The Sun Is Shining

"The Dutch are going to the World Cup semifinals!" she thought, bouncing it around in her head like a happy soccer ball. "Woo hoo! Ha ha!" Those were real sounds!

Mom shuffled her way toward the supermarket, and she was alone in the car in the parking lot again. It was just like every other supermarket trip that they'd taken every week. The sun was shining in that harsh noon way in California. The concrete was baking. The parking lot was silent, except for here and there, a few strangers shuffled toward the supermarket.

She left the car to go buy some things. As her feet climbed off the parking lot and onto the sidewalk, she saw life begin. Right outside the doors of little shops stood middle-aged men in old t-shirts and khakis, smoking, standing, people-watching - like sentinels pacing a desert who have been and would always be there. She ducked into the little Liquor store to buy newspapers. The papers were all Vietnamese, the store was full of Vietnamese people. They discussed the Dutch vs. Brazil game - middle-aged working class men buying lotto tickets, women sitting around waiting for who knows what, the cashier behind the counter, everyone was aflame with loud Vietnamese comments. It didn't matter who was talking to who, because strangers can talk into the air about football and always hear an answer.

*Middle-aged man buying lotto tickets: "I can't believe Brazil folded, they have to know that at this level you can't do that".
*A voice behind me: "No, the Dutch were playing good defense"
*20-something year old girl working the register: "$5.00 please. But they should know the more they freak out, the worse they'll play."
*Several voices from the chairs around the shop: "That's right, yeah, there were 20 minutes left in the game. Just embarrassing"

She moved on, having bought her newspapers. Ten steps later, she saw a man in old clothes sitting against the wall, legs folded under him, strumming a guitar, a harmonica near his lips. She walked past a monk wearing a saffron robe, slowly taking measured steps like a person meticulously dripping solution into tiny test tubes. He was barefoot in this dirty strip mall. A few steps later, the world seemed to spill out from the stores onto the sidewalks, with flowers, fresh fruits for sale, ladies coming out to sing phrases advertising jackfruits in season or delicious mangos for $5 a box, come in, come in! $3 for all bouquets on the bottom row, daisies, chrysanthemums. Nevermind that the fruit shop's banner actually said, "Savory crepes shop" (where are the crepes?). She wanted to stop and smell and touch, but was a little embarrassed and afraid that she would get coerced into buying, unable to resist the ladies whose professions are to coerce people into buying things.

At the vermicelli shop, they called her "con" and smiled and said she could go ahead and sit while they make her order. She could smell vermicelli all around the shop, the different types all blending together in aroma but unmistakably something vermicelli. The order came. She smiled, the shopkeeper smiled and thanked her for her business. She pushed the door open and went back out to the world.

The jungle of flowers and tropical fruits had livened up, now browsers were mixing in with the advertising ladies. Jackfruits, mangos, bananas, guanabanas, lychees, all packed against and stacked atop each other in an unmistakably Vietnamese way. The colors of summer's yellow, orange, deep red swirled in her eyes alongside the melodic Vietnamese singing out fruits' names. The man with the guitar commenced playing a song about the countryside. Someone put a dollar in his cup. She did too, and he thanked her. The guitar held rhythm and the harmonica crooned the melody, climbing, singing, whistling. It was like Bob Dylan playing in a Vietnamese strip mall. The monk was still taking measured steps, holding his alms bowl. As she walked toward her car, a little girl skipped in front of her, having come from a recently parked vehicle. The girl chased after her little brother, clutching her little green hat so it wouldn't blow away, grinning like the world was full of happiness.

And it was!

Grazing Closer to My Own Ideas

Today, I went through two panel interviews for a fellowship. I'd assumed that I was immune to further self-discovery at this point. After all, I've lived through several different philosophical experiences, and this was just two 20-minute interviews. But there were new learnings about myself. Much of the learning did not occur during the interviews themselves but surfaced to me afterward, simmering in my mind as I sat outside the interview rooms, drove back to downtown LA, and now sit reading old blog entries. I feel things starting to resurface.

