I skipped yesterday, when I spent most of the day shopping, cooking, or talking with Evelyn, Mary, and Barbara about Amigos Anonimos in the 1960s. (It didn't last beyond that decade.)
It's now 1:00 and this is my plan: Write the way a person (not me when I was younger) practices the piano. Simply put an hour in. But in this case I'll be working on two pieces: Minh-hoa Ta and Students in Distress.
Minh-hoa no longer arises at 4:00 AM to bundle newspapers with her sister and get them delivered from her laundry cart as she did when she was a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese refugee in the late 1970's. But she has the same work ethic. Leaving her Oakland home around 7 am, on a typical day she gets to the Ocean campus around 8
am and works for four hours in the International Education office in Cloud
Hall. Then at noon she drives to the Chinatown Center, where she works until 6:30 or 7:00 PM before returning to her home in the East Bay--unless there's a community meeting in the late afternoon. There are also days when she drives back and forth from the Ocean and the Chinatown/NorthBeach campuses (campi is defunct) if there are still more meetings.
I first made one-to-one contact with Minh-hoa Ta when I sent her a message expressing concern for a Russian student-in-distress. She responded promptly, suggesting that I send the student to APASS, (Asian Pacific American Success Program), which helps all students, not just those designated in its title. Later on Flex Day people were talking about Minh-hoa, impressed that she, a non-native English speaker, was so articulate and had risen to several positions of leadership in our college. What insights from her experience could help our students become articulate and successful in the English-speaking world? What could we learn from Minh-hoa Ta that could help us as teachers?
To find out, I contacted Minh-hoa, who took time from her very busy schedule to
have lunch with me in the Pierre Coste Dining Room on August 28. Because
I had a class that kept me from getting to the dining room before 12:10, she
arrived early and kindly asked the dining room staff to remove the pork from a
dish since she knew that I was a vegetarian, and there was no vegetarian option
that day.
This thoughtfulness seems characteristic of Minh-hoa, who won a Citizen of the
Year Award from the Oakland Police Department in 1990. However, the award was not for helping aging vegetarians but rather for helping at-risk and low-income Southeast Asian students in the neighborhood between 1987 and 1990 at the International Institute of the East Bay. There she worked collaboratively with the Oakland Police Department to get the at-risk youth out of juvenile hall and back in school.
Among other earlier awards
was the 1983 Academic Excellence Award given by the California Scholarship
Foundation for being on the school honor roll for all four years of high school at Albany High.
The momentum doesn’t seem to have stopped since Minh-hoa first came to the
United States in 1978 with four sisters, two brothers, and a niece.
They lived in Berkeley for one week with their Vietnamese sponsor, a family
friend who had arrived in the U.S in 1975, and then they moved into a place in
Albany, where she attended high school. However, because they’d arrived
in February, she didn’t begin school until the Fall of 1978. In the
meantime she and her sister attended adult school in the evening
at Berkeley v.e. School with people who were much older than they were. The younger refugees learned English faster than did the older ones, so she and her sisters
wound up helping the older students. In those days she said there were no
Vietnamese dictionaries available to them, so she carried around a big Chinese-English
dictionary. She made friends with the ABCs (American Born Chinese) in
Albany and “all the teachers adopted us,” she said as she proceeded to list
some of the teachers by name.
One of the many jobs that Minh-hoa has listed on her resume is that of
translator, and she recalls helping translate after a fight between a Korean
and a Taiwanese. The Korean had his own translator, but the Taiwanese
student told his side of the story to Minh-hoa in Chinese, then Minh-hoa
translated it into Vietnamese, and a Vietnamese student who had been there
longer translated it into English. As she attended high school and
college from the age of 15 to 22, she also worked in a fast-food place in El
Cerrito Plaza, flipping hamburgers and assuming other responsibilities.
That was in the afternoons from 3:30 to 6:30 and on the weekend from 10:00 to
6:00. She and her sisters also delivered newspapers, rising at 4:00 AM to bundle
up the ones dropped off on the corner of Solano and Pier Street by 4:30.
"We put the newspaper in a two-wheel laundry cart and delivered newspapers to the residents on the Albany Hills and surrounding neighborhood for an hour and a half."
They got back home by 6:30 a.m. and got ready for school.
Even though Minh-hoa’s schooling in Vietnam was interrupted for two years at
the time of the revolution, she thinks that her educational background helped
her succeed. She brought up the disadvantages of groups such as the Hmong
who come without a written language or other formal education in their own
culture. Arriving at the age of 15, she was curious and interested
in school in spite of not always comprehending what was going on. She
never liked science, but she was highly motivated and interested in such things
as Greek mythology. She read a lot and loved Agatha Christie mysteries
like Murder on the Orient Express, Sherlock Holmes, and The Little
House on the Prairie, Steinbeck’s The Pearl, Hemingway’s The
Old Man and the Sea, Margaret Craven's I Heard the Owl Call My Name, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird. But English was still a struggle. She thinks
that the teachers “graded holistically,” which helped her earn a 3.95 GPA in
high school. In her SATs, her math score was very high, but her verbal
score was low. She was admitted to UC Berkeley, where at first she floundered a
bit, not finding her academic niche until she discovered social sciences.
She wound up getting two BA degrees in four years—one Social Welfare and one in Asian-American studies, which included instruction from Ling Chi Wang, who helped establish Asian American Studies and taught its first course in 1969, and Ron Takaki, who spoke out against the stereotype of the Asian as the model immigrant (a stereotype which Minh-hoa seems to model.
She then went on to get her M.S. W. in Social Work
Education at San Francisco State University and her Ed.D in International
Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco.
"I have never stopped working since the day I arrived in this country," Minh-hoa says. "I often have more than
one job."
She came to City College of San Francisco as a counselor in 1989, working for
EOPS (Extended Opportunity Program and Services). For the past 23 years,
she has sponsored the Vietnamese Student Club and Asian Student Club at
CCSF. In 1998 she became the Acting Chair of the Asian
American Studies Department while also teaching Asian American Studies between
the years 1993 and 2005.
She has also had jobs as a social worker,
immigration counselor and youth coordinator, and translator. Her 6-page
Personal Resume, which can best be described as “awesome,” can be found online.
You can also find a video her adoring APASS students made for her birthday
this past April.
The messages of thanks and admiration are clearly heart-felt.
She also appeared in the 1989 documentary “Stories of Change,” which was produced by Teresa Torlini and was featured on Channel 9 (KQED).
As a teacher who agonizes over giving grades, I wondered about her advice to instructors. She would recommend “grading holistically” rather than strictly on the basis of
English-language skills. After all, she shows that English-language skills will strengthen as students win
scholarships and access to higher education.
She also suggests giving very precise instructions for any and all
assignments and to making instruction as clear and un-convoluted as
possible, and stresses, "Provide examples."
What advice does Minh-hoa Ta give to students?
"Reading is the best way to improve writing skills," she says.
She also advises that "Students should seek help from peer and instructor."
But her final piece of advice to students is “Never give up.”
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