Revisiting Vietnam – Reconciling With a Home Away From Home

The last time I visited Vietnam, I was six years old, and though I was young, my little brain was capable of a lot of resolve. So, after that visit, I vowed to myself that I never, ever wanted to visit Vietnam again.

My relationship with my parents’ home country has always been rocky. Both of my parents were born and raised in Vietnam, my dad being born in the city of Saigon while my mom grew up in the rural outskirts of Nha Trang. My family is not one to travel overseas frequently, but when I was six, my parents made it a point to take both my brother and me to visit my mom’s family in Vietnam to connect with our roots and meet my mother’s family.

Right off the bat, I was not excited. I would have to miss my yearly ballet recital in order to go. I resented the idea of it! Nothing and nobody could make me go to an unfamiliar country where the only thing to do would be to stay with my grandparents and all ten of my aunts and uncles whom I barely knew.

Alas, there is only so much free will I could have had as a three-foot-something child living with my parents. Away we went, and after a 15-hour flight from San Francisco to Saigon, we were officially in Vietnam.

At first, I allowed myself the slightest excitement about the prospect of being in this new country. My mom had told me Vietnam was beautiful, from the clear blue beaches to the delicious street food to the beautiful architecture. She made it seem like paradise. Even when I looked up pictures of Nha Trang, Saigon, or Vietnam on Google, I was met with an array of images that made it look like a world-class vacation destination.

Much to my dismay, it was anything but.

The reality is that, despite how well the tourism industry tries to paint Vietnam, it is evidently still a third-world country. Gone were the clear waters and well-kept streets that were advertised to me on the internet. In their place stood a poverty-stricken community and a devastated landscape. The beaches were muddy and riddled with bacteria-infested water, leeches ready to nip at your ankles as soon as you stepped inside. The sidewalks were occupied by gangs and hecklers, unfit for a little girl to walk through. Motorcyclists constantly held the streets at a standstill, packed in lines up and down the road as they aggressively yelled at one another in efforts to rush to their destinations. Most shockingly, though, was that the homes of the Vietnam locals were nothing like I had ever seen before. 

As I learned during my time there, my mom grew up in a little wooden shack with her mother, her father, and her ten siblings. In my mind, that was not a destiny fit for a woman as amazing as her. I tried to imagine her as a girl, waking up on a mattress on the floor alongside her siblings packed in the tiny room that I was looking at in that moment. As I went to bed that night squished between three of my cousins on a mattress surrounded by mosquito netting, I could not help but feel deceived. How could anyone live like this? How could anyone in their right mind willingly visit a place like this? How could anyone find beauty in this?

But as I got older, I could not help but notice that Vietnam was slowly becoming more and more of a popular tourist destination. While, when I was younger, the culture of visiting Vietnam typically belonged to families in the US who were visiting family members left behind, I gradually began to see foreigners traveling to Vietnam for elaborate vacations. Quora user Jeff Baggs exclaims,

“Go to Vietnam, it’s changing fast, but right now it’s a great mix of old and new, traditional and modern. They have a young outgoing population, who are waiting to help make your time there something special and to be remembered.”

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-you-want-to-visit-Vietnam

Travel vlogs of foreigners visiting Vietnam began to blow up, as these vloggers enticed their viewers with the sheer affordability of tourism in Vietnam, the “foreign delicacies” that they stumbled upon as they walked past all of the street vendors, and the beautiful nature they were able to witness while they escaped from the cities to the countryside.

At first, I wondered if any of these visitors knew the truth about the country they were visiting. Did they know Vietnam could only be that affordable because vendors were lowering their prices to entice more customers, all the while surviving off the small amounts they were getting in return? Did they know the dirt-cheap street foods they considered delicacies, from trứng vịt lộn (fertilized duck egg) to ốc (sea snails) were ultimately struggle meals created to feed the Vietnamese people when they fell on hard times? Did they know that intense manual labor went into the upkeep of the beautiful grounds they were visiting? Did they know that just outside those grounds, people were living in their own impoverished communities?

I was so frustrated with the fact that these tourists would never be hit with the sense of disillusionment that I was, as travelers with no cultural connection to the place they were visiting. After I left, I spent years thinking about how this vacation took away all sense of romanticization I had of Vietnam. I could not bear to think about the “cheap travel destination” when all of the memories I could conjure up were tinged with a pity for those who had to sustain a living like this. After one merely visits a country like Vietnam, they can revel in the cheap curiosities it has to offer and return right back to their lifestyle of comfortability and privilege in their respective well-off countries, unburdened with the knowledge of the true Vietnamese lifestyle. I, on the other hand, could never remember the fun I had without being plagued by the truth about how my relatives were living.

Yet, as I kept asking these questions alongside the growth of Vietnamese tourism, I could not help but wonder if I was the one who might have been getting the wrong idea. Ever since my visit in my younger years, I harbored some kind of fear and resentment towards the country that should have been my second home. I grew tired of feeling so disconnected from Vietnam when it seemed so easy for people with no ethnic connection to the country to fall in love with it. I wanted to fall in love with it too. 

Because, truth be told, my feelings towards my country began to get in the way of my relationship with my family. My uncomfortability about the truth of Vietnam’s “beauty” somehow metamorphasized into uncomfortability towards my relatives that lived there. To be honest, I can’t pinpoint why. All I know is that when my mom handed me the phone to FaceTime with my grandmother, I could only get a few sentences out before wishing it was over. A few sentences turned into a quick “Chào bà ngoại” (Hi Grandma), which turned into a small wave of acknowledgment, until eventually the emotional distance between myself and my Vietnamese relatives was more expansive than the oceans between us. 

Looking back, I think the culture shock about how my relatives were living gave me a sense of survivor’s guilt, for getting to live as well as I did in America. I had always thought of my parents as just my parents, with no past lives. But being confronted with the fact that they grew up struggling to make ends meet alongside all of their family members made me hyper-aware of the privileges I had, which were emotions all too complex for me to conquer at such a young age.

As I grew older, I slowly began to understand my parents and their families. While as I was younger, I could not comprehend why my parents viewed Vietnam through such rose-colored glasses, I began to realize that it was more about the feeling than the place. Vietnam was where they spent their youth, running around on the streets with all of their siblings and basking in the comfortability of a sense of home. It was where they walked up the hills to their schools, and then back down to the computer cafes where they could goof off with their friends before coming home to a meal made with love by their parents, and eventually fall asleep under one, tiny roof alongside their families that made everything out of nothing for them.

I am still grappling with the difficulties of forming a connection to my distant family and my distant home, don’t get me wrong. But I have slowly began to understand that without the rich history of the country, and the care my grandparents took to make it a paradise for my parents, I would be nowhere near where I am at this moment. So, no, I cannot turn back time. I cannot force my younger self to understand that there can be beauty in everything, no matter how unfamiliar and uncomfortable it might be to look for. But I can let my waves of acknowledgement grow into greeting my grandmother over the phone every time she calls, and I can let the greetings grow into lengthy conversations with each and every one of my ten aunts and uncles in Vietnam. I yearn for the day that I can finally say “Chào bà ngoại” in person to my grandmother once more.