“I Was A Stranger and You Welcomed Me”

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin, Hey, Revisionist History listeners, I have something I want to tell you. This season, we're trying something different and releasing revisionist history episodes in two batches. You're about to hear the sixth and final episode of the first batch. Then we'll be taking a little break so you can enjoy your August vacations in peace. The last few episodes of the season will be released starting in September, but if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, which you should be, you'll get the last few all at once. Subscribe now on the Pushkin channel in Apple Podcasts, or at Pushkin dot fm Slash plus. Can we go around the table and everyone just say their name.

00:01:02
Speaker 2: I'm starting with your.

00:01:03
Speaker 3: Doors White from Alma, Alma United.

00:01:06
Speaker 4: Ian Rankin from Knox Presbyteria.

00:01:10
Speaker 1: John Carston's Gail Presbyterian Church in Elmira, and.

00:01:16
Speaker 5: I'm Lilianda Rankin, married to Ian rank.

00:01:20
Speaker 3: I'm Joyce Gladwell and unfortunately my husband is no long living, but he was very active. I'll be from Elmara in Gail Church.

00:01:32
Speaker 1: I went home to Canada to visit my mother a while back, and I asked her to invite a group of her friends over, so she did. They all showed up on a March afternoon. Three school teachers, a flight attendant, a family therapist, all somewhere between their late seventies and early nineties, all long retired. They sat drinking my mother's tea around her dining room table and tried to remember the time three strangers arrived in our little town in southern Ontario. You know the famous story about my father picking people up in Ordle make this up and driving so quickly from the airport that they were terrified by the time they rock. He was a man of a heavy foots, this crazy englishman. We were talking about December nineteen seventy nine, when my brothers and I were teenagers, too young at the time to truly understand acts of kindness and how they work.

00:02:33
Speaker 6: I think people stepped up when they felt there was something that they could do. And that's why, to go back to your other question, who helped? A whole bunch of people helped me, and they came up because they felt, oh, I can do it that I had.

00:02:50
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood This episode is about the time my parents and a group of their friends agreed to sponsor three refugees from Vietnam, a teenager named Vaughan, his older o King, and a young woman named Lelan. Three strangers who showed up on our doorstep one day.

00:03:20
Speaker 2: How many people were in your group in total?

00:03:25
Speaker 6: That's almost an impossible question to ask, because if you look at it, when we would have a meeting, what we might have ten people at the most.

00:03:37
Speaker 2: But he's the people who.

00:03:38
Speaker 6: Were out behind giving the money.

00:03:42
Speaker 2: The people who were there.

00:03:44
Speaker 6: When they came were totally different people.

00:03:50
Speaker 1: Their group didn't have a name. It wasn't a legal entity. Everyone said. The minister of my parents' church, a man named Jack Boyne, was one of the ringleaders. But Jack Boyne didn't do the paperwork acquired by the government. That was someone else, and lots of other churches were involved as well. Around my mother's dining room, the details were vague because they were vague back then. These were ordinary people going about a big task by ordinary means.

00:04:18
Speaker 7: And the potlarks and pot larks, and there were a lot of people there.

00:04:25
Speaker 1: In the small towns of southern Ontario. Nothing of any consequence is accomplished without potlocked dinners. There are an estimated twenty million refugees in the world whose lives had been uprooted by one crisis after another, the Russian war against Ukraine, the US retreat from Afghanistan, the obliteration of Syria. Every era has its own humanitarian crises, and in the late nineteen seventies, the attention of the world was on Southeast Asia. After the end of the Vietnam War, when the Communists took over what had been South Vietnam, the new government turned on the country's ethnic Chinese. Eight hundred thousand people fled Vietnam, escaping across the Gulf of Thailand in overcrowded boats. Somewhere between two hundred and four hundred thousand of them died at sea. The survivors were called boat people. In response, a group of Canadian religious organizations approached the Canadian government with an idea. The pool of people the Canadian refugee system deemed worthy of resettlement was clearly much larger than the pool of people the government was actually willing to let in. So why not let private citizens handle the overflow, Let small groups of people get together bring refugees into their communities and take responsibility for finding them homes and jobs. The idea wasn't to replace the government's own formal refugee system, but too augmented.

00:06:05
Speaker 8: That was a real sticking point in the early years. A lot of groups said, we don't want to do something that we think the government should be doing.

00:06:12
Speaker 1: That's Brian Dyke, who works with the Mennonite Central Committee and the Refugee Hub at the University of Ottawa.

