by Jennifer Tran
I’ve always liked the water. Back in Vũng Tàu, the port city I was raised in, I would watch my father cast his fishing line across the water in his boat, the vastness of the South China Sea inconceivable in my child’s mind. During hot, humid summers, I would lean over the side of the boat and dip my hands into the saltwater, bringing back a cool hand to drag along my face.
I don’t have the chance to do that anymore. There is no ocean near my home to look out to. No boat to sit on with my father. My father isn’t even with us anymore.
Instead, I spend my weekends biking along the Seine. The river cruise boats hold waving tourists, and residents sit alongside the river in the evening when the temperature is cool. The weather took time to adjust to. The lack of humidity made my skin dry and flaky, lips chapped and bloody.
After crossing the Pont Alexandre III, there is the Embassy of Vietnam in France further north of the river. Today, the flag is stagnant on its pole, red and golden yellow draped delicately downwards. The Embassy isn’t a very impressive building. The entrance is one door out of the many along the corridor. Sometimes, when I pass by on the weekends, there is a line of Vietnamese people trying to apply for a visa or seek consultation for their citizenship.
Back in 1978, I fled Vietnam on the same boat my father and I used with my brother, aunt, and uncle. My parents both passed during the war. Providing wartime medical care in Saigon put them at high risk of casualty. I remember when we got the news. The doctor at the hospital sent a message to my aunt while she was teaching, and she came home with an expression I couldn’t identify. Fear? Grief? Sadness? The depth of it all was severe. I was nine.
After Saigon fell, our futures were uncertain. We heard news of South Vietnamese politicians being pushed into mass graves, and punishment for all those associated with anti-communist ideas. My aunt and uncle weren’t involved politically, but we still suffered the consequences. My aunt lost her job after the school was shut down. There were little ways to make money off of fishing and agriculture alone. The atmosphere was unstable, as if there was a ticking landmine waiting for us to slip further along the cracks. Our neighbors left and were replaced with unfamiliar, untrustworthy faces. We kept the windows closed after they moved in.
So, we left, my father’s boat taking us out to sea creak creak creaking along. I’ve heard people call us “boat people,” a phrase for people like my family who left Vietnam by boat in search of stability, whether political, economic, or even mental. I’m not sure if that is applicable to me, because, truly, I have not found that stability.
We found ourselves in Hong Kong after a few weeks at sea, only to be put in a refugee camp for four years before traveling to France. A Vietnamese woman sponsored us, so we lived with her for a year before moving into a small apartment in Paris. There is a large Vietnamese population here: A mix of immigrants who moved before and after the war. The dynamic is strange. Because the French occupied Vietnam for so long, I can see bits and pieces of their presence in bakeries and infrastructure back home. The baguette of bánh mì is sold separately. Somehow, the atmosphere is similar.
The Embassy I bike past is the one that gave me my initial visa — a bound passport booklet with my picture and name: Vĩnh Nguyễn. When I pass by, sometimes I’ll pull it out and trace my finger along the old picture. My hair is shorter. I look younger, but more worn, the depth behind my eyes a result of a lifetime of worries after the war. The day the picture was taken, I had to duck away into the small bathroom to decompress. The bodies of Vietnamese immigrants became too much — the baby crying against her mother, the older adults tapping their feet against the tiled floor in anxious anticipation, the man that looked like my father. It was too much.
How do you live? Amidst the instability of life’s circumstances, how do you learn to live another life and still claim it as your own? After 19 years, I still struggle with this. I wonder about the person I could have been if I stayed in Vũng Tàu, or if I moved to Saigon and became a cushy official for the communist government. A lot of post-war Vietnamese immigrants in France are against the Hanoi government — they say it’s a disgrace to democracy and that the people living there have been stripped of their rights. The older Vietnamese people who immigrated before the war have experience in French communist politics and watched the changing tide in the East with the Soviet bloc. They supported the Việt Minh’s policies, like opposing the re-occupation of Vietnam by France. There is a sharp division between these ideas, a deep line drawn in the sand.
I don’t know how to feel about these ideas, truthfully. I know what it means to lose my parents to the war, the feeling of grief and fear for the safety of my family. I understand what it means to sail along the waves, never quite sure if I’d make it to my destination. I also know how it feels to be a stranger. Even though the French occupied our land, they are not welcoming of our people. Parisians look at me with barely-veiled contempt when I enter stores, sometimes. I’ve been mocked for my accented French. I’ve heard Vietnamese people being called the “model minority” in this country, but that does not reflect their treatment of us. They liked that we’ve integrated in their culture, but never the other way around.
