There's an old familiar trope of the new kid in class being the object of alienation and mistreatment by their peers...but my classmates, a diverse ragtag group of 5th graders, not only welcomed me as a new immigrant, but they also taught my Dad that he was enough.

It was August of 1997 and my parents, brother and I had left Vietnam and started our new life as immigrants in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My 10-year-old self didn't speak a word of English and of course, that crippling language barrier affixed like a elephant-sized boulder on to the already hefty anxiety of being "the new kid in class."

But to my surprise, the ethnically diverse group of 5th graders at Briarglen Elementary was warm and welcoming, and they were curious in the most childlike way at the first Vietnamese immigrant to join their class. A group of girls took the initiative to greet me and showed me the ropes. I still keep in touch with some of these girls today, and proud of the beautiful women and mothers they've become.

At home, Dad had started his first job in the US as a minimum-wage toilet cleaner at LaQuinta Inn, a far cry from the prestigious position he previously held in Vietnam as an English translator to the country’s richest business professionals. His mode of transportation was this rickety $50 flea market bicycle. Because even though it can take new immigrants several months to years to assimilate to a new country, obtain driver licenses, and save enough money for a used car - Dad simply did NOT have that kind of time. He had a family to feed.

Even though Dad's stoic strength never revealed it, I know this steep descend down the socioeconomic ladder was an agonizing bruise to his ego. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, like most Vietnamese at the time, Dad walked out of the scorched ashes of war with nothing but the clothes on his back. Over the course of 10 years, he built an English-teaching business from his self-taught knowledge, and rode the wave of the lifted US-Vietnam trade embargo in the late 1980s to rise to the top, standing next to some of the country's wealthiest businessmen who desperately needed an English translator in this new open economy.

Once his economic condition improved, Dad poured all that money into his children. “If my children cannot have better than me, then they cannot have worse,” Dad fervently vowed in a letter he penned to my uncle in 1992. This man had buried 2 of his infant children when he had no money to buy food and medicine for them, and he was determined to compensate the ones who survived with what he couldn’t do for his angel babies.

He was so staunchly dedicated to assuring his children that they shall have no less than their peers, that he promptly brought home a brand new Vespa the day after he caught a 5-year-old me aimlessly staring in the direction of my neighbor's newly purchased vehicle. Years later, I would learn from that same letter that Dad had taken out a few loans to finance the Vespa.

So you can guess how much of a failure Dad must have felt like when he had to take me to our first parent-teacher conference at Briarglen Elementary on the backseat of his flea market bicycle. In Vietnam at the time, status symbols were highly revered, and bicycles were looked down as a transportation mode of the poor. He didn't say it, but I know Dad was worried I would become the subject of ridicules once my classmates saw us arriving at school on an old bicycle.

But as we were approaching the school entrance, out of the dimly lit path on that crisp Autumn night, we heard some friendly voices chirping and jaunty hands waving: "Hiiiiiiii Aaaaaaan! See you inside!" It was my ragtag band of buddies, all from the same working class neighborhood, just saying hi, and that was all. No ridicules. No cruel remarks.

If you could mute the whistling wind brushing through the chattering branches, you would be able to hear the burden on Dad's heart exhaled out of his soul and released into that chilly Autumn night, like a caged bird that was finally free.

Later, when we came home, Dad caught Mom up on the night’s event, and through jolly laugh, he observed, “American kids are so innocent. They just waved at us going by on the bicycle and said hi like they don’t care!”

They never cared, Dad. They never cared.