![]() Linoleum floors, classrooms with chables (the combo chair-tables of the 70s), blackboards, American flags, loudspeakers from which the wah-wah-wah of adult-speak would drone. Industrial gray lockers ringed its hallways, the compartments narrow enough to repel most of your textbooks but wide enough to collect the trash and detritus from your backpack-your own personal landfill. Nestled in the Susquehanna Valley town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Carlisle Senior High School sprawled as a monolithic mid-century modern block of types: archetypes and stereotypes. My disgust for Hoàng was complicated and simple at the same time: I was the Vietnamese kid at Carlisle Senior High School. I was Dorian Gray beholding his grotesque portrait in the attic, and I was filled with loathing. Hoàng was a fun-house mirror’s rippling reflection of me, warped and wobbly. We’d glance at each other, give a quick nod, and move on, swept along in the rapids of our hallways. God, he hardly looked at me except when we passed in the hallways, me on my way to physics, him on his way to wherever. ![]() Hoàng never did anything to me, and he certainly never said anything to me. That’s what I thought when I first saw Hoàng Nguyễn in eleventh grade.
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