Born Again
By Quyen Tran Wittuhn
Saturday, July 8
The plane touches down on Tan Son Nhat airport in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and I peer out the tiny airplane window for my first glimpse of the country where I was born. My family and I fled to the United States as refugees in 1975, when I was two years old. Now, after 25 years of waiting to visit my birthland, here I am. There are tall green grasses and palm fronds waving. There are remnants of old concrete structures-perhaps left over from the war?
I may have been born here, but I perceive almost everything from the perspective of an American. I grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota. I went to high school in Chanhassen, home of the famed Chanhassen Dinner Theatre. I enjoyed my college years at Macalester College, in St. Paul…I am as American as they come, yet I am Vietnamese. I have never felt as confused about my identity as I do now, when my sister and I step onto the land of our ancestral roots.
At least a hundred people are pressed up against the fence, at the airport, calling names of friends and relatives, waving signs. We hurry down the sidewalk, looking for taxis. Finding one is not difficult. They are all clambering for us. We are about to follow one friendly-looking driver, when I hear a man shout: "Global Volunteers." I turn around, and the lone American in the parking lot is holding a Global Volunteers sign with an expectant look on his face. We are two Vietnamese women in a sea of Vietnamese faces, but our team leader has picked us out as Americans! I discover later that this will not be a rare occurrence.
Our taxi makes its way toward our hotel in Saigon, as Ho Chi Minh City is still called by the locals. We pass through vibrant streets lined with stores selling dried goods, electronics, fruit, scooters and fabric. There are only a couple of traffic lights sprinkled around downtown and, as far as we can tell, there are no rules of the road. Everyone fends for themselves, using their horns to warn other scooters, bicycles, cyclos, cars, trucks and pedestrians, yet surprisingly traffic jams are almost nonexistent. It is absolutely marvelous to watch.
Our taxi driver discovers my little sister and I are "viet khieu," or "Vietnamese-Americans." We tell him of my father's reluctance to return to Vietnam for fear of government retaliation and corruption. He laughs and says that times have changed: "Today one can even curse the government." Yet there are still obvious indications of the ruling Communist party. Internet access is available, but the connections are filtered through a master server based in Hanoi. And, while satellite TV in hotels offers CNNAsia, CNBC and MTVAsia, private citizens are not allowed to have satellite hookups, and only government-approved programs are broadcast through local channels.
Sunday, July 9
After a steaming bowl of "pho," the ubiquitous and delicious beef noodle soup, for breakfast, our Global Volunteers team rumbles off in a van for Cao Lanh, where our program is based. Cao Lanh is the newly designated capital of the Dong Thap province. An up-and-coming town, Cao Lanh is located about four hours west of Saigon. It is also the city where my grandparents, on my mother's side of the family, lived until their deaths.
Tram Chim (now renamed Tam Nong, as so many towns and streets were renamed after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975) is where I was born, and it is only an hour and a half's drive from Cao Lanh. I vacillate between whether or not to visit Tram Chim. On the one hand, I tell myself, of course I must go-to be in Vietnam, within a couple hours of where I was born and not to go would be foolish. On the other hand, I do not feel ready.
On the ride from Saigon to Cao Lanh we speed past children playing in the streets, young women dressed in the traditional ao dai, old women selling fruit, buildings and homes built up one right next to the other. For me, it is all so new-and, yet, I could easily be one of those women selling fruit on the streets.
I feel a kind of relief that this is only a three-week program, and that afterwards, I will return to the comforts of my home and family. I think back 25 years to when my parents arrived in the U.S., with four small children, facing what I feel now: the unfamiliarity of a different country and culture. I grieve for my mother, especially. Most of my dad's side of the family emmigrated to the U.S., but my mother was torn away from her parents, brothers, sisters and homeland forever. These familiarities were replaced with a land so foreign in language, climate, food and people that I cannot even begin to imagine her shock and sadness. My mother never saw her parents again. What saddens me the most is that her story is not uncommon around this world-not then, and not today.
