Phuc

One day before I added SPAN 101B, I waited outside the classroom and sat down next to an adorable, elderly Asian man. Come to find out, his name is Phuc, and he was already enrolled in the class.

I think I sat next to him during one class session. He has this welcoming and sweet presence. He has these deep brown puppy eyes and he's balding, otherwise, he's a silver fox. He looks like someone I would affectionately call "Grandpa Phuc", even though there is no blood relation, kind of like my Uncle Eddie, he's not my uncle through any blood relation, but he is, in fact, yesterday I heard him tell the Spanish Worship Leader that I was his niece. :)

I have a lot of respect for Phuc, he's a native Vietnamese speaker, is well versed in French, and I'm assuming he is either a Spanish major or minor because SPAN 101B is an upper division course. Whenever Profesor calls on him to read a sentence, the whole classroom gets quiet, sometimes it takes him a long time to read the sentence and because of his accent, it can be a little difficult to understand, nonetheless, he still does it, and because of his diligence, his answers to grammatical questions are correct 99.9% of the time. He comes to every class session and is always very eager and attentive.

I beat myself up sometimes because I cannot pronounce certain words or speak like a native Spanish speaker but when I look at Phuc's bravery, my pity party stops. My perspective is that of an American English speaking native, I learned in a linguistics class that outsiders to a language think that foreign language is hard, but native speakers never feel that way. For me to learn Vietnamese would be very difficult, but you never hear a native Vietnamese speaker saying, "Oh my gosh, my native language is so hard." It's natural for them, duhhhh. For his native language to be Vietnamese, learn English, learn French, and learn Spanish, I'm blown away! Most people with Latino heritage won't even step foot into a Spanish class because they're ashamed that they aren't native speakers, I was almost one of them, and it's awesome to know that to some people, stuff like that doesn't even matter.