Last day at the newspaper job

End of twenty-two years on the job

Neither one drinks much wine, but today seemed like a time to make an exception. There was only a single bottle of Corona Extra left in the Hotel California fridge, and some Scotch in a cupboard squirreled away for emergency use only. Alas, champagne was not available. They made do.

This was Hai’s last day on the job. A career he started with Stan, 22 years ago. The two now shared a glass of mutual admiration for a job well done.

A teen-aged Hai fled the Vietnamese communist regime in 1986, after two unsuccessful attempts, and spent 30 days in a wretched boat looking for a better life. Eventually he found it in Minnesota, educating himself first in high school and then at the U of M, studying biology. He met Stan’s daughter there, then met Stan at a kitchen table in Eden Prairie.

Stan noticed Hai’s shy but intrepid nature, and soon hired him as a part-time newspaper cartoonist. That didn’t last long.

Hai couldn’t figure out how newspapers could make any money, he thought of them as sort of a volunteer kind of thing. They certainly weren’t a force in the old country. This was ironic, because the industry was about to engage in its most lucrative era ever, exploiting the wonders of digital productivity. Stan asked Hai to help take advantage of the many nascent economies of computerization. He agreed and educated himself for free at Barnes and Noble, reading voraciously in his adopted language, learning what could be done to make the newspaper production more efficient.

This he did with an amazing series of innovations, bringing the newspaper from expensive photo-typesetting into the modern digital age, one excruciating kilobyte at a time. One success after the other. Today the whole newspaper industry is totally transformed, of course, and nothing like the days when they were produced basically the same way Johann Gutenberg printed his Bible.

Stan has retired, but Hai kept working for the newspaper group, indispensable, knowledgeable. He moved to California five years ago, but maintained a service contract that kept him on call for trouble shooting things that mere human techs can’t handle. Until today that is, his last day on the job.

Don’t worry about Hai’s retirement. He’ll always have plenty to do. His wife has a couple of nail salons here that Hai helps her manage. There’s the fish farm in his high maintenance back yard garden. And the greenhouse to build. There are tuna to catch in the ocean, he’s favors deep sea fishing, miles from shore, where the Blue Fin lurk.

His son is almost a medical doctor now, he’ll visit soon to appreciate Dad’s new freedom. It’s the end of an era, a time for new beginnings. Raise a glass!

Not too bad for a teen-aged refugee with nothing, not too bad for an immigrant who had the right stuff.