Learning to Cope : Students and Parents Struggle to Renew Themselves in Spring

It is the season of flip-flops and shorts as spring unfolds at La Quinta High School, that time of year for big wins in boys’ baseball and girls’ softball and visions of championships, of college acceptance or rejection letters that will guide future dreams.

At La Quinta, the school where I graduated 17 years ago, it is also the season of the Sadie Hawkins and prom dances and the fears of moms and dads about gangs.

Inside the school cafeteria one night in March, about 30 Asian parents attend a meeting with the principal and two Vietnamese experts. It was a long time in coming. More than 600 phone calls by Vietnamese-speaking translators had extended the invitation to La Quinta homes.

That for a turnout of 30. Principal Mitch Thomas is grinning with victory. This is a first. As high as they value education, the Vietnamese parents tend to have little school involvement, entrusting teachers with their children. In the old country, teachers are revered just less than religious leaders. Teachers--not parents--often decide a Vietnamese child’s vocational path.

But frequently hysterical TV news reports about this gang or that have escalated anxiety, and you can see it in the parents’ faces, pursed and focused under fluorescent light panels. They sit at rows of tables where by day their children crowd together with food trays of pho and other popular Asian dishes the school now serves.

First Tony Doan, a Vietnamese specialist for the city of Westminster, passes out a bilingual flyer titled “Successful Parenting.” His first item: the parents’ role in bringing up their children in American society.

He explains how society here encourages children to think for themselves, speak their minds and challenge authority. Your children are growing up American, he says, and you need to help them fit in to a new culture.

This, of course, is anathema to immigrants of a society where a parent’s wisdom is the final word and customs have been passed down for generations. Several of the parents remain expressionless; one or two nod.

The majority of his talk is about gangs, how to avoid gangs, how to spot gang activities, the dangers caused to the community by gangs, how to defend yourself and your family against gangs. It is obviously a huge concern to many families, but for these who feel like foreigners still, there is the consuming worry of things unknown.

“My boy says the gangs wear certain clothes. Can’t you make the students wear uniforms so they don’t fight over gang clothes?” one mother asks sharply.

Her question is translated for Principal Mitch Thomas by Thanh Tang, vice president of the Associated Student Body, who then translates the answer into Vietnamese for the woman.

No, Thomas says, we can’t. Uniforms are not the answer to this problem, and gang members will just find a different way to identify themselves.

Those items--recently, bandannas--are forbidden on campus, and I watched this enforced one day.

A campus supervisor ordered a girl with a bandanna tied scarf-like in her hair to remove it. In a taunt at the supervisor, she later put it back on, and the principal was immediately flagged. He sized it up and decided the scarf was OK. The fuss was defused.

“My son says he tries to stay away from the gangs, but you can’t always tell who they are,” another mother says, standing with her hands on her hips. “What about a list of the names of gangbangers? Could we get that?” Thomas assures them that most of the gang members are known on campus, and despite what students say, most everyone knows who they are. But more importantly, he knows.

The woman persists. But why can’t we have the list? Can’t you just make a list and pass it out to us right now?

The dialogue quickly moves to helping children stay away from “bad friends.”

So many of the questions--and the answers--reveal cultural divides between an authoritarian and democratic society. The Asian parents want stronger control wielded on the campus: Just tell them to do it. Make them do it.

Teen-agers of all nationalities hate this like a curfew but the friction between Vietnamese parents and their American-raised children is magnified. Because nearly 60% of La Quinta’s students are Vietnamese, this conflict is something teachers and students face all the time.

*

Loco Nguyen, 18, is a Vietnam-born senior who left his homeland by boat 12 years ago with his father and four brothers. In the crush and chaos of people cramming aboard and pushing off to sea, his mother was inadvertently left behind. The same day she gave birth to a boy, Loco’s brother, to this day a stranger.

“The first time I saw her picture, I didn’t recognize her,” he says simply, deceptively unemotional.

Not knowing the language, his father worked as gardener and church janitor for a few years, struggling to support his sons in Seattle, where a relative had sponsored them. Loco’s mother felt she could not leave aging parents in Vietnam, so she has remained there.

Loco’s father later decided the boys needed a mother to cook and clean, so he remarried and resettled in Garden Grove, where he works as an auto mechanic.

Their exodus for freedom has come at a price. Loco says he and his brothers are somewhat distant from their father. One brother works at a $7 an hour job back East and thinks it’s the best he will achieve. One brother is in juvenile hall, “a gang member” whose brushes with the police have put him on a downward spiral.

Loco dreams of rising above all that, of making a life for himself as a graphic artist.

“I’m hoping to go to a good art school, maybe Cal State Long Beach, then transfer to (the Art Center of Design) in Pasadena,” he says a few hours before the Sadie Hawkins girl-ask-boy dance. (He is a candidate for dance king--L’il Abner--but doesn’t offer the information. Somebody else has to tell me.)

We sit for a long time on the picnic tables in the center of the campus, not far from the student government office in which he has painted a dancing couple on one big wall. He says he sketches first in pencil, then paints. “I’m not into abstract things, but I’m trying to experiment with different media,” he says.

“I’m painting something for Coach (Jim) Perry’s office. The supplies totaled $60. I bought three brushes, a couple of palettes, so it’s pretty expensive. I have to get it little by little. I draw when I have time, but high school is kind of hectic.

“And the problem is,” he adds with a smile, “you don’t get famous until you die.” He hasn’t had a girlfriend yet, and he’s waiting for the right one, so those hassles with a parent have not arisen.

But he lives under a heavy cloud, knowing he is disappointing his father for not going to Catholic school, for not wanting to be a doctor.

