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Tuan Bui
Emilia Grant
UWRT1103
November 3, 2014
A Journey of Literacy: In Four Vignettes
In all of our lives, there is a moment in which we learn to read, write, and comprehend symbols;
a time when the world opens up to us. We can then express and immortalize our thoughts and feelings,
as well as view the thoughts and feelings of others during and before our time. My moment starts when
I was four going on five years old in 1999, a long time ago depending on who you ask. I was living in a
shady part of High Point, North Carolina. It only had a population of about 100,000 people, but to me it
could have been the whole world. My family had moved to the United States just two years prior.
Having sold everything thing they had just to move here and living on government assistance, we could
not afford many luxuries such as books. My first two books were donated by a local church. I
remember them vividly, however, I cannot recall the titles. One was a children's book filled with
nursery rhythms and the other was a science book about the universe. I did not know English at the
time and could not read them, nor could my parents read them to me either. I just stared in awe at the
colorful illustrations on each page and wondered what the weird symbols meant. I even remember
drawing pictures with crayons and pens in the book. Looking back now, I did not fully appreciate the
value of those books. Books were a new thing to me, they were as foreign as I was. I took those books
for granted, there were other children out there who did not have books to enjoy and here I was
drawing all over my first two books. I never got to read those books from my childhood. We moved
houses a few years later once my parents got stable jobs and the books got lost during the transition.
We may have taken them with us, we may have not. A few years back, I was bored and tried looking
for those books again so I can finally know what those pages said, but they seem to be lost with the

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passage of time. This was the prologue chapter in my book of life. It is a shame that I never even got a
chance to read my first book or even remember it's name.
Like many other children in the United States, I learned to read and write in elementary school.
It all started in kindergarten at Fairview Elementary School with learning the alphabet. We would do
the typical things children across the nation would do, learn the Alphabet Song, learn the sound of each
character, word association (c is for cat), and vowels and constants. We would practice writing the
upper and lowercase form of each character on guided paper with arrows and dotted lines directing us
on how to write each letter, however, most of the student's writing did not match the computer print that
they were copying from. Everyone's handwriting style was unique. By the first grade, we were starting
to write simple sentences. They were usually very short, around five words, and usually grammatically
incorrect. Even though the spelling would be off and the subject and verb would not agree or would
appear in the wrong order, Ms. Cobain still gave everyone a check mark or a smiley face and placed a
sticker on the assignment. This was still a time when the teachers would read a picture book to the
class. We would take a break from doing our usual social studies, math, and science classes and just sit
crossed legged on the carpet in front of our teacher who would read to us. I will always hold books like
Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Marcus Pfister's The Rainbow Fish, and any book by Dr.
Seuss dearly in my heart. They were a part of my childhood. Story time was a period of only a few
minutes where students would not have to worry about their assignments and just listen to the teacher
read. The first grade was the last year at Fairview Elementary. My family moved to a different county
and I had to transfer schools. My second grade year would be Trindale Elementary with Mr. Dunn. This
was the year that we learned cursive, which I never needed to use, and sentence structure. Gone were
the days of picture books and story time. This was the second grade. In the second grade we read short
chapter books and read independently in a thirty minute block dubbed silent reading. We visited the
library each week and were allowed to check out two books to read during this time. I always checked

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out history and science books while my classmates checked out the Chronicles of Narnia series. The
third grade with Mrs. Rice was when we started taking the End of Grade Tests. We shifted our focus on
reading passages and answering multiple choice questions. We had to demonstrate to people in suits in
Raleigh that we do learn when standards are high and results are measured. This is the point where the
joy of reading was lost. We no longer read for fun or enjoyment, from that moment on, everything we
read was to pass a test.
The more time I spent in the United States and surrounded by people of a different culture, the
more Americanized I became. I lost touch with my Vietnamese culture. My dad noticed this and
decided to teach me how to read and write in my native language. Every day after I got home from
school and finished my homework he would teach me the Vietnamese language using a worn out
textbook. The book was about the size of a pocket dictionary. The binding was falling apart and was
held together by tape. The pages had water damage and were yellowish in color. I believe that this was
the same textbook that my dad has used to teach him how to read and write. He would teach me each
Vietnamese character and the sound it would make. Once I knew the whole Vietnamese alphabet (all
twenty nine characters), I was able to read most words by sounding out the word, much like how I
learned to read in English. I would use a standard notebook to learn to write Vietnamese. As I grew
older, I forgot how to read and write in Vietnamese. I can still speak it when I am talking to my parents,
but I never needed to read or write with it. My dad spent hours of his time after he got off working at a
factory to teach me it, yet I forgot it. I feel bad for wasting his time, but I have traded in one culture and
language for another. I reached a point in life where I had to remember where I came from and in what
direction I want to move in.
By high school, my views about reading had changed from elementary school. I hated it. We
were assigned books to read and we were suppose to analyze them. Now I would have no problems
with this if the books that we were assigned were any good. The books we read throughout high school

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did not appeal to us teenagers and young adults. It is not that our generation hates reading, it is just that
our generation would rather read books like The Hunger Games and the Fault in our Stars over reading
Shakespeare. There is a reason why we do not read Shakespeare in our spare time. We are however,
reading Harry Potter, Twilight, and other popular young adult novels. Given a choice, a vast majority
of us would rather be reading the books mentioned above than reading another Shakespeare play. We
read one every single year at my high school. It is just that Shakespeare does not resonate with us. His
comedies are not funny and his tragedies are not sad. Think about how many people cried at the end of
Romeo and Juliet and compare that to how many people cried at the end of the film Titanic. They have
the same storyline: Two people from different social class fall in love and then tragedy insures. Yet
people cry and feel emotionally attached to the characters by Titanic's end and not the same way about
Romeo and Juliet's end. The problem is that so many of these author's works (that we are forced to
read) are continually analyzed that people idolize these boring, bland, and out of touch novels to the
point that no modern work can achieve the same level of fame or credibility. Writers just want their
work to be enjoyed purely for the substance, power, and emotion of their works. Other writers just want
to make a little money off of their talents. I doubt writers like Shakespeare and Charles Dickens created
their works to be analyzed by high school students decades and centuries after their deaths. Even after
all that time, we still have not figured out Dickens meant when he wrote about the broken wine baskets
in the streets of a Tale of Two Cities or if Moby Dick was a personification of Ahab's inner demons.
High school put me off of reading. I only read one book in high school and that was Harper Lee's To
Kill a Mockingbird my freshman year. It did teach me that I should not judge a man by the color of his
skin; but gave me no insight on how to kill mockingbirds. From that moment on, I would not read
another book in high school. I passed my English classes by using Sparknotes.