Coming Home

Salut,

I have called many places home in my life. I wrote these words on our cohort Face Book, cute page-long intros we each made about ourselves before we set foot in Vietnam. I was the last person to make mine; sorry, Andy, I am bad at using Canva, and I kind of messed up the spacing. Anyway, how do I summarize myself into words? Most succinctly, I say that, that home is a traveling place and rarely ever a fixed point. It moves with me, and though I have learned that home can be a person, if you find the right one, for much of my life it comes and goes. I called Nam Dinh home for a short while, and then I called Midland home, then the Woodlands, then Lekki for 4 years, then the Woodlands again, then Austin for 3 years, Rome for a short while, Bishkek and my village there, Jalal-Abad for 2 years, Washington DC for the last year, Hanoi for a few weeks, and now Lang Son until the next summer. My life has existed in suitcases and a passport, a wallet and phone, and not much else. When life can be reduced to just that, it feels small and renders everything else nearly meaningless. I’m going off on a tangent, but all this is to say that homes move with me.

Nam Dinh lake

I ended August by taking a day trip, or what was supposed to be a day trip, to Nam Dinh, the city I was born in. This story has the opposite ending of the Cat Ba trip, which was supposed to be a weekend trip and turned into a day trip. I didn’t prepare much or think much about it; I just booked a train and bus ticket, perused the area on Google Maps, and went. I often think I shift and morph a lot when I travel. I was super locked into Rome, Tbilisi, and Tashkent, mapping aggressive itineraries and hopping across the place. Then again, there is significantly less to see in Nam Dinh than any of the aforementioned places. I digress. I woke up early to take the train, having played Clue and Mafia with some people at Sphira (a gameboard cafe near the hotel) the night before. Growing up, my mom had 4 different variations of Clue at our house, so I was born and bred for it. Will was playing Catan on his phone while playing with us, and he was taking an insanely detailed list of notes based on our accusations, and he won. Anyway, I took a Grab to the train station. By the way, I spent a few days in a hostel after orientation ended, because I didn’t want to pay to stay at the hotel we’ve been at; it’s like 29$ a night, and for five extra days, versus the 30$ I spent at the hostel for the same 5 nights. (Peace Corps made me a premium Booking.com member). It did mean I walked/took a Grab to the hotel a few times to hang out with everyone else, but I also quite frankly needed some space for myself.

I arrived in Nam Dinh at around 9:30 in the morning. The train was clean and easy to take and follow. One of the conductors/guards took the empty seat next to me. Train Street, which I think I talked about in an earlier post, is a famous street in Hanoi that has a host of souvenir shops and small bars and clubs, but it runs along some too-close-for-comfort train tracks. A tradition is that people will put beer bottle caps on the train tracks before the train arrives and collect the flattened cap once the train passes. The train, departing Hanoi, passed some parts of Train Street. Otherwise, the view was relatively scenic. Nam Dinh is a small city. It used to be the provincial capital of Nam Dinh Province, which no longer exists. Andy said that due to the merging of provinces, many people in former provincial cities are now moving to the new capitals for work, and as such, lots of former capitals are losing people and closing shops. Hoa Lu and Nam Dinh used to be separate provincial capital cities of Ninh Binh and Nam Dinh Provinces, respectively, but after 2025, both were merged into Ninh Binh province, and Hoa Lu is the newly merged capital. At least, I think so. Nam Dinh, at first glance, and what I noticed throughout the day, seemed a bit like a ghost town. Entire buildings and touristy areas were devoid of people. I have no evidence that the single day I was there and its emptiness is in any way connected to what Andy said, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a correlation. Nam Dinh city is small, and much more walkable than Hanoi; I walked for much of the day, and I took Grab bike rides only about 3 times. I spent the morning at a cafe, and I also spent it finishing the previous blog post (yes, these blog posts often take many hours of time!). I walked around downtown, and I passed a few churches, one that on Google Maps was advertised well and had some pretty pictures. I had not read more recent reviews, because if I had, I would have learnt that much of the church was destroyed by storm damage, and the church in front of me was a husk, in ruins and scaffolding.

