This week I celebrated my 28th birthday. I have been away from Viet Nam for 24 years. Today I started making my packing list. Among the essential items are stomach medicine and a traveler's wallet, to be worn around the waist and under the shirt, like a tucked-away fanny pack. Indigestion and theft: two things that make me the most apprehensive about revisiting my homeland. But despite these worries, I'm excited about my trip and happy about my decision.
I was only 4 when my family left by boat. My entire education was based in the United States; I never officially learned to read or write in Vietnamese. I speak it well enough because I use it at home to converse with my parents, but my mastery over the language extends to only the conversational level. I can never express myself in flowery poetry or deep literary prose as I can in English. It feels like a handicap, and I experience the same frustration as I do when trying to express myself in a language I have barely begun to learn. I taught myself to read and write by picking up my parents' Vietnamese magazines and newspapers. Tripping and stumbling over the words with their attached tonal accents, I struggled to wrestle meaning out of them.
The Vietnamese language is marked with tones--lilting-high, like a songbird in flight; deep-base low, like the rumbling of an ancient volcano; flat and neutral, like the stretch of a plateau. A word can have a variety of meanings, all dependent on its accents. Such a language with a heavy reliance on meter seems naturally conducive to poetry.
Now, I spend more hours at work than I do at home, just as how in my college years, I spent more time around my peers at the university than in the company of my parents. It takes a social interaction with another Vietnamese--booking tickets through my agent or making an appointment with my optometrist's secretary--to reawaken me to how much of my language I have forgotten. This year, I want to go home again . . . and by doing so, I hope to remember.
I was only 4 when my family left by boat. My entire education was based in the United States; I never officially learned to read or write in Vietnamese. I speak it well enough because I use it at home to converse with my parents, but my mastery over the language extends to only the conversational level. I can never express myself in flowery poetry or deep literary prose as I can in English. It feels like a handicap, and I experience the same frustration as I do when trying to express myself in a language I have barely begun to learn. I taught myself to read and write by picking up my parents' Vietnamese magazines and newspapers. Tripping and stumbling over the words with their attached tonal accents, I struggled to wrestle meaning out of them.
The Vietnamese language is marked with tones--lilting-high, like a songbird in flight; deep-base low, like the rumbling of an ancient volcano; flat and neutral, like the stretch of a plateau. A word can have a variety of meanings, all dependent on its accents. Such a language with a heavy reliance on meter seems naturally conducive to poetry.
Now, I spend more hours at work than I do at home, just as how in my college years, I spent more time around my peers at the university than in the company of my parents. It takes a social interaction with another Vietnamese--booking tickets through my agent or making an appointment with my optometrist's secretary--to reawaken me to how much of my language I have forgotten. This year, I want to go home again . . . and by doing so, I hope to remember.
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