Monday, July 10
My volunteer position in Cao Lanh is as a teacher's aide at the Foreign Language Center. My job is to help the students with their pronunciation: I say a word, and they repeat it. On my first day, I immediately understand why such help is valuable. Vietnamese is a tonal language, and many of the sounds that exist in the English language do not exist in Vietnamese, and vice versa. The teachers, despite their hard work, still speak with a Vietnamese accent and pass this on to their students. For many students, both children and adults, the Global Volunteers are the first native English speakers they have ever encountered.
After class, my sister and I set out to find the one person in Cao Lanh my parents told us to contact. We call this woman "Co Ba," because she is the third child in her family. She and my parents were teachers at the same school in Tram Chim, where I was born. We have Co Ba's address, but having an address does not mean much in Vietnam. By asking a succession of people if they know where Co Ba's home is, we are pointed further and further into a winding maze of unpaved alleys that connect small homes with the main road. Roosters crow, and women squat over fire pits, roasting corn, banana cakes and other delicacies.
We finally arrive at the open door of Co Ba's home. An old woman, about four and half feet tall, wearing glasses, with her hairneatly rolled into a bun, looks at us with a confused expression. I clasp my
hands and bow to her in the traditional Vietnamese greeting. I introduce myself
and then my sister, UyenThi. I tell her my parents' names and watch her eyes
light up as she comprehends who we are. She takes my hands firmly in her own
and leads us into her tiny house. We remove our sandals before entering, as
is the Vietnamese custom. The floor is laid neatly with red tiles. Every inch
of wall space is covered with icons of Jesus and Mary. A black and white TV
perches on one shelf. A hammock, no more than five feet long, hangs from a metal
stand.
Living with Co Ba is a young man of 22, whose education she sponsors. She raises money from family and friends, both in Cao Lanh and the U.S., in order to send him to college to study computers. She uses the extra money to buy school supplies and clothing for small children in the rural areas surrounding Cao Lanh. Not for the first or last time on this journey, I am astounded and humbled by how a woman who has so little devotes her time and resources to those even poorer than she. We show Co Ba pictures of my parents. To my delight, she says I have my mother's dimples.
My class in the evening is a bit different from the morning one. The students are mostly teenagers, with a few adults. I introduce myself in English. They stare at me for a while. One student then asks me to write my name on the board. I write it Vietnamese style, with my last name first: Tran Thi Hanh Quyen. There is another moment of silence. Finally, a student asks, "Why do you have a Vietnamese name?" I am stunned. So much for passing as a local! It must be my clothes, I think, though they are all wearing western-style clothes, too. Or maybe it is my height? The average Vietnamese person seems to be about five feet.
I explain how my family and I left Vietnam for the U.S. as refugees. "Why did you leave?" they ask.
Not knowing how else to respond, I say, "When the war ended, we had to go." They all giggle when I try speaking Vietnamese. They say I speak with, literally, "a hard tongue." I pull out pictures of my parents, brothers and sisters, our home in Minnesota. As the class comes to a close, I can tell they still cannot figure me out. Am I American or Vietnamese?
Thursday, July 13
In my various shopping excursions and rides on the pedicab (a bicycle towing a wagon on which the passenger sits), I discover that I am being charged the higher price for foreigners, which is typically double the local price. When this happened the first time, my natural reaction was to bristle at what I thought was extortion. I tried to get a better price, as bartering is a common practice in Vietnam. After successfully "saving" something between 25 cents to a dollar, I felt rather ashamed of my stinginess and started paying the asking price.
Monday, July 17
This morning, one of my students has invited me to a wedding. First we attend "di ruoc dau," a ritual where the groom and his family visit the bride's house and present her family with fruit, wine and other gifts. The bride then accompanies the groom to his family's house, where more rituals are performed to honor their ancestors. Traditionally, the bride will live with her new husband and his parents for several years until they can afford to move into their own house. If the groom is the youngest boy in the family, the couple will often live with the groom's parents until the parents die.
