t think that they heard the false notes that I was increasingly attune to in my teaching. No matter how hard I worked, how many notes I took, and how well I mimicked my colleagues, I never learned to love that book.

I never loved it because I never was able to be myself while teaching it. How could I teach The Things They Carried, which is about what white men carried, and also be a Vietnamese immigrant, the daughter of a man who fought alongside Americans in the Vietnam War, and then was imprisoned for it? How could I teach Tim O’Brien’s version of the Vietnam War that actually has no Vietnamese people in it? When I’ve said this to people in the past, they were always shocked: How can a book about the Vietnam War have no Vietnamese people in it? The main scene that describes Vietnamese people has them symbolized as water buffalo (my white colleagues had a whole lesson built around this water buffalo metaphor as if it was the most exciting thing in the world to discover that the animal represented my people).

Like the water buffalo, Vietnamese people are shot and killed. They have no personalities. No families. They are just the backdrop for American bravery and grief.

One of the main metaphors in The Things They Carried is that American soldiers were not just carrying backpacks full of rations, ammunition, photos from home, and other items necessary to make it through the war, but they were carrying the toll that the Vietnam War took on them. Teaching that text for a year took a huge toll on me. I have never before or since then taught with so little of my heart.

I could not face another year of teaching something that was so against what I knew to be true, so I needed to come up with the solution. That was when I decided to wield the 30 percent teacher’s choice in the curriculum that I was promised. I chose to teach The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Le Thi Diem Thuy. It is a novel written by a Vietnamese refugee about the harrowing journey and resettlement of six Vietnamese refugees in late 1970s’ San Diego. This wasn’t just about using a Vietnamese perspective though. Gangster is beautifully written. In many ways, its broken narrative is a much more realistic reflection of post-traumatic stress disorder than O’Brien’s perfectly crafted allegories. It has a compelling female protagonist who clearly had thematic ties to other characters we read that year, such as Caddy from The Sound and the Fury and Sethe from Morrison’s Beloved. If I sound like I am trying to defend my choice, it’s because I felt like I had to defend my choice. The other three teachers of English 12 that year were all veteran teachers, one was my department chair, and they all had chosen the 70 percent of the curriculum that I had inherited. They had been nicknamed the Holy Trinity, and to me they felt untouchable. Of course, students revered them. They had been at the school for decades, had made the English department what it was. It’s only with many more years of teaching under my belt now that I realize how unhealthy that situation was. Schools need to be wary of setting up new teachers — especially new teachers of color — in impossible situations in which they are alone in a group of long-standing white faculty. I was never going to feel powerful in that situation.

So at first, I wasn’t brave enough to completely jettison O’Brien; I taught some chapters of The Things They Carried alongside Gangster. As I was finally able to teach about the Vietnam War through a Vietnamese family’s eyes, I found my true voice again.  And once I found my voice, my students found me. I still have my student evaluations of me from that year, the ones that said that Gangster was their favorite book we read because it wasn’t like anything they had read before, and it felt real. It felt real because it was real — because it is real to tell the story of the Vietnam War through a Vietnamese perspective. Why hadn’t anyone else before me thought of that? Why would they have?

I honestly believe that no one else had questioned teaching The Things They Carried because no one else was a faculty member who was actually a Vietnamese immigrant. No one else reacted as viscerally as I did to that text. There are so many clear and good arguments for diversifying the faculty of our schools, as there are measurable benefits to having faculty of color.  I also think that schools need faculty of color because that is the only way they are going to find out what they are missing. Hiring faculty of color means that a schools doesn’t just gain new perspectives, but they will have to re-examine long-held ones. Hiring me meant that after my first year teaching The Gangster We Are All Looking For, given the enthusiastic response from students, I was asked to share my lesson plans with my other colleagues so that they too could teach it alongside The Things They Carried. No matter where I teach, hiring me means that an Asian, female, immigrant experience will allow me to look at the curriculum through those lenses. 

When asked about how The Gangster We Are All Looking For reflects the experience of VietnameseAmericans, Le Thi Diem Thuy said:

I will allow that every element in this book came from a personal passion, to wrest Vietnam the place (homeland) back from Vietnam the war, and to show Vietnamese people who carry entire worlds — of grief, of longing, of love — within them, and have something to say about those worlds.  Who they are, what they have to say, and how they say it, is not incidental to the story, it is the story.

We need to make sure that when we tell our students stories, they have the whole story.  Every person in the story has to have a voice. I am honored that my calling is teaching, and that I am able to give voice to people that were previously unheard.  Recently, I met with parents of an Asian student who wanted to hear about my current school’s curriculum. Their specific question was, “How are we represented in the curriculum?” They wanted to know when their child could see himself in something we studied. I felt proud that I was able to answer that I taught Inside Out & Back Again, a novel in verse about a Vietnamese immigrant’s experience. Through that book, I am able to teach about immigration of many other cultures as well. The parents were satisfied, but they also expressed surprise. “How long has this been in the curriculum?” they wondered. “We had no idea.” It wasn’t until I answered them I realized it myself: “We have been teaching it for three years.” Since I started teaching at this school.

