He teaches English at San Jose City College. But the professor also helped bring and edit Ngoc Tu Nguyen’s famous collection of Vietnamese short stories, “Floating Lives,” to the United States.

This instructor is Scott Alkire who has taught English 1A at SJCC since 1998. He also taught at SJSU since 2002.

The book, “Floating Lives” is a collection of 12 short stories of people living in the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam. “Nearly all of my Vietnamese students love Nguyen’s stories: They are earthy, provocative, and melancholy. We tried to keep those qualities as much as possible in the translation,” Alkire said, “it is romantic and mysterious and a compelling combination.”

His student, Thuy Luu, translated the collection from its original Vietnamese to English to help students and other people understand how people live in Vietnam.

“My motivation and inspiration is to make the English language and its literature as relevant as possible to students’ lives,” Alkire said.

“Mr. Alkire is a professor, who understands and helps Vietnamese students very much. I’ve never seen any non-Vietnamese professor who can get along and close to Vietnamese community like him.” Thanh Phan, president of the Vietnamese Students Association from SJCC said.

Phan said, “He supported and encouraged Vietnamese students doing things that they thought they would never do it. I witnessed it and I was so proud of the student who translated this book in English, and so proud of being one of his Vietnamese students.”

Alkire has helped two writers get translated and published in English- Kato Lomb and Ngoc Tu Nguyen. “Ngoc Tu Nguyen is quite famous writer in Vietnam and I thought there might be an audience for her in the U.S.,” Alkire said.

Alkire received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in English in the mid-80s and a master degree of Teaching English to Speaker of Other Language (TESOL) in the mid-90s from the San Jose State University.

“My very first teaching was the summer between my junior and senior years at college. I tutored a small group of international students. They had very little homework, so we did a lot of conversation. I learned quickly that it is not easy to always have something interesting to say,” Alkire said.

Alkire became a familiar face at our college and SJSU campus, for which he has made an  accomplishment with his students and others in the community

“I hope that everything I present to my students will inspire them to become engaged readers and writers, or at least more so than when they entered my class. If they become engaged readers and writers, they’ll likely seek out books to read on their own,” Alkire said, “that’s one of my biggest goals.”