portrait

She is quiet in what seems a particularly Asian way, hands folded and passive: a stereotype in a seat. Though she's making friends with those girls who can relate to her word-by-word journey, her voice is barely known to her other teachers. She comes and goes, sits and works, sits and thinks. And while, with the aid of the electronic translator we do confirm that even at home she is known as shy, she nods with the slightest of smiles when I say, "You're not shy with me."

I'm thinking, and so is she, of the times when the times interest and vocabulary fizz together and spill out in a gush of excitable pretty-much-English. Then she's herself, a sixteen year-old girl, and not a student not trapped by I-don't-know-how-to-say. She tells me of a squirrel she kept as a pet, of her plans for university, of a relative's unfortunate brush with the casino, of any topic we can muster. For weeks in this way I've been assembling a mosaic portrait, but today, through one exclamation in a little makeshift poem it felt as if I got a glimpse of the real person she is:

My name is Tiên.
My name
is important to me.
I am not Tina!
My name
is from Vietnam.
My friends know my name.