Over the past three years, I have become more polished, professional, adult. Banking made me driven and capable in presenting myself. Today, I realized that this has also shoved other parts of my history to the back. Not in an intentional repressive way, but just subconsciously pared away for the sake of sales pitch "presentation".

Here is the story that I subconsciously pared away and failed to tell, but that I am now piecing together.

As a young girl growing up in Vietnam, I had a sturdy sense of identity. Country, family, Uncle Ho - these three things were taught to me each day, and in everyday life at school and at home, they were my identity, lodged deep in my sense of self like fish belonged in the sea. When I came to the U.S., these things began to fall apart. My parents whom I looked up to suddenly seemed afraid of society and obsequious to others. Uncle Ho and nationalist Vietnamese pride turned upside down as I witnessed Vietnamese American politics confuse the heck out of me, and learned that my father had been in a "re-education" camp because he was on the "wrong" side of the war. Vietnamese identity itself disintegrated at school, where I saw that the most stinging forms of hatred were the ones Vietnamese refugees held for each other. The exclusion among my Vietnamese peers was primarily about class - because I was poor, wore uncool clothes, had a funny haircut. Enveloping all this, American teenage society did not help. When classmates chatted about N'Sync or the latest movies, I could only sit in silence, neither understanding nor having actual money to go see such things. In this environment, my natural self-consciousness and timidity ballooned into silence. I felt alone, confused, and ashamed of myself, my memories and my family. And as a semi-smart person, I knew that this line of thought was wrong. Watching television after school, I saw Oprah declaring that it was wrong to be ashamed of yourself, though my daily life had no real living examples for this. So my self-hatred was double - I hated myself, and hated myself for hating myself.

Funny, I have forgotten how to share this set of experience with a personal voice. All my writings have released the issues, Social Studies has given me analytical terms to describe the social world, and banking has taught me to "professionalize" my personal story. I have processed the daylight out of my immigrant teenager experience, and now sum it up in a few short sentences (to fit into admissions essays): "I learned to synthesize different worlds", "I overcame societal boundaries", "I wrote a thesis that broke apart Vietnamese American identity". But they asked me, "Why? Why? Why?" I tried to explain with my sociological words and my professional commitment, but they didn't quite get it. There was, missing, the personal narrative that carries the story above, the very peculiar and devastating solitude of those years.

At the same time, I must say that part of me resists delving directly into this personal realm because when I talk to white Americans, it seems that the stories they most want to hear about are my [sob] hardships as an immigrant and how I miraculously overcame those hardships to pursue my dreams. But I resist this simple narrative. My immigrant experience is not just about this overcoming, scaling American barriers on the way to American success. The story I want to tell does include those things, but it begins and ends with something deeper.

Because I was an immigrant, I learned what it was like for a child to whole-heartedly believe in an identity and then have that identity taken away, and worse, self-disintegrate in front of her. The label that I had thought was right, just, loving, was turned upside-down. I thought I knew what being Vietnamese meant, but it turned out that that identity had been constructed as well.

At ten years old, I was happy and whole in my community, and leaving was an act against my will. Six years later, reading The Grapes of Wrath, I saw the Joads in myself and realized that what I'd left behind was my very soul. I wept, realizing the magnitude of this loss. At twenty, Harvard gave me the chance to build that soul and community again. But somewhere along the way, I realized that the soul rebuilt was actually different from the one that I had. It looked the same on the surface - there was acceptance, community, solidarity. But the currents ran deeper. Over the next few legs of my life (New York, Chicago, LA), I learned that soul is something that lives deep within you; it is not confined in but runs underneath country, language, class, gender, profession, politics. Somehow, this freed me. I became comfortable with knowing my community, personal identity and consciousness all as constructed outside and even inside of myself. This is why I work for Latinos and African-Americans like they are my Vietnamese brethren, and empathize with investment bankers as if they were organizing friends.

