The marshlands of the outskirts of the M'nong village, Banh Mi Tuoi
They call me Viet-kieu: a Vietnamese person living in another country. Never in my entire life have I straggled between such a cultural divide. I bare my skin to the sunshine as the Vietnamese girls hide in full covered gear. I speak to my elders in casual tone as other Vietnamese bow in utter respect. I speak in tongues as I watch my fellow Vietnamese converse so eloquently. I am a Viet-kieu.
My father has always been a man of few words... Or so I believed. Being back in the place of his early life brings a flood of memory and a lifetime that has been carefully washed away for 32 years. No longer are we in the Vietnam that he once knew. No longer is poverty so intense and oppression so real that escape seems to be the only way of existence. We are in the new Saigon.
A bustling metropole, Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City) is the business capital of the once impoverished and war torn country. Young and old walk the streets in business suits. Not a small space is wasted in a city that boasts a population of about 9 million. It is a crowded place. Too crowded. This is where my mother lived as a child. This is where my father moved to escape Ho Chi Minh's regime. The first day we arrived, our friend provided us with a humble 5 story townhouse in a gated neighborhood (quite a hookup I might add). My father's sisters arrived to greet us at the house. There have been only two other times before I've ever seen my father cry. Seeing his sisters has hasn't seen for 32 years was the third. The fourth was seeing his parent's gravesite. It was the first time he had seen his mother's grave.
The first time my dad has seen his sisters in 32 years.
Incense sticks are burned at graves to offer during prayer.
In my father's family there are 6 children. Three of which are passed due to disease. You see, many people complain about the exaggerated price of health care in our country. In a place where liver disease is sure death, a life debt really doesn't seem that bad. Combining the dead siblings and live ones, I have 17 cousins on that side of the family. Most of them also have children. These family members are people I've only just met and learned about. Slowly since being here my father has opened up about his past: opened up about his hatred for communists and never believed to move back to Vietnam.
He grew up in a nha quay-- the countryside house. This is where he was born until about the teenage years when he moved to Saigon to work on cars and sell black market gas. Back then, everything was sold in the black market. He slept on a friend's rickshaw cart at night and worked on motors in the day as a teenager and young adult. After the withdrawal of US army and the fall of southern Vietnam in 1975, life was hard in the south. Everyone was under the tyrannical rule of a merciless campaign. The north did not forgive the south for siding with the Americans. In those years, you could buy your ticket onto a boat illegally smuggled out of Vietnam (much like the coyotes of Mexico). Hundreds of thousands of people took risk of open waters to escape. These people are now known as the Vietnames boat people. My father tried twice. The first time landed him in prison. The second time he succeeded.
A small portion of the many family members on my dad's side.
But success is never a sure way out. He paid about $800 then for a spot with 80 other people on a 39-foot boat. Out in the open waters towards Thailand they headed with nothing but fruit to eat. They were robbed twice by sea pirates--the first time they took all of their belongings, the second they took young girls to rape.
Luckily, the captain coyote knew how to navigate open water bearing the stars in mind. Being out in the open ocean for 4 days doesn't seen that bad until you realize you are crammed with no shade in tropical heat. On the 5th day a European boat found them and pulled them towards shore. The vessel unlatched them before getting too close so that the Thai government could not put blame them for dropping off a bunch of refugees onto their borders. As they got closer to land, my father and his boat crew purposefully sunk the ship and swam to shore. They had to sink the ship in order to ensure that the Thais couldn't force them back out to the ocean. Civilians gathered and got them to a Thai refugee camp as they arrived on shore. There my father stayed for 2 months. He was then transferred to a Singapore refugee camp for another 2 months. After that, he was transferred again to another refugee camp on Indonesia where he learned English for a US visa for 8 months. His cousin in Texas essentially sponsored him to be relocated and for permission for visa. Since then, he has worked in the states doing various job and building a family.
So you could say that the American Dream really does exist.
Who knew that 22 years of a bicultural, bilingual life could shut out such an important understanding. I find that as I get older and my Vietnamese gets better, my parents' English gets better which creates much more ease in understanding.
The first couple weeks have been a blur of family reunions, after gravesite visits, after dinner parties galore. The next couple weeks are going to be sightseeing and adventures. I am writing this in the lobby of a luxurious hotel on the Mekong Delta town of Can Tho. We spent the last couple of days in the hillside old Parisian capital town of Dalat visiting hilltribes and riding on elephants. Vietnam has become the easiest foreign country I've ever travelled in. Aside from having the lavish expenditure of my parents' pocketbook, I am easily able to communicate with the locals. Getting around has never been so easy. I find that every day adds more into my broken Vietnamese vocabulary which has given me the ambition to become a teacher guide for an educational Vietnam exchange program. The best way to find your future is really to travel back into your past.
Peace, love, and good vibes to all my fellow dreamers out there,
J.