Picture a seventh grader who has spent an entire year being handed things he never asked for. Wednesday afternoons alone with a teacher he was sure hated him. Yellow tights with feathers on the seat. A sister who left. A war that kept arriving in the middle of the school day and taking people out of the room. June is the month when the handing stops and the choosing starts. A presidential candidate is shot in California, and a boy who used to think his sister was an idiot knocks on her door and walks her to a church full of strangers lighting candles. A school cook who lost her husband to the war sets down the grudge she has been carrying and offers her house to the Vietnamese girl she once could not look at. A father explains that becoming a man means landing a good job, and his son says out loud, for the first time, that it means choosing for yourself. Part 8 is the last stretch of the school year — and it ends on an airfield, with a whole class holding boxes of strawberries and watching a plane door.

When Vietnamese families walked off military planes onto an American tarmac in 1975, the federal government did not resettle them itself; it hired private voluntary agencies, among them Church World Service, and those agencies looked for sponsors. A sponsor could be a congregation, a company, or a single family. The promise was concrete: rent, groceries, winter coats, work, and a seat in the neighborhood school. Officials deliberately scattered the arrivals across all fifty states rather than a few cities, to spread the cost. Thousands of children woke up in towns where no one spoke their language.

The welcome was uneven. A national poll in May 1975 found that most Americans opposed admitting the refugees, in a year of high unemployment and of a war people wanted to forget. Children carried that resentment home from school: classmates who had watched the fighting on the evening news for a decade sometimes treated a refugee girl as though she came from the other side of it. Some of those classmates had lost a father, a brother, or a neighbor in Vietnam, and grief looks for somewhere to land.

Schools were unprepared, but they were changing. A 1974 Supreme Court decision, the Lau case, ruled that giving students who speak no English only ordinary English lessons is not equal education, and districts began building classes for English learners. Teachers gradually learned what researchers had found about learning English: playground talk may come within a year, while the English needed to read a textbook takes five to seven. What the children remember, though, is usually smaller than any policy, and they still speak of it with gratitude: one teacher who slowed down, one neighbor who knocked, one lunchroom cook who set down a plate.

No right or wrong — tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.