Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy (ii)

from Jonathan Hill and Walker Books

Judge a book by its cover. What it’s for.

Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy

I have read the book twice. I have found 11 chapters and 1 epilogue then an author’s note. No chapter has a title. There is no table of contents to find any 1 of them to read by itself.

These are not tales. This book is 1 tale, 1 yarn spun of a seventh-grade lizard boy. It is the tale of Tommy Tomkins, the English name of that boy in the foreground staring at you with a lizard eye. The tale is Tommy’s story, as the Tale of Kieu is hers.

A tommy is a British soldier, short for Thomas Atkins. The echo of that name in Tommy Tompkins evokes Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the ordinary tommy rising to extraordinary challenges with decency overcoming weakness.

Cafeteria

The background of the front cover shows Tommy, from behind, eating lunch at school with his friends Dung Tran and Scarlett Callahan. I take it that at home the Vietnamese boy would spell his name Dũng, which means brave. People name their boys especially to call forth such moral qualities.

Dũng bravely keeps his name in 7th grade in the United States of America where indeed he suffers the abuse of his name as Dung, an archaic word in English for cow pies. Brave, he rises above that bullshit.

He inspires his buddy Tommy Tomkins who is hiding his birth name Booger, also a bummer of a moniker in middle school, in that age group now meaning dried snot. Archaically a booger is a bogey-man, an American word from Africa once used as a weapon by both sides of our old race war.

Our racially integrated military now uses bogey to mean the attacker. Booger Lizk’t is hiding not just from teasing but from the security forces of the USA. He really is an alien infiltrator, a lizard boy.

Scarlett in my middle school days was the color of the Scarlet Letter, the novel about the stigma of adultery, the A worn by Hester Prynne not for bearing a child without a husband but for choosing not to name her lover or her husband when he returns incognito.

Brave like Dung. Scarlett’s middle school no longer reads that Nathaniel Hawthorne novel but all do see that Scarlett lets her freak flag fly. They also don’t know either the movie or the novel once known to all in the United States and Viet Nam alike, Gone With the Wind whose heroine

Scarlett O'Hara bears an Irish name like Callahan, as close as Tomkins is to Tommy Atkins. I don’t yet see what to make of the association except that both Scarletts like to dress up. There is no Southern belle in this tale, any more than there is a Lady Kieu.

Another name for Nguyen Du’s book is Kim Van Kieu, for the two sisters and their loyal friend Kim. In English usage we would say Kim, Van, & Kieu as we could call the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn rather Jim, Tom, & Huck.

Each is a moral tale about suffering unjustly then rising above troubles and weakness, through proper relations in an unjust world. Call this one the Tale of Booger Lizk’t, the Tale of Dung, Scarlett, & Tommy, or the Tale of Tommy Tomkins. All these Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy are on the cover.

Jonathan Hill

Jonathan’s mother is the historian of those Vietnamese who labored and soldiered for France in the Great War, where they became rebels. Jonathan’s book mentions only that he has a kind mother, so I will leave her at that. You may locate online the work of Dr. Kimloan Thi Vu Hill, Ph.D.

Jonathan is a name among Jews, short for Jehonathan. God’s gift. Way I feel about Jonathan Hill but from that mother he is a gentile. He is not unmistakably a Roman Catholic either, since those Vietnamese take a saint’s name at baptism.

Saint Jonathan used to serve as patron of booksellers, editors, friendship, and printers, wonderfully appropriate to Jonathan Hill, but the church has discharged that saint as a fiction. That also is appropriate to the author, a fictioneer, telling tales about bearing a name.

This is the cover of a book about covering. These are tales of cover.

Long ago Erving Goffman wrote that in the Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) we cover the Stigma (1963) which shame us. Erving got it half right.

A soldier may take cover from rifle fire or fire with his rifle to give cover to others. You may hide behind a mask and you may use it to fight enemies and make friends. This cover is the cover of Booger, Dung, Scarlett, and Tommy.

This was the second Viet Nam letter of 2 so far addressed to Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy by Jonathan Hill. The first posted on October 22, 2022.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.