00:06:18
Speaker 8: So they talked about what we often call additionality. This has to be in addition to what the government is doing already. It's a principle I think the Government of Canada continues to hold you.

00:06:29
Speaker 1: The result is that in recent years, the number of refugees who come to Canada with private support dwarfs the number who come in through official channels, and Canada currently resettles more refugees on a per capita basis than almost any other country in the world. The Vietnamese refugees who came to my hometown, Kang Vaughan and Lelan, were both people in nineteen seventy nine. They were all in a camp on a tiny island off the coast of Malaysia.

00:06:59
Speaker 9: This is about one kilomeda square and about forty thousand Vietnamese refuge I live in that island, so very small.

00:07:13
Speaker 1: That's Vaughan Wuyn remembering this story. How long were you in that camp.

00:07:19
Speaker 4: As?

00:07:19
Speaker 9: Then that came for ten months, from January until October.

00:07:25
Speaker 1: Then in the fall they got word they'd been accepted to Canada through the private route sponsored by the Rankins. Doris White, Joan Carstan's and my parents and all the others who came to the potluck dinners in our little town in southern Ontario. Tell me about arriving in Canada. What was that like?

00:07:45
Speaker 9: Happy, sad, loneley, and worry. Happy because I have a contree to accept me. So they opened the door and accept a refugee, and I can stack a new life, freedom, so I don't have to worry about my past in Vietnam or I live in the Kim Sad because I still help my father and my auther brothers and to assist those there and Vietnam.

00:08:34
Speaker 1: Happy, sad, lonely and worry. I remember Vaughn and his brother from that year. They ended up at my high school walking the halls in clothes they had been given for the unimaginably cold Canadian winter, both of them thin and quiet, trying to get an education in a language they had only started learning a few months before. King and Vaughan ended up going to one of the best universities in Canada got good jobs. Their friend the Land meanwhile, met another Vietnamese refugee while playing musical chairs at an event organized by one of the sponsoring churches. The two got married, had children who grew up Canadian.

00:09:15
Speaker 10: I think one of the most fondest memories we have with our mom was just a trip that we took with her to Ottawa.

00:09:21
Speaker 1: That's Leland's son, David Haw, who teaches at the University of Waterloo.

00:09:25
Speaker 10: So back in twenty twelve we went to celebrate Canada Day with her and just as a family, and she never stopped talking about that trip. So a year after years, shard to say, hey, do you remember that time when we visited the capital just to enjoy the fireworks and just to be with others that are just proud to be with Canada.

00:09:47
Speaker 1: I'm sharing all this not just because it's an immigration story with a happy ending. This is a certain kind of story, a kind that I think we too often overlook. I have an older brother named Jeffrey, who lives in a town very close to where we grew up. In case you're wondering, my brother and I are very different. I like to talk about how to fix things. He actually fixes things. In a crisis, I waved my hands in the air. Jeffrey disappears for an hour and emerges with a solution on a desert island. Given the choice, you might pick me for company because I could amuse you for an afternoon with my theories. But when the sun starts to set and you're hungry and thirsty and have nowhere to sleep, you realize, oh, I picked a wrong Gladwell. Jeffrey was for many years the principal of an elementary school in a city called Kitchener. The school had four hundred students. If you're an elementary school principal in a country that lets in lots of refugees, chances are you'll have some of them as students in your school, and he did. I called up my brother to ask him about it.

00:11:15
Speaker 4: At one point we had I think twenty percent of our school population were Syrian refugees.

00:11:23
Speaker 1: You had, so if you had foreigner students are you saying you had eighty Syrian refugees in your school.

00:11:28
Speaker 4: Eighty Yeah, eighty Syrian refugees on top of probably another seventy to eighty ESL students, immigrants, refugees from other places. I think the biggest thing the first thing we saw was was trauma Like that was really where it kind of hit the idea of a trauma informed approach. So when kids are acting out, when they're being violent, or when they're crying, or they're withdrawing or you know, maybe stealing things, you have to look at their experience from camps or from war and say, Okay, maybe these learned responses, Maybe these are survival responses, and we have to look at them that way rather than looking at them as undesirable behaviors that you have to suspend somebody for or something like that.

00:12:19
Speaker 1: This makes sense. You're taking kids from troubled parts of the world. You have the obligation to deal with the consequences. Jeffrey said that when a Canadian kid and a refugee kid will get into a fight on the playground, you'd have to figure out how to make sense of what happened because only one of them spoke English. That was a little tricky, but not that tricky. The school board gave him lots of resources. He says, there was a really brilliant ESL teacher at his school. Plus these refugees were little kids.

