I stepped outside of the Ho Chi Minh airport and felt the humid air envelope me. Palm trees taller than any I’d ever seen in California pierced the skies. In between them were two flags: a red flag with a yellow star and another with a hammer and sickle. People of all complexions, size, age, and nationality bustled around me, calling for their relatives or trying to hail a cab — all in Vietnamese. I was finally back in Vietnam. It’d been ten years since I’d last visited. This time would be different — I was going to appreciate this experience instead of squander it. Because last time I was here, I hated my culture.
Back then, I was twelve years old and beginning to discover and shape my identity. I always felt like I was different. I was a bisexual nerdy Asian girl who liked anime, sci-fi, and fantasy and proud of all things that made me feel like an outsider, except for one thing: I hated being Vietnamese. To ignorant preteen-me, there was nothing cool about being Viet. We didn’t have anime like the Japanese, kung fu movies like the Chinese, or K-Pop like the Koreans. You’d think growing up in San Jose (the city with the largest Vietnamese population in the US) that that would have bolstered my pride, but when I glanced around at my fellow Vietnamese-American kids it looked like they all felt the same. They were all anime geeks, K-Pop/K-Drama enthusiasts, or became deeply involved in other cultures and communities, such as the Filipinx and Latinx ones. It was never talked about, but was always heavily implied that being Vietnamese was just something you unwillingly identified as. It was, I thought, never meant to be something that warranted anything other than a checkbox on standardized tests.
So when I was flown to Vietnam with the rest of my family for a summer vacation, I remember feeling incredibly awkward the entire time. Relatives never ceased to comment on how cute my American accent was, which further reminded me of how different I was from them. I played with kids my age but my cousins seemed way more carefree than my uptight American self and I would be teased for not lightening up. I had fun, but my fun was always framed in a tourist context. I didn’t find any value in the trip other than the fact that it was a vacation and we ate a lot of good food.
Ten years later, I entered my early twenties, graduated from college and started my adult life. It was this coupled with being laid off from my first job that forced me to reevaluate my life in many ways. What did I want in life? How do I want to make my mark in the world? Who am I, even? This lead me to start writing personal essays, in part as an outlet to help me process and work through my identity as well as find meaning in my life. Naturally, I started becoming more active on Twitter to keep in touch with my newfound writer pals. Because I wrote about identity so much, I found other like-minded people as well. I made queer friends, female friends, nonbinary friends, POC friends, and all sorts of buddies with marginalized identities. What surprised me the most was finding other Asian-Americans with similar values as mine, especially Vietnamese-American creatives. By surrounding myself with a positive online community filled with passionate creatives looking for the same answers I sought, I was finally able to start analyzing what it personally meant to be Vietnamese.
I came to appreciate my culture, from learning about our folklore to the Vietnam War and beyond; through appreciating the sacrifices all Vietnamese refugees made to come here for a better life; by seeing all of our history and narratives coalesce into the second and third generation Vietnamese-Americans that are shaping the US today.
I felt like all that was left for me to do was to visit my parent’s home country and then I’d finally have all the answers as to who I am. When my mom called me in the spring of 2016 to tell me that we were all going to take a two-week vacation to Vietnam together, I hung up and cried. I was finally ready.
We spent the majority of our time in the house that my mom built in a city near the village she grew up in. It was a three-story pastel house with a sprawling garden and small koi pond in the front. Every morning, she’d order cơm tấm for breakfast, delivered straight to our dining room table for just a few US dollars. As a mid-afternoon snack, she’d hail down the neighborhood lady who sold tàu hũ nước đường from the baskets she balanced on her shoulders, who would come over and catch up with my mom while she served us. It was such a stark contrast to the poverty that my mom grew up in. But she never kept her wealth to herself. When we visited my uncle’s neighborhood, he told me that my mom donated money to pave over the dirt roads there so that the residents didn’t have to stomp through the mud whenever it rained (and it rained a lot!). I realized that I inherited my mother’s need to give back to her people and community. In a way, that’s what I try to do with my writing.
The best part of the trip was when I visited the village that my great-grandma grew up in. It was a village in which everyone there was my family. We were greeted by people I had never met before, but whom I could see bearing a resemblance to us. They had the same high cheekbones my sisters, mom, and I did. When we smiled hello, they smiled back and it felt like looking in a mirror.
The main reason we came to Vietnam was because it was the 8th anniversary of my great-grandma’s death. We were visiting to pay our respects by dining with her and our other ancestors. I always knew her urn was in a shrine but never could I imagine that she was housed in a giant mausoleum that my mom had built for my ancestors going as far back as 200 years.
I walked up and down the aisles and marveled at the beautiful blue and white stone coffins that were the resting places of my great-aunts and uncles, great-great-grandmothers and fathers. I read all of their names and their birthdates as my mom enthusiastically explained to us how they were all related to each other and to us, what they were like when they were alive.
As I lit incense sticks and prayed to each and every one of them, I finally felt like I was tethered to something. It was as if I had been floating aimlessly my entire life, grabbing at things here and there, looking for something that would hold onto my as much as I desperately wanted to hold onto it. And then finally, I managed to float to this village full of faces like mine smiling up at me as my ancestors pulled my feet to the floor. As the incense smoke enveloped my senses, I imagined them reaching through from beyond, embracing me, and whispering, “You came from here. You belong here. Welcome home.”
I had finally found my roots. And I was never going to lose sight of that again.