A couple weeks after we arrived in France, our sponsor enrolled us in French language classes so we could have an easier time looking for jobs.
“If you are going to live here, you need to fit in,” she told us. She gave us clothes her family no longer wore to help us blend into the fashion. She showed us around stores and restaurants, telling us how to order and what mannerisms were appropriate in each setting. Slowly, she molded us into the French idea of what being Vietnamese should mean. No loud voices, always look your best. Never slip unless you want someone to target you. Being Vietnamese already meant you were different. “Why give them reasons to target you further?” she would ask us.
Despite her advice and good intentions, there is no guidebook for how to navigate feeling like a stranger in your own skin. Here, I am not Vietnamese enough for the French and also not French enough for them and the Vietnamese people who have been here for longer. How do you live when you are not enough for the people around you? The thought bleeds into your idea of yourself, seeping into the crevices and attacking your worth. The parts of your identity never meld together the way you want them to. Each part is distinct and noncomplementary.
Whenever I feel like this, I bike to the Seine. I choose a grassy spot near the water and take a glance at my reflection. Here is the same person as the photo on my visa, only 19 years older. I’ve learned French, I’ve learned their mannerisms, I’ve learned all that I could, but, still, it is never enough.
My hair is longer. I still have that worn look on my face, only with sharper features and wrinkles around my eyes. I wear glasses now. Truly, I am a culmination of these experiences, these identities. But they are difficult to hold within myself.
Identity is akin to a reflection in a room full of mirrors. My perspective is different from my uncle, aunt, and brother’s, who have experienced a life parallel to mine, but approached it with individual minds. My aunt teaches French to incoming immigrants. My brother and uncle work in the bakery across the street from our apartment. I work as a nurse in the ICU unit. We came here on the same boat and plane, found our own molds into society, and reap its rewards and benefits in different ways. Are these molds stable? Perhaps for my aunt and uncle, who are content with a steady income and housing. For my brother, who was too young to remember much of Vietnam, yes. For me, I’m not quite sure.
There will be futures other than mine — futures where immigrants will have their children and raise them in their suburban homes. Their children will have children, and soon, the pre-war memories of Vietnam will disappear. Even now, I find it difficult to remember the feeling of the sand between my toes on Bai Truoc, my father’s smile when he reeled in a fish, my mother’s happy voice when we brought it home. There are so many things to forget and will be forgotten. That scares me. It scares me beyond belief.
But there will be better days. I can share my memories with my children in the future, teach them my language and share my life with them. I will take them back to Vũng Tàu, where we can fish and run along the beach until our feet get tired. Maybe I will even move back, depending on how things have changed since. Even if I do not fit the mold here, I will carve my own path until I can call it completely mine. Truly, unconditionally mine.
Author’s Note
While I was writing this fictional narrative, I wanted to keep two things in mind: one, how the movement of colonial thought persists through physical boundaries, often within the minds of the colonized, and two, what it means to carve your own future despite being marginalized. This comes from my family and I’s own experience with colonialism in Vietnam and its diaspora. My dad lived through the Vietnam War and watched its destructive nature in real time, seeing people die from violence caused by the North and the U.S., and the aftermath experienced by those who supported the South Vietnamese government. His memory is a form of colonial thought — one shaped by American ideas of communism, which has continued considering he lives in the U.S. now. My mom lived in the mountains in North Vietnam along the border of China and was largely untouched by the war. Her memory, however, is an antiquated one as well, because she remembers the small township she lived in and its “backwards” way of thinking. She saw the U.S. as a form of progress, feeding into the colonial idea of the West as more advanced, and ultimately leaving her home in the middle of the night on a small boat in which she sailed on for a month until reaching Hong Kong. My dad has not been back to Vietnam since leaving. He holds a fragile memory in his mind of what it means to be Vietnamese, but that reality has shifted as Vietnam’s government, economy, and social life has changed. My mom visited in the early 2000s but only went back to her hometown, which is largely unchanged in its agricultural economy and rural setting. In all of this, there is a question that lingers: Where do I fit into the mold?