00:12:48
Speaker 4: They adapted, They learned English incredibly quickly for the most part, and then you started to see their personalities coming through and it really enriched the school in that way. We had an incredible remembrance Day service with students who had experienced war and talking about what it means to experience war and showing their pictures of what it really is like to experience and this is my house, this is my house before it was bombed, this is my house after it was bombed. I mean, that was incredibly, incredibly moving and really sort of brought the whole experience that these students had home for the students in the school.

00:13:39
Speaker 1: What about the teachers. Did you have any kind of interesting or unexpected reactions from the teachers who were teaching these kids.

00:13:48
Speaker 4: No, again, you don't go to that school. That's not what you want to do. My job was to say to these teachers, look, you need to just get these kids into the classroom. You need to make them feel at home. You need to make them feel loved, to feel welcome in the community, and we'll get around to learning when they're ready. That's that's the message you have to give, not you know, worrying about whether these kids can fit in or not.

00:14:15
Speaker 1: You need to make them feel loved, not worry about whether they'll fit in. Jeffrey didn't think that dealing with the refugee children required any heroics. It just required lots of people doing their bit. A generous school board, a really good eesl teacher, and parents who believe that seeing a picture of a classmate's bombed out house is a valuable learning experience. You open your mind, you open your heart. Once you start looking for this pattern of many small acts of kindness adding up to a lot, you start to see it in all kinds of places. I'm thinking about a very moving account that I stumbled across in the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum.

00:15:04
Speaker 9: What kind of clothes did you wear?

00:15:07
Speaker 5: I was wearing ordinary. They smelled, stink terrible. I didn't have anything except I was veering.

00:15:18
Speaker 1: It's the oral history of a man named chio Reichmann, who escaped the Treblinka concentration camp in nineteen forty three. He was part of a group that set fire to the camp and he slipped out in the chaos, which put him and a small band of other escapees in the middle of Nazi occupied Poland. Fugitives huddling in a forest.

00:15:38
Speaker 5: I looked like a living skeleton.

00:15:41
Speaker 1: Now listen to what happened next.

00:15:44
Speaker 5: And we decided during deny it to go to a farm, to a peasant and ask for food. Some decent people helped us.

00:15:55
Speaker 1: They were starving and someone gave them food. Reikmann decided that their best hope of survival was to walk to Warsaw, which was more than fifty miles away. He meets a second farmer who feeds him and give some directions to Warsaw. On the way, he runs into a third man.

00:16:16
Speaker 5: The men passed and asked me, are you a Jew? I said yes. This Christian man, who was working in the opposite direction from where I came, turned back and said, I'm taking you to my home. His wife looked at me. She ordered me to take off my shild shirt and gave me a clean one. You know what she said to me, this is my husband only extra sheild. They gave it to me. They gave me a hurty meal and inquired about my plans.

00:16:57
Speaker 1: Reichman stayed with the family for two weeks. Gaining strength, he left them and met a smuggler. The smuggler gave him a ride. He got to Warsaw, went to see someone he knew from before the war who was in the Polish resistance. His old friend was petrified.

00:17:14
Speaker 5: He wasn't able to sleep or even because of fear that he is hiding a jewel.

00:17:19
Speaker 1: Reikman told his friend, I can't blame you, But as he was leaving, his friend gave him papers identifying him as an employee of the railroad. Now Reichman could pretend he wasn't Jewish.

00:17:31
Speaker 5: This document saved my life. I used it all the time.

00:17:36
Speaker 1: The story keeps going on and on. A woman and her husband let him sleep under their bed. Someone else had a fallen down shack where Reikman stayed for a bit. Someone else knew an empty apartment in Warsaw and let him stay there. He met a watchman befriended him. The guard invited him home for dinner, gave him a job a place to stay. It was winter, freezing cold the final days of the war. Warsaw was in chaos. Reikman was huddled with a group of people in an abandoned building.

00:18:09
Speaker 5: We almost did not survive. We were hungry, cold, desplendent. But one a night a men discovered a hiding place.

00:18:16
Speaker 1: The man asked them, are you hungry? He took them to a warehouse and opened the door.

00:18:21
Speaker 5: And we cared of a couple of hundred pounds of food and clothes that lasted this until the day of liberation.

