Vietnam to America: An 18-Hour Flight, or an Impossible Journey?
Pacific News Service, Commentary, Andrew Lam, Posted: Nov 30, 2004
Editor's Note: As United Airlines prepares to begin direct flights between San Francisco and Vietnam on Dec. 9, PNS editor Andrew Lam, a Vietnamese American who fled his homeland during the Vietnam war, contemplates physical and emotional distance and the modern sense of self in a shrinking world.
In the modern world, the distance between America and Vietnam can be impossibly far or very near.
For my grandmother, who owned a clock in the shape of Vietnam to commemorate her beloved homeland and who died in San Jose, Calif., soon after the Cold War ended, Vietnam was very far. But these days, with United Airlines ready to inaugurate direct flights to Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City, if you prefer) from San Francisco on Dec. 9, 2004, going home again for me and many others is but a matter of scheduling.
Before the United States lifted the trade embargo against Vietnam in 1994 and normalized relations with the country in 1995, a care package or letter sent home took three to six months to reach its intended recipients -- if it got there at all.
Up until the late 1980s, my mother would roll $20 bills into a cylindrical shape slimmer than a cigarette and stuff them into a toothpaste tube in hopes that customs officers would fail to catch them. Would Aunty know what we meant when we wrote, "We want to see you smile" in the accompanying letter?
News from Vietnam, too, came slowly to us in America during those Cold War years. It took the form of letters written on recycled, grayish paper -- letters that threatened to dissolve with a single tear drop. The letters unanimously told of tragic lives: Aunty and her family barely survived; another uncle is indefinitely incarcerated in a malaria-infested re-education camp; and there's no news of the cousin and family who disappeared somewhere in the South China Sea.
How far was Vietnam from America then?
For me, who grew up in America reading those grayish letters, Vietnam was my past, ignoble, tragic and inaccessible. I assumed it could never again be part my future. For those fleeing on crowded fishing boats out to sea, the distance too was very far. It took one of my cousins 13 times in as many years to escape. But so determined was he that he lived in Vietnam with only one resolve: to reach America at the risk of death and destruction.
Fast-forward two decades or so, and it's a whole new world.
While some native-born Americans blame the forces of globalization -- communication and transportation technology, mass movements, porous borders, open trade -- for breaking down community and family ties, many Asian immigrants will tell you it has often had the reverse effect on their lives. Not long ago the ocean was vast, homesickness was an incurable malady and the immigrant had little more than memories to keep cultural ties alive.
Today, after the Cold War has melted and jumbo jets have shrunk the ocean, the camcorder shows Granduncle back home what life is like in America and the Internet and cell phone connect far-flung relatives across the globe.
The cousin, once a boat person, is now an engineer, wealthy and established, with his own home in the Oakland hills. And I was wrong, as it turned out, regarding my homeland. It became part of my future. As a writer, I've been back to Vietnam half a dozen times. It's as if that old, treacherous ocean has turned into a pond underneath the jet's wings, and the war that was responsible for unspeakable horrors is now only a vague memory.
Vietnam-America. Whatever happened to that bloody embrace?
The ash-blonde woman in her mid-50s at the Cu Chi tunnel, where Viet Cong hid during the war, told me she had to see Vietnam once in her life. "I grew up with Vietnam on my TV set. I grew up protesting that war. I told myself I have to see the country to learn what it's all about." She goes to Vietnam to look for the meaning of the past.
Her young Vietnamese guide has a dream for the future. It's filled with the Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars and two-tiered freeways. "I have many friends over there now," she says, reflecting the collective desire of Vietnamese youth. "They invite me to come. I'm saving money for this amazing trip."
If the encounter between America and Vietnam is remembered as a bloody battle, it has also evolved slowly into a kind of pas de deux.
Thus for me, the distance between the two countries remains enigmatic. It is both impossible, and an 18-hour flight. The jet plane will and will not take me home again. Or rather, I go home again, but not as the Vietnamese child who left home.
Yesterday my heritage was simple and self-evident. The borders were real. Vietnam and its green, rich rice fields were all there was. Today, my identity is multi-faceted, complex.
I am not alone. The Cold War and its aftermath have given birth to a race of children born elsewhere, of trans-nationals whose memories are layered and whose biographies transgress borders. They are simultaneously aware of two or three different cultures, and they move restlessly from one language to another, from one civilization to the next.
As a result, I think sometimes my real home is portable, something defined by movement, restlessness and a particular yet hybrid sense of self.
If there is a metaphor for it all, the wall in a restaurant in San Francisco's Tenderloin seems to express it. Sometimes I go there and sit and stare at two wooden clocks hanging on opposite corners of that wall. One, like my grandmother's clock, is carved in the shape of Vietnam. The other is hewn in the shape of America.
Tick tock, tick tock. They tick at different intervals. Tick tock. I was born a Vietnamese. Tick tock, tick tock. I am reborn an American. Tick tock. I am of one soul. Tick tock, tick tock. Two hearts.
Andrew Lam (lam@pacificnews.org) is a journalist and short story writer.
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