vietnamese-american

I watched Joy Luck Club yesterday morning, and nearly burst into tears about twenty times. My propensity to cry at overtly tear-inducing film scenes depends on my mood, and my general mood these past few weeks has been Being in the Motherland--all the obvious feelings that entails. And hey, that movie is pretty good.

Having many first-generation friends and America being America, in writing my mass emails from Southeast Asia last summer and this one, I got a lot of replies from people about how they related to the cultural aspects of my experiences. From people who felt connected, disconnected, somewhere in between, in relation to their family’s culture. I’m not sure when I started becoming consciously aware of my culture, but I do know that my family has done so well in keeping it a constant presence, whether or not I was aware. And for that I feel such incredible gratitude, it’s tangibly difficult for me to write it accurately. And I feel it’s so important, I so want to get it right.

When I visited Notre Dame Cathedral in Saigon, I sat for a long time in the pews because I was tired from walking all the day in the heat. Mass wasn’t in service but there were a few women in the first row reciting prayers. It immediately brought me back to going to Vietnamese mass with my parents at home, as a kid. I hated going. I hated that it was in the middle of the day, that I had to dress up, that I couldn’t fully understand the sermons, that in the summer it was stifling. But there was one thing I didn’t hate, one thing that with age I actually grew to love, and that was the recitation of prayers in Vietnamese. In English we just say them. In Vietnamese, I wouldn’t say there’s a real melody to the prayers, but the prayers are melodic. There are certain tones that made me enjoy memorizing and reciting them too, purely for the sound and experience, because I’m not religious and not really spiritual either. When I heard the women saying them in Vietnam, they sounded exactly like back home in California, and I found myself saying them too. And I was struck by how this thing, these words and these tones, was carried intact from across the world.

Lately I’ve felt, with a sense of urgency, a need to preserve things about my parents and their history that might fade when they’re gone. To keep through time what they so bravely, carefully transported through place. I want to make my mom’s food, to teach my kids Vietnamese (and have them learn the great amount I don’t know, if they’re not too resistant). And most, to honor all my parents went through to bring me here, by remembering and continuing what they left behind. Because it’s their values from there that made it possible for me to cultivate ones from here. I can feel the question of rationale arising: why does it really matter to remember where you’re from? I don’t have an all-encompassing response, because all my metaphors are too-neat answers. But I think that if one life lived is what provides meaning, and it’s this continuum that makes a single life possible, then there must be some syllogism there.

In America, when people ask you what you are, they mean where your family’s from, because it’s (usually, ideally) accepted that you’re American. In Vietnam, even though my family is Vietnamese, they ask me what I am. They see you by the country you live in, and you’re not considered Vietnamese. And it’s true, because I’m not fully or even mostly Vietnamese. But I’m not just American either. Too often people find themselves choosing between one culture and another, when one of the best things about America is that you can have both (or several). I really dislike the misconceptions of being whitewashed because you’re integrated into American society, or of being super Asian because you have a lot of Asian friends. Because in polarizing things this way, you can forget that you should (or so I personally think) remain connected to both, and can be, despite falling into one of those aforementioned categories. Because that’s what the hyphenation is about. It’s about how one can motivate the other, how you take the best from each, how you incorporate the privilege of perspective into your life, how past and present becomes your future.

D. once talked about the benefits of shared culture, and I saw that in spending a little time with him here, when I felt consciously that the sense of being in between cultures is a culture in itself. One that shouldn’t be separated, because how sad for old things to be lost in a shuffle of migration and opportunity, and how sad for new things to be overlooked by comparison to something else. Culture is such a rich and dynamic thing, and how lucky we are to experience more than one, and to have that combination to claim as ours.

D. also brought up the idea of randomness, that we could’ve easily been brought up in Vietnam if not for certain circumstances and luck and timing. I definitely feel that, especially being here and meeting people my age and comparing where their family was at the time mine left, or others who were born after the narrow window to leave closed. If in 1954 when the Communists uprooted the French, in the small sliver of time that people were allowed to choose communist North or democratic South, my parents hadn’t been able to migrate South, I might’ve been born in Hanoi. If in the years following the fall of Saigon in 1975 my family hadn’t escaped, before nearby countries stopped taking in refugees, I might’ve been born in Saigon. If they hadn’t been picked up by a German boat, sponsored to Germany and then America, I could’ve ended up in so many places. But the one thing that doesn’t change no matter time and place or situation in life, being born to my parents means being born Vietnamese. And if I had to choose only one reason out of the many I feel, it is for that that I love being Vietnamese.