00:18:30
Speaker 1: By my count Cheo. Reichman survived the war because of eleven acts of kindness. The keyword here is kindness. The biggest act we can perform for another is sacrifice, where we surrender something important for someone else, where we take a risk for someone else. The step below that is generosity, where we surrender some share of our time or resources for another. Kindness is entry level caring. Kindness is just a temporary suspension of indifference. The biblical story of the Good Samaritan is a story about kindness. The Good Samaritan finds an injured man by the side of the road, stops, bandages him up, and takes him on the back of his donkey to a nearby inn, where he gives him to the innkeeper with some money to pay for his care. The good Samartan doesn't fight off a band of hoodlum's single handedly or sneak the injured man past an enemy checkpoint. He's kind, not brave. Of the eleven acts that saved Chio Reichman's life, almost all are of the good Samaritan variety. His rescuers aren't brave. They're terrified. They give him some food and a temporary place to stay because they think it's too risky to do anything more. This is why I think it's so easy to feel underwhelmed by kindness. It feels so inadequate, so random. Reikman sounds like he just got lucky. When it comes to helping people in dire need, we prefer organized, big time, high commitment acts of generosity, where we don't leave things to chance. For example, America's refugee policy, which is the perfect illustration of the anti good Samaritant approach. Nothing is left to chance. Helping isn't informal and personal, it's systematized in order to ensure that only the most deserving of displaced people come to the US. The American Refugee Resettlement Program mandates a health check, a background check, an eligibility check, and multiple interviews. The Department of Homeland Securities involved, the State Department, the intelligence community, all of whom weigh in. The parents get interviewed, then the child separately to make sure their stories match. And finally, for those few refugees who do trickle through this process, there's another layer of bureaucracy to protect them against the potentially nefarious intentions of whatever group may be taking them in.

00:21:10
Speaker 11: There's a grave concern that people are going to be brought over here and they're not going to be supported the way that we would want people to be supported in the United States.

00:21:21
Speaker 1: That's David Beer, an immigration policy analyst with a Cato Foundation in Washington, d c.

00:21:27
Speaker 11: That they would be you know, living in squalor in somebody's basement, or you know, not have enough spoons for everyone in the family, so they be sharing spoons.

00:21:40
Speaker 1: You're serious. There is a regulation about the minimum number of spoons necessary for us.

00:21:46
Speaker 11: Yes, everything is very carefully monitored. And you know, God forbid that you are so lax. It's only to bring four spoons to a party of five.

00:22:00
Speaker 1: You can do things that way and tie yourself in knots and end up barely letting in any refugees at all. Or you can just have faith in the good that can come out of the other end of the generosity scale, the way it did back in my hometown. When Kang, Vaughan, and Leeland arrived, someone with a big house and lots of empty bedrooms took the three of them in for a few weeks. An apartment was found for them in Elmira, a little town where I grew up. Leeland said she wanted to get a job, so Joan got her job at a local clothing factory. Everyone, including my own family, took turns in the early years inviting them over for dinner. Was that sacrifice, please? My father had an endless stream of grad students from overseas who were always coming over for dinner on the weekends.

00:22:53
Speaker 10: It was just to have the people around her like your parents, like Graham and Joyce, just to kind of welcome her in and to bring her to community events and help her learn the language and things like that.

00:23:06
Speaker 1: That's David Hoggin remembering what all those invitations meant to his mother.

00:23:12
Speaker 10: For me, you need just to hear stories from my mom of just the small things, those mundane things that really stood out to her that I don't think people would normally even talk.

00:23:21
Speaker 1: About little things, mundane things, not big things. But remember the lesson of ChIL Reichmann. Lots of people doing little things can very quickly add up to a lot. When King and Vaughan were finishing high school, my mom remembers that the guidance counselor called my dad.

00:23:41
Speaker 3: And he said, what are you doing with these boys? They are in grade twelve. They have to go to university because they have got eighty percent in calculus and we don't give marks away.

00:23:56
Speaker 1: Just so you know, eighty percent in calculus at my high school in those years put you near the top of the class.

00:24:02
Speaker 3: Well, Graham had the inside knowledge of where to get money. You see, you can get you can get bursaries, scholarships, things like that. You know where to look, and so he must have pulled a number of strings. Because they were both at Waterloo with Graham, and they got their bas.

00:24:20
Speaker 1: Graham had inside knowledge. But then again, Graham was a math professor at the University of Waterloo, and here his task was to help two young people who were really good at math get into the University of Waterloo. This was not a heavy lift. And before any of this, there was the problem of bringing Vaughan King and Leland to Canada in the first place. Someone had to do the paperwork. Now, if my mom had to do the paperwork, that would have been an act of courage. But Ian Rankin does the paperwork.

00:24:50
Speaker 6: I remember having to go down and interview or be interviewed by somebody in Duke Street.