According to Michelle Murphy, alterlife names “life already altered, which is also life open to alteration (Murphy 2017: 497).” In her case, she notes the chemical relation between humans and non-humans, proposing that the idea of the alterlife is a life entangled with ecological, colonial, capitalistic, and infrastructural histories that impact our futures. I leaned more into the colonial aspect, which my character, Vĩnh Nguyễn, exemplifies through his reflection of an alternative future still impacted by war and French colonialism. In this alterlife, he sees himself working for the Hanoi government — a job that would pay comfortably and would keep him in Vietnam. Such a life would be touched by various countries — China, for backing the North during the war; the U.S., for intervening and imposing a conflicting American idea of communism and democracy through their involvement; and France, for shaping how the country developed economically and socially since the 1800s. Though these influences are tangible, Vĩnh would still have felt a sense of freedom in Vietnam. He would be able to speak his first language, eat the foods he grew up with, and visit friends and family. There would be less political stability following the war, but, in a mental sense, he would be free. Vĩnh’s current life in Paris is shaped by French influence: He must learn to assimilate into the culture despite facing discrimination for his race and expression. Because of French colonization, Vĩnh has been forced into the position of the “Orient,” which was established a century before he was even born. “The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony (Said 1978: 5)…,” and because of this, there is little chance to escape the colonized mindset except through fantasy.
Through these alterlifes, Vĩnh subconsciously experiences the colonial mentality — the internalized idea manifested within colonized people: a feeling of inferiority compared to their colonizers. It perpetuates the belief that the cultural values of the colonizer are above one’s own cultural expressions. In Franz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth,” he explains how French colonization and the results of the Algerian War influenced Algerian identity.
“In the West, the family circle, the effects of education, and the relatively high standard of living of the working class provide a more or less efficient protection against the harmful action of these pastimes. But in an African country, where mental development is uneven, where the violent collision of two worlds has considerably shaken old traditions and thrown the universe of the perceptions out of focus, the impressionability and sensibility of the Young African are at the mercy of the various assaults made upon them by the very Nature of Western Culture (Fanon 2021: 194–95).”
He argues that this creates an internal conflict as Western ideology is pushed onto colonized populations despite their cultural differences. This introspective experience is present within Vĩnh when he asks, “How do you live? Amidst the instability of life’s circumstances, how do you learn to live another life and still claim it as your own?” The idea of not being French or Vietnamese enough in a country that colonized his ancestors is suffocating. The fantasy of the alterlife is his way of reclaiming his identity. Fanon maintains that colonized individuals need to destroy one form of recognition in order to produce another form of mutually-affirming recognition. Vĩnh’s potential future of having children to share his culture with, and perhaps even moving back to Vietnam, is his way of reclaiming life after it has been forcibly taken by him by factors out of his control. In this way, he follows Fanon’s words: “For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man (Fanon 2021: 312).”
Above all, what guided my writing was our in-class discussion of the subaltern. I wanted to write about a history from below: A life of someone living in a country that colonized his own. Vĩnh mentions how others have called the Vietnamese “boat people” or “the model minority,” but these are reductive and homogenous ways of thinking about a population with divided ideas about politics, who have had their share of displacement. I did not want to feed into the stereotype of the “Orient,” nor fetishize difference itself. I wanted an honest reckoning of progress in the colonized through confrontation with the present and future. Instead of speaking for the subaltern, I wanted to let it speak for itself.
So, once again, where does this leave me? I am a part of the diaspora Vĩnh worries about, the one where immigrants have children with little knowledge about pre-war Vietnam. I grew up in the suburbs of Charlotte. While there’s a large Vietnamese population there, I have never fully felt connected to this culture — like Vĩnh, never American or Vietnamese enough. But, truly, there are other realities to my own, and other alterlives that are touched by colonialism in different ways. My dad tells me about his brother who currently lives in Vietnam. He owns a company and lives a content life. His children live in the U.S., where they share their culture to their children and communities. My mom will tell me about her family back in Phó Bảng, who live a completely alternate lifestyle compared to us. So, in my case, there is little use in thinking I’m not enough in a postcolonial world. Stories will be shared, and we will persist as we always have.
Bibliography
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2021.
Murphy, Michelle. “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4 (2017): 494–503. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.02.
Said, Edward. “Introduction.” Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.