“I Was A Stranger and You Welcomed Me” 33:47

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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.fm slash plus. Can we go around the table and everyone just say their name? Starting with you, Doris. Doris White from Alma, Alma United. Ian Rankin from Knox Presbyterian. Joan Carstens, Gale Presbyterian Church in Elmira. And I'm Linda Rankin, married to Ian Rankin.

I'm Joyce Gladwell and unfortunately my husband is no longer living but he was very active and we are from Elmira in Gale Church.

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 70s and early 90s, 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, or did I make this up, and driving so quickly from the airport that they were terrified by the time they arrived? He was a man of a heavy foot. He was a crazed Englishman. He came down the highway at 100 miles an hour.

We were talking about December 1979, when my brothers and I were teenagers, too young at the time to truly understand acts of kindness and how they work. 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. And they came up because they felt, oh, I can do that. Or they had this, they could donate.

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 Van, his older brother Kang, and a young woman named Lilan, three strangers who showed up at our doorstep one day. How many people were in your group in total?

That's almost an impossible question to ask because if you look at it, when we would have a meeting, what, we might have 10 people at the most? But geez, the people who were out behind giving the money, the people who were there when they came were totally different people.

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 required by the government. That was someone else. And lots of other churches were involved as well.

Around my mother's dining room table, the details were vague because they were vague back then. These were ordinary people going about a big task by ordinary means. And the potlucks. And the potlucks. And there were a lot of people there. In the small towns of southern Ontario, nothing of any consequence is accomplished without potluck dinners.

There are an estimated 20 million refugees in the world whose lives have 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 1970s, 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. 800,000 people fled Vietnam, escaping across the Gulf of Thailand in overcrowded boats. Somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 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 to augment it.

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. That's Brian Dyke, who works with the Mennonite Central Committee and the Refugee Hub at the University of Ottawa. 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 to.

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, Khang, Van, and Le Lan, were boat people. In 1979, they were all in a camp on a tiny island off the coast of Malaysia.

This is about one kilometer square, and about 40,000 Vietnamese refugees live on that island. So very small. That's Van Huynh remembering this story. How long were you in that camp? I stayed in that camp for 10 months, from January until October.

Then, in the fall, they got word. They'd been accepted to Canada through the private route, sponsored by the Rankins, Doris White, Joan Carstens, 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? Happy, sad, lonely, and worried. Happy because...

I have a country to accept me. So they opened the door and accepted the refugee. And I can start a new life, freedom. So I don't have to worry about my past in Vietnam or living in the camp. Sad because I still help my father and my other brothers.

and two sisters that are in Vietnam. Happy, sad, lonely, and worried. I remember Van 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.

Kang and Van ended up going to one of the best universities in Canada. Got good jobs. Their friend, Le Lan, 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. I think one of the most fondest memories we have with our mom was just a trip that we took with her to Ottawa. That's Le Lan's son, David Ha, who teaches at the University of Waterloo.

So back in 2012, we went to celebrate Canada Day with her and just as a family. And she never stopped talking about that trip. So year after year, she would just say, hey, do you remember that time when we visited the Capitol just to enjoy the fireworks and just to be with others that are just proud to be with Canada? 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 wave 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 the wrong Gladwell. Jeffrey was for many years the principal of an elementary school in a city called Kitchener. The school had 400 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. At one point, we had, I think, 20% of our school population were Syrian refugees. So if you had 400 students, are you saying you had 80 Syrian refugees in your school? 80, yeah, 80 Syrian refugees, on top of probably another...

70 to 80 ESL students, immigrants, refugees from other places.

I think the biggest thing, the first thing we saw 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 maybe stealing things, you have to look at their experience from trauma

camps or from war and say, okay, maybe these are 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. This makes sense. You take in 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 would 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. They adapted.

They learned English incredibly quickly for the most part. And then you started to see, you know, 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, you know, pictorials

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 forward.

What about the teachers? Did you have any kind of interesting or unexpected reactions from the teachers who were teaching these kids? No, again, you don't go to that school if 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. They feel welcome in the community and we'll get around to learning when they're ready. That's the message you have to give, not worrying about whether these kids can fit in or not. 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 ESL 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. What kind of clothes did you wear? I was wearing ordinary clothes. They smelled, stank terrible. I didn't have anything except I was wearing. It's the oral history of a man named Chio Reichmann, who escaped the Treblinka concentration camp in 1943.

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. I looked like a living skeleton. Now, listen to what happened next. And we decided during the night to go to a farm, to a peasant, and ask for food. Some decent people helped us.

