Jamil Jan Kochai knows exactly how much a teacher can change a child’s entire life. Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, published in July. While his work has been praised and accepted, for much of his early life he hardly spoke English. Kochai, whose parents are from Logar province in Afghanistan, was born in a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan. His family moved to West Sacramento, California when he was just one year old. Raised in a household that spoke only Pashto and Farsi, he struggled in school. As a young boy, he says he felt “very scared” on his first day of 2nd grade. Kochai had just spent the summer in Afghanistan, where his Pashto improved, but he had forgotten everything he had learned in English. “From the beginning of second grade, I was ready to be held back to some extent,” Kochai told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “But luckily that’s when I met Mrs. Lung.” Susannah Lung was Kochai’s teacher at Alyce Norman Elementary School in West Sacramento, and she said she could tell almost immediately that he was having trouble keeping up in class, though eager to learn. “There was an added sense of attention and care from Mrs. Lung. She would sit with me almost every day after school and just read with me,” the author said. Growing up in a household where only Pashto and Farsi were spoken, Kochai struggled with English at school. His 2nd grade teacher gave him extra reading and writing lessons every day so he could catch up to the rest of the grade, and by 3rd grade he was winning reading comprehension awards. (Submitted by Jamil Jan Kochai) The Kochai family moved and he lost track of his former teacher, but he often thought about how much she meant to him and how she had helped him. Finally, after more than 20 years of trying, she connected with Lung by phone. “I got to talk to her and we had a long talk, and I finally had to explain to her how much she meant to me and how much that year, you know, how much she changed my life,” Kochai said. original phone call to which they were reconnected. But it wasn’t until last summer that the two managed to meet in person.
“He was full of ideas and just a nice kid”
Lung’s patience and desire to help was different from what Kochai had found with a previous teacher. “My first experience was with a teacher who I’m pretty sure didn’t have a lot of experience with second language students,” she recalls. “Whenever I didn’t understand his instructions or if I disobeyed him because I didn’t understand English, he would punish me. “She’d put me aside. She’d put me in the corner. One day she gave out all the other candy in the class and didn’t give me one because I wasn’t listening. . . . But luckily that was the full opposite of Mrs. Lung.” Lung says she remembers Kochai being a smart kid and that once he got a feel for the language, he “just took off.” “I wouldn’t have guessed that maybe he would be a writer specifically, but I knew he would do something creative because he was full of ideas and just a cool kid,” she said. Kochai had often tried to find his former teacher, but he did not know her first name. So despite asking at the school and district office, he was unable to locate her and Google searches turned up nothing. The road to their reunion began when Kochai mentioned Lung in an article he wrote for the website Literary Hub in 2019. Lung’s neurologist had read the article and, at an appointment, asked her if she was the Kochai teacher mentioned in the piece. It was. Then Lung’s husband, Allen, contacted Kochai on Facebook. Kochai didn’t receive it right away — he told the Washington Post the message was in his requests folder — but in the summer of 2020, he finally saw it and reached out immediately. This led to the emotional phone call in which he was finally able to tell Lung how much she had helped him. “There were a lot of tears,” she said. “There was a lot of laughter. It was a very special night.” They had planned to meet, but Kochai said the COVID-19 pandemic — as well as the birth of his child, the publication of his second book and the fall of Afghanistan — delayed any in-person meeting.
Finally a reunion
On August 13, Kochai gave a reading for his latest book, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, at the University of California, Davis. He didn’t know Lungs had discovered the read and was in the audience until afterward, when Allen Lung approached Kochai and introduced himself. “So I just follow Allen to where Mrs. Lung was sitting and that was a very beautiful moment for me because, you know, after all these years, I finally got a chance to see Mrs. Lung in person again,” Kochai said. , adding that he gave her a big hug. “It almost seemed like a miracle to me. “I had read part of the first book, but he came to life in this reading and it was exciting to meet him,” she said. “Every teacher, I think, would like someone to come back and say, ‘You had something to do with my life.’ Kochai captured the encounter in an emotional thread on Twitter. Ten years ago, Kochai thought he had made a breakthrough in his search for the Lung, standing left, when he found a class photo. But the caption didn’t include her first name. (Submitted by Jamil Jan Kochai) He remembered a saying his father often repeated to him: Hara hewaan rocket da. Kho yawaazey yow lag wor ghwaari chey aloozi. “My father always said in Pashto that every child is a rocket full of fuel and all they need is a spark to take off into the sky. Mrs. Lung, he said, was my spark,” Kochai wrote in the Thread. Lung is humble when it comes to remembering the help she gave Kochai, rejecting the idea that others would not do as she had. “If it’s your passion and what you love to do, then it’s not a big deal,” he said. “That’s what teachers do.” Lung said she is about halfway through her former student’s second book. “And yes, he’s quite the writer. Unbelievable.” Written by Mahek Mazhar and Andrea Bellemare. Interview with Jamil Jan Kochai produced by Kate Swoger. Interview with Susannah Lung by Andrea Bellemare.