There was a single standing church I went into. It was an early Monday morning, and the area was so eerily empty that any footsteps I heard were just the sound of the wind and the rustling of the leaves, empty paper bags, and the swaying of the door. I have been in and liked empty churches, and I didn’t expect a church to be crowded at 11 am on a Monday, but its emptiness left space for contemplation. Here, I finally can circle back to those last blog posts, where I said I would have words to say about Nam Dinh and Ninh Binh. In Ninh Binh, the feelings started to rise to the surface. Yet the touristy parts of Ninh Binh didn’t make it feel real. Coupled with the cohort and running between things to do, I never really digested where I was. Stepping foot into the Nam Dinh train station didn’t feel like coming home. It felt like exhaustion and was reminiscent of my other travels and day trips, like any foreign spot you walk into for the first time. The feeling of its closeness and the anticipation can sometimes overwhelm the actual feeling of being there in person, if that makes sense. I am adopted; I am open about that, and I have never known a life where I did not know that.

These roads, these streets, the wind on my back on the Grab bike, were the air and life I had been born in. The shops and cafes of a life that did not exist and never would. Nam Dinh is so incredibly small, and it is because of my life now that I get to imagine and dream, and it is because of my family and my childhood that I get to call many places home. What was this place in comparison? Could it ever hold any weight to the fantasies or dreams in my head? In the empty church on the pews, I let myself think of those dreams and fantasies. What was this other life, and why did the smallest part of me mourn it? If I grew up on these streets, would I have been a barista like the one in the cafe who prepared my drink? Would, in another life, I have sat on these pews and listened to sermons, and would I have looked at this Christ in a Vietnamese church, instead of the American ones I grew up in? Would I have walked these halls that felt so foreign, and would they have been as familiar to me as the back of my hand? Would I have sat here every Sunday and prayed beneath these arches and pillars, beneath the dreary sun overlooking us? Much later, when I visited the pagodas and temple, I wondered if I would have known how to pray before the offerings, and if I would wave the incense and light the candles. Could I hold space for both these things in my mind, the gratitude for my life, my privilege, my dreams, and my happiness, but also be sad at what could have been? Was this a home at all, or was it truly just soil to be born on? Could it be both or neither? Could I cry, just once, for the life I never had and the one I could just imagine and picture in my mind, inside these empty walls of this empty church?

I left the church with all these thoughts swirling in my mind. I sat by the large lake, Vi Xuyen Lake, where I saw people fishing and a Highlands Coffee (Vietnamese Starbucks). Life here seemed serene and quiet. It did not have the frantic and kinetic energy Hanoi often has. The large government square was big. I visited the beautiful but very empty pagodas, and I had Pizza Hut for lunch.

The major debacle and minor crisis was getting out of Nam Dinh. I had booked a train for the way there, and a bus for the way back. My bus was supposed to depart at 6 PM, and I walked early to the spot. The pickup spot, which I triple-checked, was in a residential area. Skylar and Andy have told us to trust our intuition; if something feels wrong, it probably is. The pickup spot was deserted and empty, with some very frightening dogs in one person’s home waiting outside to bark at me. I tried to use Google Translate and ask a resident who saw me lingering if this was indeed a bus pickup spot, and he looked really confused and seemed to be directing me to the rail station. Failure one. Giving up, I tried to book a second option, using a different app and company. This second mistake was mine, I unknowingly entered the wrong pickup address for me (Google Maps listed an incorrect address for the coffee shop I was at, and the spot I entered was like a quarter mile from where I was standing). I was quickly texting the bus company while I waited, and I probably walked in circles outside that coffee shop for maybe a mile, and I called it at 9:30 PM that I was going to stay the night. Thank you to Jessica, Andy, Chi Diu, and my mom, who were all witnesses to this mess. I have been told that I often don’t panic. I would say I was stressed, because I know that real danger deserves real panic. We have the disposable income and ability, comfort as foreigners and Americans, and financial stability to quickly resolve decisions like these. I am also quite a passive person in dire straits like these; someone more like Andy, or someone with better Vietnamese skills, would have made it home that day, I did not. Such is life. My mom said that my birthplace was letting me down, and it was easy to write off the whole day, especially considering the way it ended. I booked a hotel for one night, then took the train back to Hanoi. Thank goodness for the train. My friend, Lulia, suggested I go back again at the end of my time here. Perhaps I will, when I can come full circle finally, when my Vietnamese is hopefully better, and maybe I can even bring someone here with me.

