for those away from home

an ode to lives across cultures [59]:

Photo by Benjamin Voros

2am on a Saturday night, I tossed and turned in bed from pain. Cramps came in waves, causing me to roll from my back to the sides. It has been two hours. This was one of those moments when my need to be with loved ones trumped any desire to be independent and girlbossing in a foreign country.

Growing up, whenever I got sick, whether from a fever, digestive problems, or allergies, my mom as a wonderful caretaker would know how to alleviate my ailments. A call to the family’s pediatrician, a usual treatment routine she knows like the back of her hand, getting me to the hospital when things became serious, I relied on her love and care. She likes to call herself “mommy doctor” or bác sỹ mẹ as the original term in Vietnamese. The rest of our family teases her for it even though we are all grateful.

On this particular night, when my digestion failed me, that gnawing sensation of “I need to be home” intensified. As a former international student and current professional from a “developing country” I like to talk about how I miss homes for the cheap haircuts, delectable street food, and affordable healthcare. What I don’t talk about nearly enough is the amount of emotional support and sense of community I find lacking being far away, all of which trump any cheap food or services.

Ever since I moved to America in 2017, most nights have seen me sleeping alone. Before that, I shared my bedroom with my sister and our dog. Occasionally, I’d sleep with my mom when my dad was away for business. Once I moved to America and came back home, I couldn’t really sleep with anyone. I needed to sleep by myself knowing I would be alone in a few weeks. The moving away and visiting family cycle develops my defense mechanism. Doused with anxiety, I figure the best way to avoid being let down is to not become too comfortable, too loved, too cherished.

I tell myself time after time: “Don’t get used to this because you will be all on your own again.” Don’t get me wrong, I love the food, the coffee hopping, and friends reunions. Those are the more obvious, surface-level joy of staying at home after a long time deprived of one’s old happiness makers. The deepest treasure, nevertheless, is a sense of comfort and complete safety I can only get when I am on the soil of my home country. I cherish the familiarity of my mother tongue that makes me crawl up my skin if I use it at full capacity. Even the term “I love you” is much lighter in English than in Vietnamese. I have learned to associate English with the more professional, superficial side of my life. The terms like “I am excited”, “I am good”, “I am well”, and “How are you?” have become trite to most English speakers, non-natives and natives alike that they cease to stir up any emotions.

As long as I have spent time here in America, I would be lying to say that I can empathize with people. I am a good listener, I listen much more than I speak. I have stepped into a variety of settings to socialize, from my time in college to working in elementary schools and hospitals. I have the privilege to converse with and work closely with a lot of people, most of whom have no clue I am not American. I blended seamlessly into society, learning to act and speak with an almost accent-less American English. All the books, analysis, the empathy I try to spare and I still struggle to understand the norms here: individualism, extroversion, friendliness, way of thinking, and how it weaves itself into complex political debate and policy-making. I know why but fail to understand logically how everything is converted into financial transactions, from tips in restaurants to dinner parties where you are invited as a guest to asking a friend for help.

My mom came to live with me once in college and another time when I started working. She made meals for me just like she did when I was in grade school. She helped me clean my room. We did groceries and she suggested what produce to buy. We went on walks after dinner. We talked: my life, our life, everything. For once living away from home, my eating schedule was not all over the place. I slept soundly at night knowing someone I love was laying by my side.

Then she left, and I forgot any of those good memories ever existed. I continued to live my life like nothing had happened: work/grind, exercise, sleep. It is simultaneously scary and empowering to live on your own. Relatives and strangers tell me they admire my emotional agility. The thing is I am strong and I have no choice. If I don’t continue to show up, I don’t know if I can continue to live here. People at home think we lucky students lead glamorous lives in a Western country. Most of the time, we are stranded somewhere in rural Pennsylvania or Ohio, with six months of winter, dreadful dining hall food, and daily lives filled with norms that we had zero contextual understanding. When we start working, all we want to do is to save money and PTO to come home. Ironically, people at home would save their money to travel to places we are working in. At least here, the desire to escape daily reality is universal.

After graduation, living alone made me the handywoman of my life. I moved apartments with the help of a friend, carrying the entire belongings across the city several times. When I was tired of walking the same loop in sleepy suburbia, I had my landlord in Austin drive me to Walmart to get a bike, strapped to the back of his old sedan to bring back. I had never even looked at a bike’s chain closely before but when the bike broke, I found a video on Youtube and fixed the damn thing. Little did I know about the definition of self-sufficiency until I manage to surpass one milestone after the next.

In some ways, the colors of my life were muted when I moved away. My friends are scattered. I got to see family at most twice a year and that makes me luckier than most friends. How do you explain to people that your reality is detached from both that in your home country and that in your adopted country, where you don’t watch the Super Bowl but also forget an important soccer match for your national team? How do you explain to people that Christmas means little but then the Lunar New Year doesn’t feel the same to celebrate alone, or surrounded by people who are not aware of the most important holiday in your life?

Missing home is like grief: it gets better over time but it never goes away. One whiff of a good noodle soup broth, an encounter with an Asian lady who reminds me of my grandma, the sound of a motorbike engine and my stomach is immediately in knots. Where I live in America (Minneapolis and Austin) are so different from home that any semblance of Viet Nam feels delightful and sad simultaneously.

If you have much love for your family, your culture, and the place you were born into, there is no easy way to repudiate all that and move on to a new way of life. You bring that little pain with you everywhere you go, in everything you do because that little nagging pain makes you a stronger human being. It makes you cry at night but it also makes you resilient.

As George Bernard Shaw put it: “The reasonable (wo)man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to him(her)self. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

As foreigners, we might as well be the most unreasonable people. And we are damn good at it.

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