Check It Out: A Teen Who Spends Friday Afternoon at the Library

I’m overdosed on teens shooting teens. Of teens having babies out of wedlock. Of teens getting busted for drugs or alcohol. Of teens dropping out of school.

I know--I think we all know--those kinds of stories don’t describe all teenagers or even most of them. But those stories sell. Not in the sense that our newspaper sales are linked to teens in trouble, but in the sense that stories like that catch our attention and say something about society that can’t be overlooked. They have sizzle.

What doesn’t “sell” is a teenager doing his homework in the library. What doesn’t sell is a kid with a backpack carrying not a concealed weapon but a concealed textbook. A kid who hangs out not at a mall on a Friday after school but at the public library.

I know they’re out there, and on Friday afternoon, I talked to one. His name is Huong Ho, who showed up about 3:30 at the Westminster Library, backpack and all.

While an untold number of his peers are playing the angles, Ho, literally, was studying angles for a geometry assignment. After he got that assignment done, he had to finish an outline for his U.S. history class.

Huong is a 17-year-old junior at Marina High School in Huntington Beach. He is Vietnamese and came to America five years ago. He lives with his father and is the youngest of several brothers. When he gazes into the future--his future--it appears to be way, way off in the distance.

But he knows he won’t get there without an education.

That’s what he told me after I asked why, instead of horsing around after school on Friday afternoon, he came to the library.

“I don’t really like that,” he says of whiling away his hours on things less productive.

“I am an immigrant, I’m from another country and came here. I need to survive. I want my parents to be proud of me. I want to be something good, not to hang out. When I grow up, I need to have a family and things like that.”

What about killing time at a mall, I suggest. “I don’t have enough money to go,” he says. “If you just walk around, you don’t learn anything. If you stay home or go to the library, learn stuff, read newspapers, you get more ideas and your education is going to grow.”

I ask Huong if he’s made to feel strange for hanging out at the library. “My friends will say, ‘Oh, you schoolboy,’ but I say it’s not like that.”

In fact, he says, a number of students spend as many as three to four days a week at the library. “We talk, we do homework, have conversations with each other,” Huong says. “If we have free time, we talk about guy-and-girl stuff.”

And why the library? Why not study at home? “It’s quiet, so you can concentrate on things,” Huong says. “You do your work and if you don’t understand, your friends can help you. If you don’t know something, someone who knows it better can show you how.”

That camaraderie may be more important in an immigrant culture where some teens, like Huong, have a good English vocabulary but still speak with a pronounced accent or are still mastering the subtleties of syntax.

Westminster chief librarian Mary Ann Hutton says it’s not unusual on any day to find high schoolers clustered or alone at library tables. “Some libraries may be kind of like a meeting joint, more of a conversation pit, but not here,” she says. The students, most of whom are Asian, “come in and do serious study.”

I explain the American word “bookworm” and ask Huong if he’s one. “I’m not that kind of person,” Huong says. “I’m just like a normal kid. I don’t want to be with bad people, just normal people, and I want to grow up with an education.”

When I told him I feared it might not make interesting reading to write about someone at the library, he laughed. I’m afraid he agreed with me.

Maybe it’s because I was so clueless at that age, but it’s always enlightening for me to learn how teenagers envision the course their lives will take.

“My future will be math or science, doctor or engineer,” Huong says.

But before you think he’s all that resolute, in the next breath, he speaks of a future almost like a distant planet to which he will travel. “That is way far away,” he says, softly. “I think I won’t reach that thing. It seems like a long way.”

I probably should have given him the spiel about how, from the vantage point of high school, the future has always looked a long ways off.

I spared him. Like his predecessors, he’ll find it on his own.

Besides, he’s already one step ahead of the game. Somebody must have told him the future isn’t nearly as scary if you hang out at a library instead of a street corner.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to [email protected]