Autobiography

I have no idea where to start this autobiography business. I will say, I was one shy geeky kid from elementary to high school. Yes, I have the whole shebang: the rolling backpack, the infamous Vietnamese bowl haircut, braces, hand-me-down clothes that are always two sizes too big, and a funny accent. A perfect recipe for the “other.” People couldn't really figure me out since I wasn't quite Vietnamese, wasn't quite American. I didn't know what the hell I was.

I didn't start to identify myself as Vietnamese American until my late high school years, and I didn't even really understand the concept until college. Like the concept of Asian American, Vietnamese American means I am a being between both world. The Vietnamese identity alone fails to represent my experiences as a young womyn (note: never mind the grammar, I refuse to spell this any other way) acculturated to the United States culture and customs. And as for the American identity—there are so many definitions for this. Some might say you must be living in the United States for a certain years, some might say you must have citizenship, and some conservatives even insinuates that you must look a certain way (read: white). However, I live in California, specifically, the Bay Area where folks tend to be more liberal, therefore more welcoming of multiculturalism—even sometimes to the point of being an ethnoglobalist . I don't want to sugarcoat my experiences in America as completely tensionless, because there are some serious covert racism here. People won't say: “You are Vietnamese, go back to Vietnam or any of that silly sort of thing. But people will say: “You are Asian, you must be extremely smart, submissive, hardworking, and good at math. You speak English so well—like you are actually born here. Can you do any kung fu moves for me?” This Asian American minority myth that generalizes a continent of people as the homogenous, or that is culturally insensitive to the difference between “Asian” versus “Asian American.” Racism with a smile :)

I must apologize if my autobiography is making you feel uncomfortable, but these are valid experiences I must live and deal with as a generation 1.5 Vietnamese American every single day. It is simply inescapable. Being a person between two world, I continuingly struggle to balance preserving my Vietnamese heritage and retaining the Western culture that everyday feels more familiar to me. I don't want to succumb under the ethnocentric beliefs that Western culture are better, or more “superior,” but I cannot live without its materialistic comforts. I truly thought I would escape it, especially if I am on the other side of the globe. I was wrong. There is a wrenching spirit in the Hanoian air that tastes too familiar, too much like internalized oppression. Hmmm globalism, so delicious like a bowl of pho—all with the bitter aftertaste of MSG. The Vietnam I knew thirteen years ago as a seven years old is not the Vietnam today. That was simply a vanishing memory. Yes, the Doremon comics is still here, the locals are still here, and the food is still here. But something, something more than the surrounding skyscappers, more than the hypermarkets, more than the polluted pond, something has changed. Is it me? Am I the one that changed? Or is this strange spirit of Vietnam nation as a whole. This spirit of “It's time to catch up.”

It's so hard to reconstruct the memories of Vietnam as it were with what I have now. I remember dancing under the mid-afternoon rain of the summer monsoon, half naked. I remember the festivity of Vietnamese Tet, where hundreds of close and distance relatives gather under the same roof to feast and toast for the upcoming year. Most of all, I remember the loud, crackling laughter of the firecrackers, vibrating deep from my eardrums to every fiber of my body. Sounds of celebration and joy. I remember the red envelopes hehehe. I remember singing children nursery songs with my sister—until she bit me because I took her microphone. I remember my mother tailoring customers' clothes on the front of our house for a while, then my father switched the store into a motor bike repair shop. Now looking back, I think life is much better in Vietnam for them. Some days, they seem so depressed and isolated in the United States. The only thing they look forward to is church, the only major community hotspot for all the Vietnamese people. I still sleep at the church :). While my grandpa was there in the early 1990s, he had a barbershop for men and he would always gave me these bowl-cuts that he proudly said “It's cool”. Every late afternoon, he drove me around the neighborhood and bought me all sorts of treats. I'm so glad he is still alive.Now he drives my younger siblings and cousins around the block in America—still with a motor scooter.


I remember the dreadful hours falling asleep in Catholic mass, until those old men would come up to me and smack me in the head for being disrespectful to God. “God is watching you. He has eyes everywhere.” Yeah, like Big Brother. My grandma would tell all these scary scenes of hell that sounds eerily similar to Dante's inferno. Scared the shit out of me. I think that was the only reason I prayed and attended mass.

I didn't really appreciate my odd family until after I move out of the house to attend college. I've started to take interest in all the stories my dad tells me about our family in Vietnam on weekends car ride home. He would burst out all these stories dating back to the 1890s about my family in the north, and I was so shocked. I never knew my grandpa's 18 years old brother disappeared as a indentured servant for the French in the south. My family never know what happen—was he fighting their war, did he died from some freak accident from hard labor. Then I realize, I have to go back to Vietnam and find out. I need to return to my motherland, visit the graves of my great-great grandparents, and feel all the love and runs though me. I want to reconnect with my roots, to redefine my own personal geography—not the geography drawn by the hands of the conquerors, but by myself—my internal geography. Redefining the very definition of being a Vietnamese from the hyphenated Vn-Am identity. I want to walk the very earth that my family have walked and farmed and loved and lived—before the damn war that torn our family apart, our nation apart, and the very fabric our souls apart. No I never experienced the war, but I still feel its effect like the massive destruction of a tsunami. The pain that my grandparents and parents experienced affect me. What's left is animosity and misunderstanding between the Vietnamese people abroad and the ones still struggling here. A cultural gap much farther than the ocean, but only takes a crossing to bridge.

Let the bridging begins...