Once, I felt with a child's faith what it was to be Vietnamese. Since then, life has repeatedly taught me the illusory nature of reality. Still, having experienced that faith (and holding to my Vietnamese experience), I know the strength of identity and solidarity. I seek this in life and have found it in many different communities. It comes to me not in one particular place, but more like recognizing old friends in a crowd - the crowd may be Paris, Buenos Aires, a trading floor, a housing project, but always one would know that face. This is the immigrant story that I want to tell. It is not only about climbing the walls that men build to move from outside to inside, excluded to included (a simplistic notion of success). Rather, it is about an outsider digging beneath the ground, tunneling clear through to the other side and reaching many other places in the process. When you are an outsider everywhere, you actually have an extraordinary opportunity to be an insider to all of the world.

So it sounds empty for me to say to a panel of white people, "Being an immigrant is about compassion". But now, hopefully, you know all that I mean. And hopefully, I get another chance to explain it to them.

Buenos Aires

In Buenos Aires, the streets wrap their nights around
As you walk somewhere
Cobblestone paths punctuated with old lampposts and
A gnarled set of railroad tracks turning up dust in faded fluorescent light, to remind that this is an old city of industry, gasoline, smog. And deeper into the neighborhoods, further into the streets you find Palermo's boutiques, with whimsical designer goods encased behind glass storefronts, a young woman wearing a blue scarf tending the shop within, her secret laboratory.
I pass, running, getting lost, being found
in the night around me.

In Buenos Aires, they smile when they speak, even if it is just to say, "Here we digitalize music scores for the library". How simple it is to just inch up a smile while speaking, and what relief it blows into the air,
lighting the space between strangers.
I am charmed secretly by this easy joy.

In Buenos Aires, I traded unknown secrets with strangers, unbeknownst to them. As we boarded the Subte, as we traversed Avenida Corrientes, ebbing and flowing to the City's breathing, I gave and was given.
A smile, a wind, an identity
to push me to write. It was a fabric, a pattern, a dance. It was not the most beautiful, richest, poorest, most trendy, loudest, or saddest, but somehow it was all of these as I rounded street corners day and night, going to sites but really looking for people, lives, routines, all the while not noticing these things and all the while
remembering them all.

I woke up in Los Angeles and immediately missed Buenos Aires. There is nothing more specific, just a feeling of something torn apart, left behind,
Like a secret I didn't even know I had.

The Music Stopped

It is 7pm on a Sunday evening. I am having dinner with my parents, before driving back to LA for the week. Mom puts on one of her favorite CD's, the singer Ha Thanh, who has an extremely clear, light and airy voice. I have grown to love this singer's voice as well, as it floats into the air some of my favorite of the old songs, bringing me a sense of familiar home and memories, as well as exquisite beauty within each note. To hear Mom describe Ha Thanh's voice is to see real passion. Mom does not use fancy vocabulary or metaphors to describe, but rather, draws out her normal words and emphasizes with tone, "It's sooo light and each time I hear, it becomes so GOOD and so BEAUTIFUL! Mẹ thấy hay ơơơơơơi là hay, hay QUÁ!".

I ask Mom why I had never heard Ha Thanh among her cassettes when we were still living in Vietnam. Mom says that after 1975, Ha Thanh only sang certain songs that she was allowed to sing, and those were not the songs that Mom loved. Of course, the concept of censorship is not new to me, especially after years of studying and following social movements. But this time, censorship put side by side with Mom's expressive love for this music and its romance, and my own appreciation, it hit me personally. Briefly, I had to imagine how it could be that one day, the music stopped. All the songs you grew up with, fell in love over, cried over, was inspired by, one day they all just stopped. You were not allowed to hear them any more. In the streets, flames were engulfing cassette tapes and books in huge piles. Then what happened? Who were you, and who could you become?

Then, I got in my car and drove off to LA for the week.

Uncle Six

I have seen one picture of Uncle Six. He is a little boy, around eight years old, he looks cute and smart. He is squatting on the ground (to my recollection). I know that Uncle Six died when he was a boy.

