Author Jamil Jan Kochai with his 2nd grade teacher in Davis, Calif. on August 13, 2022. DAVIS, Calif. - A Northern California author and Stanford writing fellow has shared a moving story about a long-awaited reunion, long-held gratitude and how one caring teacher can change the path of a child’s life forever.Last week, writer Jamil Jan Kochai tweeted a photo of himself standing next to a woman he’d been looking for for almost 20 years.
The woman, Susan Lung, was credited for going above and beyond her job as a teacher to help him learn to read and to write when Kochai was in grade school, struggling to learn a language that was not his native tongue and was chastised because the language barrier prevented him from following along in the classroom.
The acclaimed author, named a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award in 2020 and a 2019 nominee for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel "99 Nights in Logar," took to social media and shared how the long hoped-for meeting with his former teacher came about after years of searching for her.The author told of the special reunion in a poignantly and beautifully woven post on social media which he began with this: "Let me tell you a story."That story was about a young child who with his family had come to the U.S.
from Afghanistan at the age of one-and-a-half. The 29-year-old Kochai, who was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan, settled with his family in the Sacramento-area.