My years at Gallaudet
By Fat Lam
After spending my youth working some eight years as a tailor, carpenter, and bricklayer, at the age of 21, I bid farewell to my mother, relatives, and friends in Hong Kong. It was the first time I flew on a plane, a Boeing 707, on Northwest Orient Airlines. The plane took off on a bright afternoon on August 10, 1968. Growing up poor and from a slum on a hill, the next three years at Gallaudet changed my life forever.
When the taxi from National Airport took me to Gallaudet, I marveled at the beautiful row houses on the way and on 7th Street, I pictured how the rich occupants in those houses lived. It was only much later that I learned those were poor areas! Having lived in a shabby hut with no running water, those houses certainly looked impressive to me.
The taxi dropped me at the entrance to Ely Hall. Not knowing even Chinese sign language, somehow I was put in a room on the second floor of Ely. Having settled in my room, I sat in a chair in the Ely Hall lounge, reading the day’s paper in the late afternoon when someone signed to me the ASL sign for eating, with one hand. I did not understand what he was saying. There upon an Oriental looking guy who happened to walk by and signed to me with two hands, one hand with two fingers extending out, signifying chopsticks, the other hand imitating a bowl, the two hands near his mouth. Oh! The light bulb shined.
He was Chuzo Okuda from Japan and we became good friends, bridge players, and eventually colleagues teaching in the same Mathematics Department. He received his Ph.D. from Penn State University and I University of Montana. Anyway, back to my weeks at Gallaudet. I took the placement exams as with others, over two days or some periods like that. Some math questions got me stumbled, such as Mary has x dimes and y nickels and John... What the heck did a dime or a nickel mean? I could not answer those math questions. Well, when the results of the placement exams were announced, I was placed as a freshman. What was a “freshman?” First time a man? (In Hong Kong, they are called first year university students).
Here I got something which I believe, very few of you went through. I was taught by a husband and wife! Mr, Leon Auerbach math and Mrs. Auerbach sign language. How many of you were taught by a husband and wife? Furthermore, I could be the only student who had to repeat the sign language course, having confused the sign for the letter “d” for the infamous 4-letter word sign, by extending the wrong finger.
At Gallaudet, I achieved several firsts, my first razor, my first bank account, my first kiss, and probably my first birthday celebration (“probably” is because it was possible that the first celebration of my birthday was after my years at Gallaudet, not during.) All in all, I look back my three years at Gallaudet as the most memorable and probably the best years of my life.
The year 1971 was the last year Gallaudet held its Commencement outdoor, at the present football field, and probably the last year emissaries from foreign embassies
were invited to come confer degrees to students from their countries. One more thing (I probably watched one too many Colombo movies), although I graduated in 1971, you will not be able to find my mugshot among the seniors in the 1971 year book, Tower Clock. Why? Well, well, consult with Sherlock Holmes, my dear Watson.
Fat Lam 8/10/2020 (52 years to the day when I first left HK)