The countdown

In about 24 hours I will be, if all goes accordingly without any flight delays or complications, boarding china airlines flight 007 to journey half-way around the world to Vietnam, where I will reside for the next 4 months. Vietnam, the country wherein half of my cultural identity was born, and yet I have only tales extracted from my parents’ memories and classroom lecture notes to conjure up an image of where my heritage derives from. And now I not only get to go to Vietnam, I’m going to live there. Yikes!

I must admit that less than 24 hours before my journey commences, I am replete with trepidation and utmost fear. While a part of me is extremely excited to go back to my parents’ home country and discover my ‘roots’ (I hate that term but it essentially sums it up), the same enthusiasm channels into fear. How am I going to survive in a completely different world? While I am fluent in Vietnamese, my vocabulary is that of a 3rd grader’s (at best), and my passive nature makes me cringe at the thought of having to constantly haggle and bargain my way through every purchase. Or should I worry about constantly beating off pickpocketers and being perpetually paranoid that someone will steal my passport and I will consequently be detained in Vietnam forever? And what about the waterborne-bug infested water that will inflict unimaginably horrible viruses to my stomach? And the SQUATTING, non-flushable toilets?!?!

I kid. Those are really the least of my worries. In all honesty what I fear most is Vietnam not living up to what I have always imagined it to be. Throughout my life I have battled and tried to compromise the hybrid identity of being Vietnamese-American, and I know there is a whole generation of us out there, children of Vietnamese war refugees, who can attest to the fact that these two cultures are not easily reconcilable. I was born and have lived in the US the entire duration of my life, and now is my opportunity to go back to the other half of my foundation and really learn about my heritage. Here is a country that has manifested in me so much of its cultural history and heritage, and yet conversely I know so little about it. Yes, I speak the language fluently and I voraciously ingest pho and goi cuon, but what do I really know? But it is what it is; I am a 1.5 generation Vietnamese-American, juggling Vietnamese traditions that my parents have instilled within me since I was young, while simultaneously trying to ‘fit in’ in American society.

I have always dreamed of going to Vietnam, despite my parents having renounced their home country years ago and despite the perpetual negative buzz of Vietnam being a war-torn (true), communist (mm half true), and third world (developing!) country. In the course of the past few weeks I have been training myself to lessen my expectations as to correspondingly lessen my chances of disappointment. In a way, I hope everyone was just wrong and cynical about anything critical they may have thought of Vietnam, because I, admittedly in naiive fashion, want so badly to see only the beauty of the other country that fulfills the other half of my foundation, to understand and to see starkly what it means to be Vietnamese.

While disappointments are of course inevitable and while I probably will never understand in its entirety what it means to be Vietnamese, I’m still excited. Nervous, but excited. The countdown begins…