Dear Starry Souls,
Thirteen years ago, I went to Vietnam with my mẹ and older sister. I was only six years old, having started my third quarter of first grade at school, when I held onto my mom’s shirt through the airport and continued to hold on as we navigated unfamiliar streets.
I only hold small details of that trip and have them tucked away in a corner of my mind. I remember the constant beeping that came from the motorbikes that never stopped passing by my aunt’s tiny apartment. Even at night, it would become a lullaby that was sung even in your dreams. I can recall tasting nuoc mia on a flimsy plastic chair, in the hot, sticky weather, with mud freckling my legs. I think back to how annoyed I was when my uncle continued to make fun of my American name, and how outlandish I felt when I couldn’t speak Vietnamese as fluently as my non-American-born cousins.
Thirteen years have passed and those recollections–once hidden away–are now on replay as I prepare to leave for Vietnam in a little more than a week. I’m much older now, having entered my twenties, ending my internship early to spend three weeks there before I start my third year at university.
It’s been hard to fathom that I am going. Vietnam had always remained an idea, a near possibility, as my sisters and I got older and suddenly we have more responsibilities than ever and no longer lived together at home. My family has also never been terrific at planning trips: Always discussing an idea for a day or two and never acting on it until suddenly we are in a car heading eight hours to Florida and trying to book a hotel for a few nights. So naturally, this three-week international trip was planned very last minute with me scrambling at work to find plane tickets for my family.
Despite the stress that comes with my family’s last minute planning, I feel excited. Excited to go back—now being old enough to remember much more and to better navigate my parent’s home country. Yet within that excitement is also a particular silence. The kind that comes before a new beginning–a blank slate. Like a brand new page that’s awaiting its writer and pen. I know I will arrive in Ho Chi Minh as I am and return to Raleigh changed. or perhaps–more of me.
For so long, I watched others have the privilege to go to Vietnam and spend their days there lavishly as if it was their own exotic paradise. As my own immigrant parents worked endlessly to keep us living here in America, never quite able to save enough to go back to their own childhood homes. I try not to hold any bitterness towards it all and be grateful–especially now that we do have the opportunity after years have passed. But that envy stuck with me for a while, along with all the complicated, intertangled feelings of never being wholly American or Vietnamese. There’s still that six-year-old in me, afraid of how outlandish I will be in a country full of others who do look like me.
But thirteen years have indeed passed and even in small everyday moments here I feel like an outsider, but those are only moments, and like years, they pass too. Only as if continue to let them pass and remember I am only completely, wholly myself.
So maybe it is okay that I am a foreigner to the land that holds part of my identity. I am only twenty, and much of a foreigner to all that is ahead of me. Somehow, I know it will all feel like coming home again in the end.
With Love,
Leah K. Tran
P.S. Prepare for some poems to be written and sent from the other side of the world!
deeply resonating with this. a foreigner in all but skin and bones. excited to see what else you write!