My Petite Autograph Book

Hoa P. Nguyen
Aug 22, 2017 · 9 min read

Twenty nine hours rushing between terminals and gates and flights, I arrived home.

New York, August 2016.

Hanoi welcomed me with its 30s-degree heat from the dying sun. I secretly thanked New York for showing me its dog days of summer, otherwise I would have complained about coping with that unsurprising heat shock again and again. Or perhaps it was drizzling just moments ago. One following another, a sprinkle of rain drops ran down the glass wall as I was walking through the jet bridge. From the distance across the airfield, fuzzy clouds were cuddling, taking their time putting the mountains to sleep. As I kept pace with the passenger line, I was thinking to myself, “here’s to a few shorts days (12 to be exact) of jet lag and family vacation.”

Fortunate enough to have travelled outside Vietnam a dozen times, I had anticipated coming back this time should not be too emotional. But I was wrong.

That minute, it felt different because for the first time in 20 years, I was away from home for the whole 12 months. Compared to more than 300 days abroad, I only had less than 300 hours home then.

My parents, grandparents and younger sister came to pick me up then dad drove us home like the old days. Oh, my sis wanted to ride shotgun now, which was slightly new, good thing that I got to sit with mom at the back. Thanks to the recent construction of a new bridge, it only took us less than half an hour to get to my house from the airport.

Loading off my luggage, I dusted off my hands then looked up to admire my mom’s flower pots on the balcony. The house itself didn’t seem to change much though the outer paint had faded quite a lot.

Everything appeared to be pretty different than I remembered, and needless to say, I have changed so much too.

— —

Climbing upstairs, I put my suitcases down. I took a peek at my old rooms. At home, my little sister and I didn’t have our own rooms but rather two common rooms to share, one for studying and one for sleeping. I rarely slept there though cause I lived with my grandparents basically my whole life. It may sound embarrassing but never had I ever slept alone until I left home for college in the States three years ago.

We used to not really like the bedroom because sleeping side by side each other wasn’t that fun and private all the time. Meanwhile, we have always loved our study room — the chamber of secrets where archives of our childhood are kept safe.

Having spent my previous half of the day taking long naps on the plane, I decided to swing by the study room for a bit. I cracked the door open. A bit dusty but ok. I still remembered how it was painted popping lime green (ew..) since my little sis loved that color back in elementary school.

Ah! No one had really touched my things. Piles of old, ripped-off textbooks still lay there on the desk. My pink, wooden revolving chair still tucked between the side drawers. Superheroes stickers I collected from the so-called “smartening” milk boxes (Fristies for those who know it :D) were still glued on the desk lamp’s shade. Cut off pieces of Taylor Swift’s face from the 2000s teen magazines loosely hung on the background.

Glancing all over, I fell for the nostalgia trap. Amid the organized mess, a little book put a big smile on my face for some mysterious reason. It was my petite autograph book from 9th grade. ❤

Who knows since when and how it becomes a norm but in Vietnam, we pass on this tradition of having people write extensively in our autograph books. We don’t just write brief messages or scribble our contact information at the end. We write well-put-together essays, if not, real-freaking-serious papers about our friends — for our friends.

Apparently almost everyone knows the dreadful unwritten rule of ‘friendship versus length of the essay’: the close you are to a person, the longer you’re supposed to write. The actual count can range from two, three to even ten or twelve pages. It’s strange to think about how we, or at least myself, used to think the number of words would be proportional to the amount of feelings we have toward each other. Anyhow, middle school was all about being harmlessly silly together before transitioning to become “partners in crime” in our late teenage years.

Not sure if there existed a consensus of how people look at autograph books but to me, mine is hell of a work of art. Who says it’s just a random collection of sloppy messy signatures by a bunch of 14-year-olds? Who says those notes are so generic that they are not worth noting?

— —

Back in middle school, I was known for owning stuff with rainbow colors, which explained why I bought such a garish autograph book with all sorts of colors on it. The book size was just a tad smaller than that of A4 paper. Its cover, wrapped in a thin plastic sheet, was a doodle of a playground with a few kids playing with balloons in the foreground. Layering on the right edge were tiny strips painted red, blue, yellow and grey.

Wait. Hang on for a sec right there. Never judge a book by its cover.

Obviously the book was just another ordinary item until my friends poured their awesome expressive writing and drawing into it. Some opted for straightforwardness with five pages of page-long paragraphs. Others used my book as a canvass for a full-page portrait of me or my musical teen idols. One even shocked me with her 12-page illustration (and exaggeration) on what she liked and didn’t like about me. Of all the masterpieces in my book, the account written by N.L. struck me the hardest.

