Talking writing with eight-year-olds in Vietnam

Greetings from Southeast Asia on the 50th anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam after a struggle of a century-and-a-half to be free of foreign powers.

The last and most prominent of the invaders was the United States. Over here, it’s called “the American war,” chronicled in detail—I learned that more than 60 journalists were killed before it was over—in a museum called “Remnants.”

On April 30, 1975—when I was 17, a year away from draft age—Saigon fell as North Vietnamese tanks broke through the gates of South Vietnam’s Independence Palace. Over the next 24 hours, American helicopters whisked away about 7,000 Americans and South Vietnamese from rooftops. Many thousands more, most of them Vietnamese on the losing side, were left behind.

Fifty years to the day later, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam held a military parade with 13,000 participants, a sculpture of a tank painted gold and huge portraits of Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969), the George Washington of modern Vietnam, a man of extraordinary persistence inspired by our Declaration of Independence. It is for “Uncle Ho” that Saigon was renamed. Hanoi remains the capital.

I landed in Ho Chi Minh City a week after the parade, having crossed the Pacific on the Maersk Kinloss cargo ship, boarding in Los Angeles on Easter Sunday and sailing to Busan, South Korea before flying to Vietnam.

The city was awash in the national flag, a yellow five-pointed star (identical to the white one on a captured Chinook helicopter outside the museum) centered on a blood red field. Often, it is twinned with a red flag featuring a hammer and sickle, capitalism booming from every storefront. I ate on the cheap and got a buzz cut and a shave from a guy who’d set up shop on the sidewalk, a rickety table with mirror, comb, scissors and shears. Five minutes and four bucks!

My host was a singer-songwriter from New Orleans named Wallace “Trey” Yip, a guitarist in the mold of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott with homage to Dylan. I befriended Trey years ago when I was writing in Los Angeles and he played local coffee houses. In Ho Chi Minh City he teaches second grade at an elite international school in which storytelling is the first class of the day, followed by a group swim. Not quite the grade school I remember.

We shared “hot pots” of clams, prawns and fish in clear broth—Lẩu Hải Sản—with his Vietnamese wife Van; zipped around on motor bikes (of which there are millions, you better look five times before crossing the street) and shared the stage at a local dive in front of ex-pats from around the world. I told a seafaring story—did you know that the United States ships blood plasma around the world in refrigerated containers?—and Trey played a set of originals.

Among his memorable compositions was “The Family Song,” with the line: “You belong wherever you say you belong, but we ain’t leaving without you.”

That evening, Trey invited me to reprise a most particular passion: Would I like to talk to his students about writing? 

I walked into his classroom the next morning and it was 1966 again. I  was in the third grade, the Orioles had just stunned the baseball universe by sweeping the Dodgers in the World Series, 96 Tears by ? and the Mysterians was at the top of the charts and a veteran teacher named Jean Ortgies was reading E.B. White aloud to us after recess, lights turned off, heads resting in our arms on the desk.

It was miraculous, so indelible that I visited Mrs. Ortgies (1908-2006) near the end of her life to thank her. Invited to give a eulogy at her memorial, I unbuttoned my dress shirt at the podium to reveal a Cat in the Hat t-shirt.

Stuart Little—published in 1945, preceding White’s Charlotte’s Web by seven years —was my favorite, the part about the eponymous mouse rowing a miniature canoe in Central Park especially bewitching. That very day I decided to become a writer without knowing what that might entail besides, you know, writing. On loose-leaf, I scribbled my first story about an obese lion who needed to go on a diet in order to visit his friend—a mouse—in a baseboard cranny.

All of which I told kids from a half-dozen different countries in “Mr. Wallace’s” class. I forgot to tell them that I then bugged the heck out of my aunt, who worked in an office at Hertz rental car, to type it up, sensing that a print version made it official. About a dozen years later, her insurance salesman husband gave me a manual typewriter when the local Met Life office switched to electric. On that battleship gray Royal I banged out my first stories for the fledgling City Paper in 1977.

In another classroom in a more recent epoch, an art teacher in Overlea discovered that reading aloud to her students helped them focus on drawing, which makes sense since the greatest movie screen of all time is the imagination, the one on which I saw a mouse named Stuart fall into a garbage scow before being rescued by a small bird he loved.

“I would read to my young artists as they created,” said Betty Walke, a Catonsville resident who taught elementary school art before retiring in 2023. “It was a strategy to get them to be quiet and focus on their art. It was also a way to mesh art with science, history and culture, even math.”

I didn’t read aloud to the Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and British kids sitting in a semi-circle before me, unsure how well yarns about steamed crabs and baseball would travel. So I talked about what a thrill it was to be their age making up stories on the page, a world of my own, my very own and no one else’s.

And how ingenious their teacher’s approach to keeping their stories alive when they’ve written themselves into a corner,  a simple game equal to all the expensive creative writing programs in a world that no longer reads.

When a student says they’re stuck, Mr. Wallace conducts them to a trio of dice and asks them to roll. Whatever comes up corresponds like this: Between 3 and 7 requires the next chapter to be an “epic failure;” 8-10 is a small failure in which a character learns an important lesson; 11 to 13 calls for a surprise success but, significantly, not the success the character had hoped for. And rolling between 14-18 results in “huge success,” something bigger than anything the character could imagine in their dreams.

At the 20 minute mark it seems I had gone on too long about the gift of doing what you love for a living, how art is more important than money (take that chestnut back to the dinner table, kids) and a nearly vanished oddity called the daily newspaper.

Trey turned to me and said, “Start taking questions. They’re getting bored.”

The questions were predictable—How old are you? Do you have children? Where do you live?—until a girl halfway around the circle raised her hand.

“Why did you marry your wife?” she asked, making me wonder what was going on in that kid’s house.

Which one, I said and everyone laughed.

But that’s a story for another day.

Rafael Alvarez is the author of the Orlo & Leini tales. Now home in Greektown, he crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans this year on cargo ships. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com