GEAR ESSAY - MY EVOCATIVE OBJECT

Where I come from, Hanoi – Vietnam, dried fruits are considered one of the most popular specialties. They are present in most households during Tet holiday, the biggest celebration of the Lunar New Year, as some kinds of tasty treats or snacks for guests visiting the family. Sugar coated or salted dried plums, mangoes, apricots, and many other fruits are ladies’ favorites.

I am honestly not so into eating these dried fruits because some of them are either too salty or too sweet for me. However, somehow they still appear so endearing to me, and if I go to the old quarters in Hanoi, where these dried fruits are sold in abundance, I will often buy some home. 

When I was 8, my mom registered me for an after-school English course. That time, English was not popularly taught in Vietnamese primary schools and was not considered an important subject. I could merely said “hello”, “hi”, “what’s your name?”, “how are you? I’m fine, thank you, and you?”. The idea of paying $20 monthly for an English course was something fancy in my community during the late 90s, and I was grateful to my mom for affording me such a “luxury”. However, much as I got excited to join the course and started to feel a little more special than other kids at my primary school, I was turned down by how poor my English was in comparison with the English other kids in the after school program were learning. Most of those kids were 2-3 years older than me; they came from wealthy families and had started that English course much earlier. As a top scorer at school, I felt so humbled and so little here. I remember a boy even refused to play with me because he thought I was stupid. For each mark 10 we earned in that English course, we would be awarded with one dried fruit, most of the time a dried apricot. I never got those dried apricots. 

Dried apricots

Now that I am penning these lines, I do not really remember what motivated me to continue the course. Maybe I did not have to power to decide whether to discontinue it: maybe my mom was trying so hard to afford the course and I didn’t want her to waste her money; maybe I was so familiar with being at the top of the class I couldn’t stand being considered stupid by other kids. But I did make a lot of progress with English. I saved the first dried fruit I got for my mark 10 in the course to gift my mom. I’m not sure because I loved her so much I wanted to save the best I had for her, or because I was so eager to show how good I was at learning English, maybe both. Later, I got so many dried fruits that even my mom was not so thrilled to eat them anymore. However, I do know that these fruits did play a role in shaping me who I am today. 

Thanks to the dried fruits as tangible and undeniable proofs of my improvements in English, I could keep my head high and be more confident. As this confidence “snowballed”, I only got better and more comfortable with the language. I became an English language teacher. I have never been so into eating dried fruits, but I know without the confidence I got thanks to their presence as rewards for my improvements, I couldn’t get to where I am today.