Uncle Six was born with a disease. His bones grew faster than his muscles, so that he could not walk very well. Uncle Six only went to first grade. After that, he could not move well enough to walk anymore so he couldn't go to school with the other kids. He stayed home. In the mornings, his mom or sisters carried him out to the living room, where he could sit and watch the neighbors passing by, and listen to the radio. Uncle Six was a smart boy. He read a lot, maybe because he couldn't do anything else, books and newspapers. He would sit there and read. And he drew pictures, just like the ones he saw in the newspaper comics, pictures of people speaking with little speech bubbles, pictures of objects emitting light through lines blasting off their radiance, Uncle Six sat there and drew and drew and drew. When he was eight years old, Uncle Six had surgery. He went to the hospital and they opened up both of his legs and pulled his muscles. He was in the hospital for a year, just eight years old. His Mom moved into the hospital to live with and take care of him. Uncle Six eventually came back home. He wore a metal brace and it helped him to practice walking. He would walk around the house, front to back, back to front. But his legs never recovered and eventually, he could not move anymore. Uncle Six lied in one place, all day, every day. Just lying in one place, his sense of hearing developed into something amazing. Hearing footsteps, he could tell exactly who was coming over to visit. If any object in the house fell out of place, Uncle Six knew where it happened. If something dropped and rolled under the bed, Uncle Six would say, "It's under the bed, in that corner over there", and there they found it. Everyone loved your Uncle Six.

Eventually, his immune system gave up fighting. Uncle Six died on the 29th of December in the Lunar Year, right before Tet, in 1968. It was fortunate that he died that day because we could bury him. The next day, on the 30th, the Communists fought their way all the way into Saigon, and all the roads were shut. In fact, right before that, our neighbor had gone back to his village to visit his mother. There, the communists ambushed that house and shot him. They thought he was someone else, someone in the Southern government that they were looking for, and shot him. Then they said, "No, it isn't him" and sent his body back home to our neighbor's house, right next door. I still remember the neighbor had to do something with the body, but they couldn't bury it. They broke down the front door to their house, and put his body on it, and carried it off on the door to somewhere else.

Deciding

There was a recurring hesitance that could be attributed to fear. It was safer to hold on to the existing, or at least, to passively allow it to exist by simply not speaking the counterfact that if spoken, would immediately and irreversibly change reality. She was in that place. The space that allowed itself to exist, where to use a trite but entirely applicable phrase, "it was easy". She felt like a runner who had rounded the track so many times. The turns were second nature, and putting one foot in front of another was an act as natural as breathing. Now, the thought occurred to stop, a serious thought. But her legs continued to carry her, one in front of the other. She wanted to stop, but also didn't want to stop, wanted to run, but also didn't want to run. Until it became indecipherable exactly what "want" was.

The decision was entirely in her hands. But it was like a heavy rock on the road, it would not fade away or melt away or change shape on its own or through anyone else's energy. No, it required conscious exertion on her part to move. There was no other course of action. Which was, of course, the difficult part. Most difficult because she would be moving it while not knowing what other boulders lay ahead, while only knowing that today, it must be moved. And what about tomorrow? There was no way to figure that out, and the thinking about it continued without reaching conclusions.

But, today, she knows that the rock must move. It will not do to sit idle in the same position for another 365 days, she thought. Her mind and body know.

How terrible would it be to write for 365 days, to self-structure her entire life, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Perhaps it will be terrible. Perhaps it will be wonderful. She could gather herself, spread her mind out in the garden and trace its life, connect its webs, spin to the light something that was only hovering in darkness this whole time. She could hike under the sun, have habits, make investments, read the morning paper, ride her bicycle. The challenge is that all of it will have to be self directed, self created. It will ask her to be not only smart, but also a free and responsible human being, more so than she has ever been.

She did not reach a conclusion. The writing comforted her.

Oh, Now I Get What's Missing

I'm just looking to be inspired. Somebody, something! Wahoo!!