Like the backpacks worn by the soldiers in The Things They Carried, teachers are weighed down with the baggage of a pre-existing curriculum, a curriculum that has sometimes existed for so long, no one even knows why it still exists. Maybe the faculty has not changed composition for years, and they cannot see why the curriculum should change. Diverse faculty provide new lenses. Faculty of color in mostly white independent schools offer fresh perspectives. When I was able to finally envision a curriculum that felt true to my experience, I felt a huge weight lifted off of me. We as teachers should not let our students carry the burden of curriculum

Using Literature to Eradicate Xenophobia: One Educator’s Response to COVID-19

By Thu Anh Nguyen

“No one cares where you’re from.”

Such a short phrase, and yet so damaging. In one of my first years teaching at this school, some students had left an anonymous note on my desk. The note was two pages full of hurtful and racist language, but what I remember most was that particular sentence. 

In the weeks and months since COVID-19 appeared, many worse racist things have been said and actions taken against those perceived to be in the Asian community. Asians have been physically harmed and verbally harassed. Every time I read an article about these incidents, or heard about them on the radio or in the news, I kept remembering the note left on my desk, that no one cares where I’m from.

If they actually cared, if they understood, then their empathy would not allow such cruel behavior and words. 

I started to wonder how I might make people care about where I’m from, how I might address the xenophobia and racism against Asians since the COVID-19 disease was publicized as the “Chinese virus” and blamed on the Asian community. Books, for me, have always been an answer to challenging questions. Reading widely about the various Asian experiences is more important now than ever.

I have spent much of my time as an educator concentrating on providing mirrors to my students so that they can see their identities reflected in the works that they read. Right now, I am also very consciously making sure I include Asian voices and perspectives to provide windows to non-Asian readers so that they develop the empathy necessary to recognize and combat xenophobia and racism. 

Luckily for all of us, there are so many good, complex, and contemporary books for all ages about the Asian experience. I have taught Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (Macmillan) to middle and high schoolers. Students love the graphic novel format, and the perspective of the young Chinese narrator allows readers to explore common microaggressions and racism committed against Asian students.

Yang also recently released Dragon Hoops (First Second), and it has been a huge hit with my middle school sports-loving students because of its basketball theme. Even if they are not Asian, students can relate to the Asian main character in this book through the lens of sports, and that ability to connect is the first step in understanding where someone is from. 

Just three months ago, when things seemed much simpler, a seemingly lighthearted book was published by HarperTeen, and I devoured it. Loveboat, Taipei by Abigail Hing Wen is about a Taiwanese girl who grows up in the United States and is sent by her parents on a summer pilgrimage to Taipei to learn about her heritage. The “Loveboat” experience is famous among Asian Americans and is similar to pilgrimages in other cultures such as Birthright Israel trips. In the 414-page novel, it’s not until page 351 that the main character realizes the racism that her family has had to endure. Once she has that realization, she and her friends can’t help but talk about all of the stereotyping they too have endured.

I think it’s crucial that the book doesn’t even touch the topic of racism until it’s mostly over. By then, you have gotten to know the characters. You have laughed with them, and at them. You have sympathized with the teenage experience of wanting to set out on your own while feeling held back by your parents. You have fallen in love with the characters, and so you are ready to be sad when they are sad. You are ready to be outraged when someone makes fun of the way they talk. Your ears are more open to hearing the multiple stories of how Asians have been mistreated through the specific examples of how the characters have been mistreated. That is the beauty of the literature: It opens us up more so that if we have not experienced something, it allows us to imagine experiencing it.

As I was writing this piece, I was working from home while trying to keep my own young children occupied. My 7-year-old son was reading Bao Phi’s A Different Pond (Capstone Young Readers). It’s the subtle and beautiful story of a father and son who go fishing together. As they sit quietly and wait for fish, the father talks about growing up in Vietnam, a different pond from where they are now in the United States. We so often live in our own worlds, unable to envision what it is like in others’ landscapes. It is as if we are fishing from different ponds. 

This is a time for more understanding. Cultural literacy is about fluency in another culture, its customs and beliefs; it is understanding gained through literacy. In A Different Pond, the father tells his son stories so that at the end of the book, when he’s drifting off to sleep, the boy “will dream of fish in faraway ponds.” The boy is now able to do what he had not been able to before, which is to imagine his father’s world.

Literacy in Asian culture, when so many people are misunderstanding and harming each other, is vital. We must continue to read stories that reveal to us the truths of others so that we can know where we are all from, and care for each other with more kindness and grace.

Recommended reading (in order of reading level from youngest to adults)

• Drawn Together by Minh Lê (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

• A Different Pond by Bao Phi (Capstone Young Readers)

• Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang (First Second)

• Butterfly Yellow by Thanhhà Lai (HarperCollins)

• Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park (Clarion Books)

• Frankly In Love by David Yoon (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Reader)

• Loveboat, Taipei by Abigail Hing Wen (HarperTeen)

• I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir by Malaka Gharib (Clarkson Potter)

• The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai (Algonquin Books)

• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)

Addressing Tough Topics through Middle Grade Literature

Join four middle grade authors as they discuss the importance of using fiction to introduce tough topics to middle grade readers as part of an educator-led moderated conversation. They will discuss how to best use their books in the classroom to address these tough topics with children. This panel will cover difficult subjects and social emotional learning, such as divorce, drug addiction, childhood cancer, and cultural identity, in a sensitive way.