N.L. was the first one to put pen to paper in my book. After a three-page preface packed with our best memories, she put on her comedian mask, shifted the writing tone to her signature sarcastic mode so she could start making fun of my future adult life.

I had no idea how well N.L. could draw until she sketched this series of pictures where I handled three jobs throughout the 24-hour frame.

Honestly though, on second thoughts, she was a filmmaker who created this short animated documentary about my career that involved three distinguishing paths.

According to N.L.’s fortune, I would spend my morning working for a modelling agency. I would wear these bizarre-looking short skirts and fashionable crop tops then pose graciously for the photoshoot. I couldn’t help but cracking up laughing.

Taken by my big Ly Harriet Bui ❤

Until 9th grade I was the tallest girl in my class. I always tried to bend my knees or lean down so I could pretend to look not so giant among others. My peers said they wanted to be taller and that being tall would be much nicer. But to my 12-, 13-year-old self, it was something I detested because I didn’t feel confident, beautiful or included. People always mistook me for a high school kid or assumed I would know certain things because I “looked old.” I wanted to look my age, I wanted to look like my friends, I wanted to fit in. Luckily right before that period of low self-esteem worsened, I learnt to appreciate myself more. At least because N.L. said in the book she loved that I was tall. She pictured me becoming a model, a scenario so unlikely to happen that I could take my height less seriously and laugh it off.

After a glamorous morning, N.L. suggested me taking up a reporter position in the afternoon. She made sure that I would grumble on about how I repeatedly got mosquito bites as my investigative work required me to explore remote areas, especially dark, sketchy places. When I first read this part, I supposed she simply was referring to the fact that I loved writing.

Little did I expect her imagination to truly take shape in reality. Three years of high school and then another year in college, I was clueless and confused about what I wanted to pursue academically.

Searching around for directions, I saw my friends going into some of the trending, lucrative fields like economics, computer science or engineering, which made me feel nothing but even more disoriented. They virtually put me under a lot of pressure during that time because I could not imagine myself committing to any of those types of work.

My first transformation came at the beginning of sophomore year — I decided to join the campus newspaper while simultaneously taking several classes in journalism and media studies (with the best profs in the world). In no time at all I fell in love with editorial work. Shortly after I ended up drafting a proposal to officially design a special major in journalism which I’ve been following so far. And, I had just said goodbye to the most wonderful summer doing journalism in New York, a couple days before I stood there in my study room with the autograph book in my hands.

Five years since N.L.’s lines about me as a journalist (dang she even predicted I would enjoy the investigative kind 😝), now it has nearly come full circle. It did take a while but her satirical drawing eventually made sense.

Only in 9th grade but N.L. already knew how much of an overachiever I was, meaning I would not settle on having “solely” two jobs. She probably thought, “why not making a sketch of Hoa, for example, as a freelance singer performing in a pub during the evening?”

The first time she heard me sing was when we were in 8th grade. Thanks to my friends’ encouragement, including continuous support from N.L., I kept on singing and daydreaming about one day when I could have a primary job and then sing at night for fun in some hippie bars or pubs. N.L. helped get me there in a sense. She believed that would be absolutely possible, before I even dared to wish so.

I turned 20 a few months ago. It’s getting harder for me to wrap my thoughts around the fact that it’s been half a decade since this book was created and stored on my old, dusty rack. My friends and I used to fantasize about where we would be five years, ten years forward after we left school. We used to always think our world would turn upside down to a point where we would no longer be able to recognize ourselves.

But to some extent, my autograph book has proved otherwise.

Reading how my friends thought of me back then made me realize how much I’ve changed, but more importantly, it opened up another door for me to delve into myself. Through that slanted angle, I learn to appreciate how much of the same spirit, how much of the same soul and the same heart I still am today. Of course they say change is the only constant and I’m undeniably in a different position than I was in middle school.

Despite the years has gone by, my love for writing and yearning for music and all arts alike has refused to leave. I am no different than that 14-year-old kid who loved singing, writing and striving harder every single day to become better at both.

Most of the time people are reminded to move on from the past, live for the moment and change for the future. But more often than not, they inadvertently forget how similar they still are to their old selves. A memento, in this case — my autograph book, surely is more than a tale of the past. It is a fortune of the present that resonates into the future.

California sky, December 2016.

Whenever I feel like breaking down, whenever I’m too afraid I’m not good enough or not brave enough to move forward on the path I have devoted to, I want to get lost in the reverie of my past again. I want to look back on the time when I took the first steps to figure out how to navigate my possibilities without holding my breath about what’s coming next. And, to know that some dreams are carried on for a reason.

__South Hadley, October 2016__

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Hoa P. Nguyen

Written by

Avid writer. Travel fanatic. Music enthusiast. ENTJ.

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