Dear Bien

Dear Mazoo,

Of course I call you Mazoo because we started calling each other Mazoo and Fazoo when we first we realized we had a mutual favorite movie, Mulan. Dear Bien, this Thanksgiving season marks one decade since we first met and became friends and I want you to know how grateful for that I am.

When we first met in Ms. Churchill’s Sociology of the Family class at Guilford Tech I really didn’t guess that we were gonna become best friends. You sat behind me in class and we ended up being grouped together for project work the entire semester. Everyday we talked more, learned more about each other and a relative sense of friendship had grown.

When we finished our group project at the end of the semester you specifically told me to continue our friendship after the semester ended because you didn’t do classroom friend and complete strangers later. I knew then that we’d end up becoming best friends.

I don’t think you will ever truly understand the level of positive impact you’ve had on my life. Sure enough after our classroom days were over we started hanging out together. I didn’t have a car so you always came to pick me up and we’d go all over. Mainly to have lunch where you took me to a lot of restaurants that I had never been to before and put me on to ALOT of good Vietnamese food that I ended up being addicted to thanks to restaurants like Pakse Cafe. During these lunches we would discuss life and vent about our day to day issues. So in a big way you became a human diary for me.

The way you were there for me when life got difficult is what I appreciate most about you. Of course we can remember when I was struggling to get back in school during the fall of 2015 you made sure I was able to get to campus everyday to handle all the business I needed to handle to assure that I would make it back in and when I wasn’t so optimistic that everything was going to work out you gave me words of both encouragement and even some tough love so that I would be able to pick up the pieces.

The moment I knew that I had a friend for life in you that I was eternally grateful for was in October of 2015 when one of my aunts who I was close with was on her deathbed and soon to pass away. You were with me the whole time making sure I was okay. A couple mornings before she passed away you woke me up with a phone call while I was sleeping in misery and told me to come downstairs and go with you somewhere. You took me to our favorite spot Paske Cafe and bought me that Vietnamese sandwich you knew I liked and you did it just to cheer me up so that I would know that I wasn’t alone. You lifted my spirit and I knew things would be better one day.

Life changed a lot since that first year that we became friends, but our friendship never changed. Your friendship has proven to be so real and rare that we could go days, weeks, months and yes, even years without speaking to each other and whenever we reconnect we always pick up right back where we last left off. To this day like no time has passed and our dynamic remains the same. I’m so grateful that we are still in each other’s lives.

I forget if I ever told you, but during the time when you went through your traumatic situation I learned about it and thought you may have potentially lost your life after I hadn’t heard from you in a while and it felt like my heart had been ripped out. Thankfully that wasn’t the case. Dear Bien Krajan, you are an amazing mother and best friend and during this season of Thanksgiving I am grateful that you are a part of my life.