They were starving and someone gave them food. Reichman decided that their best hope of survival was to walk to Warsaw, which was more than 50 miles away. He meets a second farmer who feeds him and gives him directions to Warsaw. On the way, he runs into a third man. The man paused and asked me, "Are you a Jew?" I said, "Yes." This Christian man, who was walking 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 shirt and gave me a clean one. You know what? She said to me, this is my husband's only extra shirt. They gave it to me. They gave me a hearty meal and inquired about my plans. 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. He wasn't able to sleep or eat because of fear that he is hiding a Jew. Reichman 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. This document saved my life. I used it all the time.

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 Reichman stayed for a bit. Someone else knew of 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. Reichman was huddled with a group of people in an abandoned building. We almost did not survive. We were hungry, cold, despondent. But one night a man discovered our hiding place. The man asked them, are you hungry? He took them to a warehouse and opened the door. And we carried off a couple of hundred pounds of food and clothes that lasted us until the day of liberation.

By my count, Cheo Reikman survived the war because of 11 acts of kindness. The key word 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 the 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 Samaritan doesn't fight off a band of hoodlums single-handedly or sneak the injured man past an enemy checkpoint. He's kind, not brave. Of the 11 acts that saved Cheol Raikman'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. Reichman 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 Samaritan 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 U.S., the American Refugee Resettlement Program mandates a health check, a background check, an eligibility check, and multiple interviews. The Department of Homeland Security is 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. 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 them.

people to be supported in the United States. That's David Beer, an immigration policy analyst with the Cato Foundation in Washington, D.C. 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'd be sharing spoons. You're serious? There is a regulation about the minimum number of spoons necessary for... 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. 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, Vaughn, and Leland 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. Leelan said she wanted to get a job, so Joan got her a 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.

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. That's David Haw again, remembering what all those invitations meant to his mother. For me, it was neat 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 about.

Little things. Mundane things. Not big things. But remember the lesson of Chiel Reichman. Lots of people doing little things can very quickly add up to a lot. When Kang and Van were finishing high school, my mom remembers that the guidance counselor called my dad. And he said, what are you doing with these boys?

They are in grade 12. They have to go to university because they have got 80% in calculus and we don't give marks away. Just so you know, 80% in calculus at my high school in those years put you near the top of the class. Well, Graham had the inside knowledge of where to get money. You see, you can get bursaries, scholarships and things like that if 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. 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, Kang, 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. I remember having to go down and interview, or be interviewed by somebody in Duke Street. 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 form of pleasure. None of that stuff was anything that sort of the organizing committee did.

delegated. It just was who could do it. I'm learning for the first time what your role is. I have wondered many times how was this engineered, you know, and what were the links with the government. Now I'm learning for the first time. If I can break in here, this is a very Joyce Glabo 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. I was a stranger and I had to be taken in myself, so I know what it felt like, you know, going to England as a student and experiencing hospitality from churches and organizations like that. So the sense of being strange in another culture was something I understood very clearly.

My mother came from Jamaica to England in the 1950s. 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 25, verse 35. 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. So we give credit to those people, Jack Boyd. And Graham. Oh, definitely. And you too. Yes, and you. I want all of us to read in unison...

Matthew 25. 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, Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to eat? Tell me the story about that girl. Do you remember? Oh, yeah. I don't know if I can tell that story and hold it together. When my brother Jeffrey was principal of the elementary school in Kitchener, one of his youngest students, a Syrian refugee, was inconsolable.

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 she

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 your child. It's okay. So we give them encouragement. And usually they come in five minutes later, they stop crying and they're fine. Except that didn't happen with her. She just kept wailing. And it was 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 universal lullaby.

And she stopped. She stopped crying. She was looking at me, 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 classrooms.

And then we were 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 we were saying. 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. I mean, 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. Our parents and their friends opened their hearts to three refugees in need.

My brother witnessed that act and then, 45 years later, opens his heart to another in need. Kindness leads to kindness. Working with that child and seeing what you can do when you show love and support and welcome to somebody. And yeah, that to me was the pinnacle of my career, I think.

in many ways I'll never forget her I was a stranger and you welcomed me yeah Revisionist History is produced by Eloise Linton, Lehman Gistu and Jacob Smith with Tali Emlin and Harrison Vijay Choy our editor is Julia Barton our executive producer is Mia Lobel original scoring by Louise Guerra mastering by Flan Williams and engineering by Nina Lawrence fact checking by Keisha Williams

Special thanks to Sasha Mathias and Salman Ahad Khan for production help on this episode. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

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