ONE DOLLAR (AMERICAN) TUTOR

Burns retells his father’s remembrance of his first year at Boston University in 1947 and the two extraordinary foreign students he roomed with.

Bernard J. Burns—much to his chagrin, he was eternally called Buddy—was born in 1929, a “veritable Depression baby”; the gloomy time hung over his entire childhood like a storm cloud. When he matriculated at Boston University in 1947, admitted on an academic scholarship, he was given an opportunity to begin anew—to refashion himself and attempt to convince people to refer to him as anything other than Buddy. In addition to the daunting nature of the big city (Buddy grew up in Worcester), he was surrounded by older students, veterans of the war, and men who had killed other men in combat; it was an intimidating experience for a 17-year-old boy of provincial origins, a predicament thoughtfully rendered by the author, Buddy’s son. Buddy was fortunate enough to make good friends with two of his roommates, both foreigners, and years later he regaled his son with the fascinating stories of their exploits. Pong Sarisin hailed from Thailand, born into one of the most prominent families in the country (the “Kennedys of Thailand”). His father was the nation’s secretary of state at the time, and his fiancee was the daughter of the prime minister. Fernando Uribe Senior was born in Medellin, Colombia, and his father, Eduardo, founded the newspaper El Diario, a liberal publication that agitated for reform. Buddy’s time with his two foreign friends supplied the kind of education a university curriculum never could—at one point, Pong took him to meet a prince, who turned out to be Prince Bhumibol Adulyadej, the grandson of King Chulalongkorn, “who spent four decades modernizing Siam.”

Burns’ recounting of his father’s stories can be a bit long-winded and personally idiosyncratic—as he admits, these are reports of “an old man’s recollections of life as he knew it,” and they often read precisely as such, even though they are gently dramatized. Still, he intelligently captures a pivotal time in the history of the university, in which it was flooded by soldiers cashing in their GI Bills and changing the landscape of collegiate life forever. Pong and “Ferdie,” as Buddy called him, are two utterly captivating characters, excitingly exotic to Buddy at the time and both caught up in the political tumult of their nations in a way Buddy was not. (Pong’s father led an uprising against the prime minister, and disappeared for a time in the chaos.) Ferdie would become a prominent politician in Colombia and was eventually assassinated by the drug cartels he refused to bow down to. What emerges from this personal narrative is a powerful demonstration of the fact that the immigrants who come to America to work and to live are more often than not motivated by the same aspirations as their native-born counterparts, and often bring with them far more experience and maturity than their new countrymen. “Some, like Pong and Ferdie, are sent here from families that are truly prominent in their necks of the woods, and the American education will enable them to return to pick up the banners and run with them,” Burns writes. “They sit fearlessly in the crosshairs of history.” This is a captivating remembrance, packed with historical and cultural insight.

A thoughtful memoir brimming with marvelous anecdotes.