The Haunting Name
The Haunting Name
Huy — my friend — was a standout student: tall, handsome, and strong. One time, our Psychology lecturer, Mr. Thà, walked into the dorm room, complained about his back, and asked Huy and Quyết to “give him a massage to feel more comfortable.” I stood there, small and skinny, briefly thinking that perhaps because of my frail frame, the teacher never considered asking me.
Quyết rolled up his sleeves and massaged the teacher’s back with practiced skill. At that moment, Hằng walked by, stopped at the door, her eyes wide with surprise. Mr. Thà didn’t seem embarrassed at all; he simply smiled:
“Why so surprised? I just asked them to massage my back.”
Another time, he asked Huy alone. While Huy was massaging him, the teacher suggested:
“When you’re free, come hang out with me sometime.”
Huy refused instantly:
“No, sir. I won’t go.”
A blunt refusal — enough to darken the teacher’s expression.
Not long after, the teacher’s chicken went missing. Rumors spread quickly: a student named Huy from the Fine Arts class had stolen it and hidden it in his room. As soon as he heard the name, the teacher became furious, his face stormy:
“I will bring this matter to light!”
And so my friend Huy and even Quyết — simply because he was close to Huy — fell under the teacher’s suspicion and resentment. At the end of the semester, in Psychology, both received a score of 3. No one dared say it aloud, but deep down, everyone understood: it was “the grade of prejudice.”
In the second year, Huy left the school to study in Hanoi. The name seemed to fade away. But whenever Mr. Thà substituted for a class, his eyes would fall on me. He would call out:
“Huy, stand up and answer!”
I knew clearly he had gotten my name wrong, but I still stood up and answered, accepting it in silence. Perhaps I feared that correcting him would only make things worse.
At the end of the semester, I, too, received a 3. Holding the grade sheet in my hand, one question kept circling in my mind:
Did the teacher mistake me for Huy, or had that name become a shadow — an invisible sentence clinging to anyone associated with it?
And I realized that in a school environment, even the smallest prejudice can become a binding chain, turning fairness into bias, turning knowledge into a tool of imposition. Psychology is supposed to help people understand one another better, yet ironically, in this story, it became an invisible net trapping both teacher and students.
