Years later, author reconnects with Grade 2 teacher who helped him learn English

Jamil Jan Kochai knows exactly how much one 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, which was published in July. While his work has been highly praised and received, for much of his early life he could hardly speak 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, Calif., when he was just a year old. Growing up in a household that spoke only Pashto and Farsi, he struggled in school.

As a young boy, he says he felt “a lot of trepidation” on his first day of Grade 2. Kochai had just spent the summer in Afghanistan, where his Pashto improved, but he had forgotten everything that he had learned in English.

“From the beginning of second grade, I was set up to most likely be held back to some degree,” Kochai told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “But fortunately that’s when I met Mrs. Lung.”

Susannah Lung was Kochai’s teacher at Alyce Norman Elementary School in West Sacramento, and he said she could tell almost immediately that he was having trouble keeping up in class, although eager to learn.

“There was an added sense of attention and care from Mrs. Lung. She used to sit with me almost every single day after school and she would just read with me,” the author said.

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.

Eventually, after more than 20 years of trying, he connected with Lung by phone.

“I got to talk to her and we had a long conversation, and I finally got to explain to her how much she meant to me and how much that single year, you know, how much it changed my life,” Kochai said of the initial phone call in which they reconnected.

But it wasn’t until this past summer that the two were able to meet in person.

‘He was full of ideas and just a cool kid’

Lung’s patience and desire to help was different from what Kochai had found with a previous teacher.

“My very first experience was with a teacher who I’m fairly certain hadn’t had too much experience with second-language learners,” he recalled. “Whenever I didn’t understand his instructions, or if I wasn’t obeying him because I didn’t understand English, he would punish me.

“He would set me aside. He would put me in the corner. One day he gave all the rest of the class candies and he didn’t give me one because I wasn’t listening…. But fortunately that was the complete opposite with Mrs. Lung.”

Lung says she remembers that Kochai was a bright kid and that once he got a feel for the language, “he just took off.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed maybe that he would have been a writer specifically, but knew he was going to 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 didn’t know her first name. So even though he asked at the school and the district office, he wasn’t able to track her down, and Google searches didn’t turn up anything.

The path to their reunion started when Kochai mentioned Lung in an article he wrote for the website Literary Hub in 2019.

Lung’s neurologist had read the article and, during an appointment, asked her if she was the teacher Kochai mentioned in the piece. She was.

Then Lung’s husband, Allen, reached out to Kochai on Facebook. Kochai didn’t receive it immediately — he told the Washington Post the message languished in his requests folder, but then in the summer of 2020, he finally saw it and reached out immediately.

That led to the emotional phone call in which he was finally able to tell Lung how much she had helped him. “There was a lot of tears,” he said. “There was a lot of laughter. It was a very special night.”

They 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 Aug. 13, Kochai did a reading for his latest book, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, at the University of California, Davis. He didn’t know that the Lungs had discovered the reading and were in the audience until afterwards, when Allen Lung approached Kochai and introduced himself.

“So I just follow Allen over to where Mrs. Lung was sitting and that was a really beautiful moment for me because, you know, after all those years, I finally got the chance to see Mrs. Lung in person again,” said Kochai, adding he gave her a big hug. “It almost felt a little bit miraculous to me.

“I’d read part of the first book, but it came alive at that reading and it was just thrilling to meet him,” she said. “Every teacher, I think, would want somebody to come back and say, ‘You had something to do with my life.'” 

Kochai documented the meeting in an emotional Twitter thread.

He recalled a saying his father often repeated to him: Hara hewaan rocket da. Kho yawaazey yow lag wor ghwaari chey aloozi.

“My father always used to say in Pashto that every child is a rocket filled with fuel, and all they need is a single spark to lift off into the sky. Mrs. Lung, he said, was my spark,” Kochai wrote in the thread.

Lung is humble when it comes to recalling the help that she offered Kochai, rejecting the notion that others wouldn’t do as she had done.

“If it’s your passion and what you love doing, then it’s not a big deal,” she said. “That’s what teachers do.”

Lung said she’s about halfway through her former student’s second book.

“And yeah, he’s quite a writer. Incredible.”

Written by Mehek Mazhar and Andrea Bellemare. Interview with Jamil Jan Kochai produced by Kate Swoger. Interview with Susannah Lung by Andrea Bellemare.