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From the desk of the ugly American...

01 Jul 2008 12:37 pm

I mean really, this is just stupid:

School officials in Terrebonne Parish are considering a policy that would require all commencement speeches to be in English.

The proposal comes after Hue and Cindy Vo, cousins who were co-valedictorians at Ellender High School, delivered part of their commencement addresses last month in Vietnamese.

Cindy Vo, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, spoke about high-school memories, friends and the future. Then Ms. Vo, 18, recited a sentence in Vietnamese dedicated to her parents, as they watched. She told classmates that the line, roughly translated, was a command to always be your own person.

A sentence? Just a sentence?? Turns out Vo's parents barely speak English, and people are pissed that she had the temerity to adress them in words they might understand.

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I agree with the school officials. Clearly the parents didn't do a very good job raising their valedictorian daughter. Why reward that kind of failure? 'Be your own person,' indeed!

Posted by gussie | July 1, 2008 12:42 PM

That really is terrible.

Posted by crack | July 1, 2008 12:44 PM

My guess is that the school officials aren't as upset about the sentence in Vietnamese as much as they are that the Vo cousins, being 'exotic' immigrants, had the temerity to even BE the valedictorians in the first place, when I'm sure there were lots of very nice 'real Americans' who would have been much more traditional in their speech. Except for the minor inconvenience that they didn't have the grades...

Posted by JadedOptimist | July 1, 2008 3:41 PM

Lumping Americans with Louisianans is really not entirely fair. Sure they are Americans, but j u s t barely.

Posted by Michael O'Neill | July 1, 2008 4:29 PM

Yeah, those damn Asians really have some nerve if they believe they - like most generations of Americans before them - can come to this country, work/study hard and find success!

At least some upset parents will find consolation in the fact that they can force members of the Vo family to use English when asking them if they'd like fries with their order.

I've got several family members who act like these jackasses in Louisiana. They're family (and I still love them), but they're simply ignorant, lazy-ass people completely lacking in
intellectual curiosity or ambition, yet somehow manage to walk around with a sense of entitlement simply because they're white even though they personally do very little (if anything) to benefit society in any meaningful way other than assuring that employees of the local tavern continue to have a job.

When they see other races jump ahead of them in the social/economic hierarchy; they start to get nasty because, deep down, they know they could better their lot if they simply got off their beer-swilling asses and did something with their lives.

I don't get invited to too many family functions anymore...

Posted by Ingvy | July 2, 2008 9:05 AM

My guess is that the school officials aren't as upset about the sentence in Vietnamese as much as they are that the Vo cousins, being 'exotic' immigrants, had the temerity to even BE the valedictorians in the first place

That's my guess too.

Posted by Persia | July 2, 2008 3:04 PM