Printer FriendlyThe following lecture was presented by Professor Hai B. Pho, Professor Emeritus, on Thursday, December 4, 2003, at a series entitled: "If This Were The Last Lecture I Would Give, What Would I Say?" organized by the Multi-faith Council of the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Some Lifetime Lessons
I must commend Reverend Imogene Stulken for this unique lecture series and thank her for inviting me to speak today. I must confess that when she first asked me to speak in 2001, I gracefully declined promising her that I will do it at a later date. In truth, at that time I was not ready to give such lecture since I was not prepared to tell my students and colleagues what is important to me or what they should know about me. Besides, what can I say how much I have learned about the meaning of life and who am I to give advice on such mighty, fundamental questions?
After my retirement, and supposedly having more time on my hand, I could no longer find a good excuse to refuse Imogene's reminder and since I have moved far away from this campus, I am less reticent to share with you my thoughts of the lessons that I have learnt of life. However, please remember that this may not be my last lecture since I do not know what else life has in store for me. The one thing I know for sure is, as some sage once said: "L'homme propose mais Dieu dispose" or poorly translated as: "man makes plans, but it's God who decides."
Ever since I can remember of my past, from my childhood to my entire adult life, only one persistent concern that constantly bothers me and that I don't seem to be able to escape is the pressure on me to learn. Even now after I have gone into retirement, I am still being driven by some inescapable circumstances to learn. Last year when we decided to re-locate to San Diego, California, I had to re-study the Rules of the Road and to take the California driver's license test over again. So I would not be run off the freeway, I had to learn to drive at an average speed of 80 miles an hour and even at this break-neck speed I have to expect massive SUVs and pick-up trucks to tailgate me almost all of the time. So that I might not appear to be a foreigner from the East (that is east of the Mississippi) I had to learn a new set of Mexicali vocabulary and correctly pronounce such names as La Jolla, El Cajon, or El Camino Real. I have yet to master the Californian instant, on-demand, fast-pace life-style. Almost overnight, hundreds of new track houses completed with fully landscaped lawns and giant palm trees are up for sale starting from the low 600 thousands. Buyers are expected to be pre-qualified, to camp out for their turns and to quickly sign the purchase agreement or else their dream home would be sold to the buyer next in line. When the economy took a downturn, the voters could not wait for the necessary corrective measures to take its course. Instead, they sought a quick-fix solution. As you know, they sought a recall of the governor and elected in his place a fast-talking ambitious Hollywood actor.
When I was a child, like all children, I loved to play and hated to study particularly rote learning as was the prevailing method of teaching at the time. I can tell you now that I hardly remember anything except a few children's rhythms and dozen of popular sayings. One of those verses that for some strange reasons still sticks in my mind says: "Co cong mai sat, co ngay nen kim" literally translated as that "If you keep filing down a piece of raw iron, someday you will get a sharp needle." This, figuratively speaking, means that if your study hard enough to develop your brain, someday you will have a sharp mind. So, I was made to believe that even though I might not a smart kid, all I had to do was to apply myself hard enough and I would someday become somebody. But even before I finished my 5th grade the First Franco-Vietnamese War came and all schools were closed. After 3 years of running away from all these battlefields I was given the opportunity to start my high school education in Belgium. Study has never been easy for me and to master a whole new language and making up a 3 year gap in my education were very hard. After 3 1/2 year of schooling in Brusselles when I just about developed the proficiency in the French language and almost ready to get my high school diploma, my country was divided into two and I could no longer receive the financial support from home in Hanoi as the city and Vietnam north of the 17th parallel came under the control of the Eastern Bloc. I had to pack up and took a cargo ship across the Atlantic to Waltham, Massachusetts, where I can work and earn a little bit of money to finish my high school education.
