I’m not a Hokie, but my mom is. I guess that makes me a son-of-a-Hokie.
A week ago, I was looking for my Va Tech cap to show my solidarity with the Hokie Nation, but I couldn’t find it. It’s actually my mom’s, but she passed it on to me. (She doesn’t wear ballcaps.)
She received it when she attended a class reunion a bunch of years ago. She’d flown out from L.A., and I drove her down to Blacksburg in my “putt-putt” Mazda Protégé. (I call it putt-putt, because I found out during a drive through part of the Shenandoah Mountains, that its uphill torque was weak. I had to downshift to make it up ascending grades. But, hey, while only 103 horsepower, you just can’t beat the mpg!)
Anyhow, my mom’s Va Tech visit wasn’t all that comfortable. The racial and ethnic diversity of today’s student body and faculty as evident in the massacre victims’ backgrounds, may not have been the case for my mom’s fellow alumni. I guess when she was going there, most of the students were white and the school was known as VPI.
Her classmates were mostly white Southerners. Nothing wrong with that, but maybe they weren’t used to the idea of a fellow alum of Asian background. Or maybe she felt a bit weird around Southerners, as she never lived in the South nor returned to the school after graduating.
She got ticked off by an incident or two, when she felt somebody was condescending to her or treated her like she was inferior. I'm not entirely sure about the specifics, so I can’t explain. All I know is that she felt slighted. Maybe it was just cultural misunderstanding. (Southern California is a bit different social environment than southern Virginia, George Allen’s case notwithstanding.)