00:24:58
Speaker 1: I'm sure it was a complicated process that took many, many hours. But my sense is that Ian Rankin is the kind of person for whom successfully navigating a complex bureaucracy is a of pleasure.

00:25:10
Speaker 6: None of that stuff was anything that's sort of the organizing committee delegated. It just was who could do it.

00:25:23
Speaker 3: I'm learning for the first time what your role is and I have wondered many times, how was this engineer? Do you know? And what were the links with the government? Now I'm learning for the first.

00:25:34
Speaker 1: Time if I can break in here. This is a very joyce glabal moment, her surprise discovery of some formal bureaucratic structure beneath what she thought was just people interacting with each other. And then my mom volunteered this.

00:25:49
Speaker 3: I was a stranger and I had to be taken in myself. So I know what I felt like, you know, going to England as a student and experiencing hospitality from churches and organizations like that. So the sense of being straight in another culture was something I understood very killing.

00:26:22
Speaker 1: My mother came from Jamaica to England in the nineteen fifties, an unfamiliar place, a new culture. That phrase she used, I was a stranger and I had to be taken in myself is a reference to a Bible verse that everyone around that table knew very well, Matthew twenty five, Verse thirty five, for I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. Heroic rescues can have huge and dramatic effects, but they're very difficult to replicate. The group around my mother's dining room table were non heroic rescuers, and there is nothing they did that couldn't be done by any like minded group of ordinary people.

00:27:16
Speaker 3: So we give credit to those people. Jack Boy and Graham, Oh definitely.

00:27:24
Speaker 1: Yes. And you I want you to do all of us to read in unison like.

00:27:33
Speaker 2: Chips.

00:27:40
Speaker 7: I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me. Then the righteous will answer him.

00:28:04
Speaker 1: Lord, tell me the story about that girl.

00:28:29
Speaker 2: Do you remember? Oh?

00:28:30
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know if I can tell that story and hold it together.

00:28:38
Speaker 1: When my brother Jeffrey was principal of the elementary school in Kitchener, one of his youngest students, a Syrian refugee, was inconsolable.

00:28:48
Speaker 4: Yeah, she was. This little girl came in to kindergarten and she came in on the first day and she was just wailing, like just wailing like crazy, and the parents didn't seem to know what to do with her because they were just at a loss. What's going on. We don't understand, and we did, as we do with any child who's crying in kindergarten. We work with the parent, we'll look after child. It's okay, So we give them encouragement and usually they come in. Five minutes later, they stopped crying and they're fine, except that didn't happen with her. She just kept wailing and it was heart heart wrenching. So we went into class and my ESL teacher was there, Tracy, and I just said, look, just hold her, and so she held her on her lap and she was still just crying, and I thought, okay, what am I going to do? So I just knelt down in front of her, and I just started to hum and I was humming that the Universal lullaby and stopped. She stopped crying. She was looking at me, just just looking right through me. She stopped, She got off Tracy's lap. She took my hand and she didn't let go for an hour. She walked with me around the school and she had a death grip on my finger, and she kept up with me. She just ran beside me and kept going and we walked around the school. We visited all the classroom and then we sat in another little conference room and she drew pictures for me, and I was drawing pictures for her, and she was talking to me and I was talking to her, and we didn't understand what.

00:31:24
Speaker 2: We were saying.

00:31:25
Speaker 4: And then I Finally, about an hour and a half later, I took her back to her class and she was fine. And the next day the real kid arrived to me. She walked into the school and she just strode into the classroom like she was ready to take on the world. And that was the kid the parents knew. Every time I was in the primary hall, in that kindergarten hall, and I went there a lot, just wandering around, she would be looking at the door, and if I came into the classroom, she would launch herself across the room and give me a hug. Every time for the rest of the year.

00:32:07
Speaker 1: Our parents and their friends open their hearts to three refugees in need. My brother witnessed that act and then forty five years later, opens his heart to another in need. Kindness leads to kindness working.

00:32:24
Speaker 4: With that child and seeing what you can do when you show love and support and welcome to somebody. And and yeah, that that that that was, I mean, the pinnacle of my career. I think in many ways, I'll never forget her.

00:32:49
Speaker 1: I was a stranger and you welcome me.

00:32:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:33:07
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is produced by Elobie's Leeman Gesteu and Jacob Smith, with Tolly Emlin and Harrison vj Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is miel Label. Original scoring by Luis Karra, mastering by Flon Williams and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact checking by Keishaw Williams. Special thanks to Sasha Matthias and Salmana had Khan for production help on this episode. I'm Malcolm Glava.