Posted April 4, 2023

Author Finally Finds Teacher Who Taught Him How to Read

Popcorn is usually reserved for video content, but some Twitter threads can be just as worthy—this author’s is proof of it. Keep reading for the summarized, non-split version.

As My Modern Met reports, Jamil Jan Kochai was only a baby when his family moved to America from Afghanistan. Living in a household that only spoke Pashto and Farsi, he struggled in an English-speaking classroom. Fortunately, he came across Ms. Lung. “[She] sat with me almost every single day after school, giving me extra lessons in reading and writing so I could catch up with the rest of the class,” explains Kochai. In the span of a year, he was able to do exactly that. Jamil Jan and Ms. Lung lost touch after his family moved and, for many years, he unsuccessfully tried to find her.

However, during the pandemic, he received an unexpected message from Ms. Lung’s husband, Allen, after hearing about an article where Kochai mentioned her. The student and teacher were able to have an emotional conversation over the phone, but that was all. Until the summer of 2022, when she surprised him at one of his readings and he, at last, got to thank her in person for changing his life. “Seven year old me finally got to hug my [second] grade teacher again,” he writes in one of his tweets. Will this spark his next novel? It already sounds like a bestseller to us.

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