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Abstract

“The Lessons I Never Took” is a lyric poem rooted in the author’s experience growing up as a first-generation Cambodian American child in an immigrant family. The poem examines how socioeconomic hardship and language brokering shape a child’s relationship to desire, responsibility, and unrealized possibility. While other children receive formal lessons that allow their interests and talents to be discovered, the speaker develops unrecognized interpretive skill by helping her parents navigate English-speaking institutions. Without assigning blame, the poem holds parental sacrifice and childhood loss together, revealing how survival can limit not only access to enrichment but also a child’s opportunity to discover who they might have become. Through the recurring images of the piano, translation, and the speaker’s hands, the poem gives language to early role reversal, unequal access to opportunity, and grief for abilities that were never given the conditions to emerge.

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