Retaining Indelible Values In A World Of Constant Changes

I’m sitting in my room, staring out the window at the cold snowy weather, in a country thousands of miles from home, a strong sense of reminiscence hit me with images of the country i hold so much dear, Vietnam. I miss those scorching summer days when i used to take the bus with my friends to Ho Guom Lake to have ice cream, I miss the unexpected torrential downfalls at dawn after school coming home with my dad, I miss the crowded streets with the incessant flow of traffic going back and forth in this vibrant city and above all, I miss my home. There’s just something peaceful and serene about it that makes me fall in love with this city and the people. Its eerily familiar aura has become part of my identity, shaping the person that I am today and the person that I aspire to be in the future.

Amidst all of these spectre about the hometown that i grew up in, the figure of Mrs Nguyen, my beloved former teacher, is perhaps the most deeply entrenched and seemingly intractable in my memory. She was my english teacher at secondary school, the person who enlightened me to reading and writing in this language. In those years, i was somewhat a slow learner and always had a lot of catching-up to do with my peers. I remember being humiliated for my sloppy handwriting and my apparent humble height compared to others of my age. For this reason, I was always shy and had trouble socializing, I barely raised hands in class and was too afraid to ask questions. I was like a little figure in the corner whose disappearance might go unnoticed by everyone, until Mrs Nguyen came along and pulled me out of that shell. She recognized my timidity and tried to engage me in class discussions as much as possible. She even read my essays in front of the class and told me that i had a propensity for English and should never let anything get in the way of me honing that capacity. It was the first time anyone has ever paid recognition to my work and somehow, it empowered me to try even harder and break out of the comfort zone that i created myself for years.

Somehow, magically, that desire not to let her down, coupled with my teenage ego at that time, got me selected as one of the members in my school’s elite team to compete in the National English Competition. More than anyone, Mrs Nguyen was the most thrilled to share the joy with me and at the same time, most dedicated to my training process. She gave me a book called Wonder which ignited my love for reading ever since. The most memorable lesson I got out of it was: “if you have the choice between being right and being kind, choose kind”. More than anything, Mrs Nguyen was like my second mother, always caring and loving, helping me get through obstacles by obstacles, casting the perpetuating self-doubt that i have about myself to become more confident in my abilities. If it were not for her, i would not have known The picture of Dorian Gray, a masterpiece by Oscar Wilde, in which he postulated my favorite quote: “To be good is to be in harmony with thyself. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others”. She was the one who introduced me to the wonders of literature and how the power of words can change the status quo dramatically. We used to spend hours reading books in her house, forgetting about the notion of time, just us and the magical world of words. Her favorite author was Ernest Hemingway, hence, virtually everything he writers about becomes a topic of discussion for us. Through the medium of writing, she instilled in me such values that i shall never forget: “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men.

True nobility lies in being superior to your former self”. Thanks to Mrs Nguyen’s relentless dedication and unwavering support, i was able to scale such heights of success that i would never have imagined. Towards the end of junior school, i got the second prize in the English competition on the national scale, with maximum points in speaking and writing, an accomplishment seemingly far out of reach for a girl who could not even communicate confidently with others like me at the time. Every single lesson that she taught me has become a guiding beacon for the perspectives that i choose to adopt on life. I have and always will strive to become a better version of my yesterday self and have kindness in every decision that i make. As Oscar used to remark: “Keep love in your heart, for a life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead”.