He seems to straddle two worlds: his happy school world at La Quinta, where he is a popular member of the student government and co-president of the Vietnamese Club, and his problematic home life, where he barricades himself in a room most nights to watch TV rather than fight with his stepmother.

His closest friends are gentle and protective of him and sense the sadness he does not hide very well. He is dark-haired , Gap-dressed and part of the in-crowd, but when you talk to him you sense he sees himself an outsider.

In that he is like every other teen-ager who feels certain that everyone else has a better life, happier disposition, cooler parents and better cars and sweethearts.

*

Deeper concerns persist, though.

The Centers for Disease Control has investigated the La Quinta tuberculosis outbreak, in which 12 students were discovered with active TB and 198 others with latent TB. Government officials conclude that the findings show a national need to focus more effort on fighting tuberculosis, a disease that only a decade ago was thought to be virtually eliminated in America.

Responding to government shortcomings identified during the La Quinta experience, the county’s top physician asks the Board of Supervisors to add $1.5 million a year to beef up the county’s tuberculosis prevention and investigation activities.

“To my knowledge,” says Richard Jackson, chief of communicable disease control for the State Department of Health Services, “it was the biggest multi-drug resistant outbreak of tuberculosis associated with a school in the United States.”

By mid-spring, the media coverage has died down and the most visible reminder of the TB problem is the daily treatment visits of students at the school nurse’s office.

Panic has been averted by making sure students understand these facts about the disease. First, tuberculosis is generally hard to contract and easy to cure. The TB bacteria is transmitted in minute droplets exhaled in the breath, and a person must have close and lengthy contact with a contagious person, possibly six to eight hours a day for six months, before the bacteria settles in the lungs. A healthy person’s immune system can still suppress the infection.

Some of the bacteria can survive, though, and if or when the immune system becomes weak through age or ailment, the bacteria can revive and spread, damaging the lungs and other organs.

Inexpensive antibiotics taken consistently for six to 12 months can rid the body of any lingering TB bacteria. Active cases require four antibiotics taken simultaneously for up to a year.

In mid-April, a report released by the federal government about a study by the Centers for Disease Control concludes that the outbreak of TB at La Quinta could have been prevented if private doctors who diagnosed a 16-year-old girl had more promptly informed county health officials and her treatment had been monitored.

*

Amber McCammack, 17, never ruminates openly about such things. She does worry occasionally about her boyfriend, though.

One Tuesday during fifth period I run into her in the hallway outside Assistant Principal Derick Evans office. She’s wearing pale purple plastic glasses, reading a textbook covered in brown shopping bag paper. She’s doing detention for ditching class Oct. 24, Miss Buckley’s U.S. history class.

But she is glowing, very happy from the events of the weekend.

There had been that business about her boyfriend eyeing her friend. But after Christmas--he got her a “reallllly nice present, a watch.” It’s a Mickey.

She called him to talk after months of trying to discuss their relationship. He didn’t have anything else to do, she said, so he didn’t put her off this time.

“His voice perked up,” she said. “I said, ‘I want you to be my boyfriend again.’ He said ‘OK.’ It’s different than before; I didn’t know if he was gonna screw around on me.”

So what’s different now? How does she know that officially being her boyfriend precludes that?

“He won’t cheat on me or lie to me; he may look like that kind of person,” she laughs, “but he’s not. He makes me laugh. I love him,” she gushed.

And mom?

“My mom doesn’t like him. Never has. Since that day he left the message on my answering machine,” which her mother thought was rude.

Does she wish they were just friends sometimes? “Only if it’s a real real real big argument,” she says with a giggle.

She looks a bit tired in her purple gray sweat jacket, worn inside out. But she is happier than I have ever seen her about her boyfriend, who asked that his name not be used.

“It feels good now that we’re going out again,” she says. She feels more secure.

“I’ve never had my dad, so (my boyfriend) is my little shield. I’ve known him since eighth grade, five years almost now.”

She opens her Life Sciences textbook with a sardonic smile.

“Chapter 7 is on animal reproduction,” she says with a laugh, a reference to her pregnancy last year, a frequent joke of hers that does not mask her unresolved feelings about having a baby. “I got 59 out of 59 right on that one.”

How did people react after they learned she was pregnant?

“Nobody thought it would happen to me--little miss perfect.”

Has it changed her?

“I was always really nice to my friends but, if someone pissed me off, be -ware. I’m more patient now. Now you have to do a lot to piss me off. Probably the pregnancy, because with a pregnancy, you have to--you know, you’re this walking ball. When I was nine months pregnant I looked five months pregnant. Nobody messed with me because they knew who my boyfriend was, this 6-feet-6 guy.

“I was always the main person being teased. ‘Freckles all over her face, and red hair.’ Always (they teased me) until I went out with (my boyfriend).”

Painful as this sounds, it is nothing compared to the grief she tries vainly to get past, but still has not.

It is by what she does not say that you start to see how excruciating it was to let her baby go. You can tell it was the one person in this world she was ever safe to love with her whole heart, and she had to give her away--in the best interests of her daughter. A family friend adopted her. She has not seen the girl since infancy.

Every so many months, a dispatch of photographs arrives from the adoptive mother--part of their adoption arrangement. They are snapshots of a blue-eyed, red-haired girl that can’t help but make you smile. And Amber does. It buoys her until the next batch is due, and I’ve seen her dark mood when the pictures are late. I can’t help worrying if this Kodak connection to her adopted daughter is prolonging her pain.

A couple of nights a week Amber takes vocational classes to learn clerical skills. That’s the extent of her immediate plans after high school. As soon as she turns 18 and her mom nudges her out the door to take care of herself: She wants to stay with the towering boyfriend and work in an office somewhere.

She is looking forward to that future. She thinks of it as freedom.