Quitting school and go to work full-time after my high school diploma was never an option. I had to apply to go on to college and fortunately I received a full tuition scholarship for 4 years to complete my BA. Work to pay for my education now was the only way that I can continue to go on to get my higher education and there were plenty of menial jobs for me to do so, although it took much more time for me to get my Ph.D. degree, I found that if I work hard at it, I could do it. Shortly after I received my terminal degree from Boston University and my tenure from then Lowell State College, I got an offer to teach at the University of Saigon, then South Vietnam. Since my Vietnamese language skills was totally inadequate for lecturing at the university level, I had to literally translate all my lectures into Vietnamese and to study unfamiliar Vietnamese terminology and issues to be able to address the specific need of my new audience. Before my 2 year leave-of-absence without pay with Lowell State College was over and before I had fully converted my Political Science curriculum into Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese state collapsed and I came back to Lowell re-learning everything that I had left behind.
One thing that I have learnt throughout my personal experience was that changes, and occasionally drastic changes to one's life and career, do happen and I have to be prepared to face it or, more exactly, I have to be prepared to study hard to master new and different demands in changing situations. For me, war, WW II, the first Franco-Vietnamese War, and second US-Vietnamese War, imposed drastic changes on my life. I learned that war was a great equalizer. I may be born in a wealthy and highly privileged family but my father's early death, the Allies' bombing that destroyed the family factory, and the scorched earth military campaigns between the French and the Vietminh Front, all reduced everybody who survived to the level of bare essentials. You must scrap every bit of resources, tap on every ounce of your energy and exercise all your mental capacity to deal with the simple tasks of daily survival. I realized that I must force myself to face adverse situations as they come, to do the best that I could and can not ask any question or demand any favor. There is no sense or logic as to what happens to one's life.
However, I also realized that I had received most generous and timely support from many family members and untold numbers of acts of kindness from total strangers. The path to complete my formal schooling was a long 30 years and I know that without the help of these people I more likely would never have completed my final degree. If I can draw any conclusion from this experience is that without their help I alone, even with all my effort and hard work, could not have reached my ultimate goal. And my debt to them can never be repaid. In return, all I can do to repay their kindness is to try to help as much as I could those, relatives or strangers, who are willing to work hard to pursuit their own educational development.
Finally, I have to admit that Lady Luck, or you might call it good fortune, or providence, or the divine grace of God, also plays an enormous role in my life. When I look back to my past I could so easily have been a war casualty, a victim of deadly diseases so common in third world countries, or more likely a pauper so financially strapped that I had to give up my educational pursuit and engage in some dead-end jobs. You see, when I was still a kid I loved to sneak around to watch the firefights between the Japanese and the Vietnamese guerrilla fighters. To get away from them and later on from the French expeditionary forces I was taken to live for three years in the tropical jungle forest that was full of deadly snakes and malaria infected mosquitoes. Had it not been for the God-sent Japanese war damage reparations that helped restore the family brick factory and finance my overseas education I probably would have been drafted as a soldier into the French neo-colonial Army, the North Vietnamese People's Liberation Army, or the South Vietnamese Nationalist Army to fight against my own countrymen and end up as one of the tens of thousands casualties of these wars. If I were so lucky to survive this nearly 30 years of on-again and off-again warfare period, I most likely would become an unskilled laborer knowing only how to shoot and kill.
So you see, the conclusion that I can only draw from my personal life experience is to study as hard and learn as much as I can at every turn of my life. I must be thankful for the smallest act of kindness that is given to me no matter who is the giver. And I should never be so proud or so self-confident of my own success as to forget the fact that much of my survival and achievement is due largely to Lady Luck, or providence, or the divine grace of God. I am constantly reminded of a quote from a 19th century Chinese scholar - general whose writings my father translated and published in a manuscript before his death in 1944. This scholar, Tang Quoc Phien, said that:
Success or failure is the will of God. Praise or condemnation is the right of men. However, to work hard and do all I can at my task at hand is both my duty and responsibility.
Thank you very much for your attention.
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Hai Pho is Professor Emeritus, Political Science, UMass Lowell.