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.