Ohio State: Common App Personal Statement

My alarm goes off at 4:50 a.m., and for eleven months it has gone off in a language I do not speak. The buttons on our bakery's proofing oven are in Vietnamese, labeled by my grandmother in a looping script I cannot read. So every morning I memorize positions instead of words: third dial, two clicks right, the one with the chip in the corner.¹We are not a famous bakery. We are a folding table inside a nail salon on Cleveland Avenue, where my grandmother sells banh mi to the men who come in for haircuts next door and the women who get their nails done while their kids do homework on my lap. My job was supposed to be simple: take money, make change, say thank you. Instead, I became the bridge.My grandmother's English stops at "hello" and "five dollar." Our customers' Vietnamese stops at "pho." For two years I have stood between them, translating not just words but tempers. The contractor who insisted his order was wrong. The woman who wanted to know if the pate had pork because she was Muslim and my grandmother had never been asked. I learned to soften my grandmother's bluntness without erasing it, and to slow down a customer's anger until it became a question I could actually answer.²For a long time I resented it. My friends were at the rec center on Saturdays; I was explaining sales tax to a man who did not believe in it. I told myself I was just free labor with a vocabulary. But the morning everything changed was an ordinary one. A regular named Mr. Osei came in looking gray. He had been laid off. He could not pay, and he was too proud to say so out loud, so he just stood there pretending to read a menu he had memorized months ago.³I did not ask my grandmother for permission. I said, in Vietnamese, that Mr. Osei had paid already, that I had rung it up earlier. Then I made his sandwich and added the fried egg he always wanted but never ordered because it cost a dollar more. He thanked me without quite looking at me, which is how men thank you when looking would undo them. After he left, my grandmother counted the drawer, found it short, and looked at me for a long time. Then she said, in Vietnamese, "Tomorrow you teach me to say that."⁴So now, between customers, I teach her sentences. Not "hello" and "five dollar" but "You can pay me next time" and "Are you all right today?" Her accent makes a stranger of the words, and she practices them on the men getting haircuts, who grin and answer slowly so she can catch it. The bridge, it turns out, was never supposed to stay one person wide.⁵I still cannot read the script on the oven. But I have stopped seeing those labels as a wall between me and the work. They are my grandmother's handwriting, and one day I will learn to read them the way she is learning to read our customers: slowly, on purpose, because the people on the other side are worth the effort. At 4:50 tomorrow, the third dial, two clicks right. Then I will turn on the lights, and we will open.