The students pick me up by scooter and we arrive at the groom's house about 15 minutes later. An altar has been prepared inside for honoring the ancestors. Fruits are piled on golden urns. Decorated metal canisters are filled with more fruit, and packages are wrapped in shiny paper. After much discussion about who will carry what to the bride's house, I am given the top layer of the wedding cake. I am supposed to carry it with one hand, in the rain, on the back of a scooter! Some of the roads are greasy with mud, and I am doubtful I can pull this off. Nevertheless, I grasp the cake stand and, bearing it like a torch, off I go. The scooter slips once, but there is only minor damage to the cake's frosting. Thankfully, it arrives intact at the bride's house.
Another volunteer, Mary Ann, is also attending the wedding. She has the unfortunate experience of using the bathroom: a little wooden stall built over the river. The floor consists of slats of wood, and a bucket of water and a pail are available for rinsing the floor when one is finished. The dishes are washed upstream from here, and even farther upstream is another house with another "bathroom." At the back of our minds, we always knew what went into the river, but it had never been made so explicit.
I feel quite sheepish after my evening class tonight. I tried to explain the popular U.S. TV game show "Survivor" to the students. They did not understand it. With their blank faces staring at me, I realized how ridiculous the game must sound. Their day-to-day lives are as hard as the challenges on "Survivor," but here no one gets a million bucks.
Tuesday, July 18
This weekend I will go to Tram Chim, where I was born.
Friday, July 21
It takes us an hour and a half to drive from Cao Lanh to Tram Chim by car. During my parents' time here, there was no road, and the same journey took six hours by canoe. I meet the woman who used to be my grandmother's housekeeper. I meet some of my parents' former students and their children. They all remember my three older brothers, and they ask about them by name.
For the umpteenth time, I wonder what my life would have been like if my family had not left Vietnam. My father would probably have been sent to a "re-education camp"-in other words, prison. I would probably be married, with children. Or perhaps I would one of the young teachers or students with whom Global Volunteers works.
Saturday and Sunday, July 22-23
As we approach our final week in Cao Lanh, I delight in what I have come to love about Vietnam: watching the eyes of the children light up when they pronounce the words "red" or "violin" correctly, riding on the back of a scooter, taking the pedicabs, or "xe loi," at night and gazing up at an entirely different sky of stars, removing my shoes before entering a home or shop, hearing stories about my parents when they were young, wearing my conical hat called the "non la," which is common enough to make me blend in, and simply watching the people pass by on the street-entire families on a scooter, a whole billboard on a pedicab, and young women in gracefully draped ao dais sitting upright on their bicycles without a trace of sweat on their noses.
Thursday, July 28
For a final celebration, UyenThi and I pick up our ao dai from the dressmaker. They cost a total of $35 U.S. dollars. We learn this is double the normal cost, but I still feel guilty for paying so little. In the States, two such ao dai would have cost at least $200. Walking down the street with my sister, wearing the traditional ao dai, our conical hats dangling from the tips of our fingers, I think that I have never felt so fully Vietnamese in my life.
Saturday, July 29
I am exhausted when we board the plane, but I am at peace. Up until now, my only images of Vietnam came from movies, documentaries and books about the Vietnam War. Vietnam, however, is so much more than a war. It is a country with an ancient and rich history. When I think of Vietnam now, I see the smiling children, the graciousness of our hosts, the rhythm of the scooters, and the warm welcome of the people.
At the time of this writing, Queyen Tran Witthuhn was Director of Asian & Pacific Service Programs at Global Volunteers. She holds a B.A. in anthropology and Latin American Studies from Macalester College, in St. Paul, M.N., and an M.A. in international development studies from the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. qtran@globalvolunteers.org