I briefly considered taking a Grab (Uber) back to Hanoi. Later, when I separately told Andy and Skylar about my debacle in Nam Dinh, they both told me it wasn’t a bad idea. I think it’s really interesting how, in the Peace Corps, they emphasize living as a local, paying us marginally higher but similar salaries to the average teacher, encouraging us to use public transit and live how locals live. Here, that is much less discussed, and we are reminded more here that we are not locals, and we are not paid like locals. So much constantly reminds us of that; we play pickleball, but racquets alone can cost hundreds of $ and are status symbols for Vietnamese people. Our students will rarely play, as they cannot afford the racquet. We take private chartered cars to our sites, and we book private Airbnbs. We are not like regular tourists, and there is a part of me that dislikes being compared to a tourist, but on the other hand, we are very much like tourists. We exist in the in-between, and we are on that bridge, the space between passersby and tourists and locals. We step into Vietnam for longer than many tourists, but we don’t stay long enough to feel like a true local. I bring that up because the idea of taking a Grab across a province is crazy and NOT normal for a local. Is anything we are doing here normal, though, for a local? Try as we might, eating Michelin multiple times is not very local. A Grab drive back to Hanoi would have been expensive, but not that expensive; it would not have crossed my mind or been a serious consideration for me. There was even an option for a motorbike ride, and the thought of a 1.5-2 hour motorbike taxi ride to Hanoi sounds insane; Skylar said it sounded like a good idea. Andy told me he has taken rides to the airport by bike, holding his suitcase in one hand. How Vietnamese of him. The American mind cannot comprehend going to the airport with luggage on a motorbike taxi.

For Vietnamese Independence Day, a group of us went to the main square, where in 1945, Ho Chi Minh read a declaration of independence, declaring a free Vietnam from France. You can see Ho Chi Minh’s body in his mausoleum, but I haven’t gone since I got here, mostly because it is usually only open in the morning, and I had been dead tired the whole of orientation. National Day certainly wasn’t the day to go, as the place was overrun. We instead walked around and went to the Imperial Citadel. A guard stopped Isabelle and Max and demanded they pay an entry fee, while the rest of us could enter freely, as we looked Vietnamese, and during the holiday, most museums are open and free. Foreigner privilege, as a sidebar, is a complex thing. On one hand, foreigners are often given much more grace in learning the language, making cultural mistakes or faux pas, and are catered to in touristy areas. They are not expected or inundated with cultural expectations about fitting in. On the other hand, foreigners who are visibly foreign cannot escape that. Their non-Asianness is visible and attracts lots of stares and looking. Max, for example, with his look and height, attracted lots of children’s stares.

As an additional sidebar, Vietnamese Americans here too face a litany of complex identities and problems when it comes to reconciling with Vietnam. Many Vietnamese Americans and the diaspora come from South Vietnam, particularly after the South and Saigon fell. It is not uncommon to hear students or people here question or wonder about Vietnamese Americans, particularly “3 stripers”, people who still hold allegiance to the Southern government, the 3 striped flag. In Hanoi in particular, you can see the story and narrative Vietnam has about its own history, its relationship with the war and the United States, and how it frames its own independence.

Anyway, for National Day, the city seemed to be very open. Andy opined that as this year is an even number (and last year was the big 80-year anniversary), this year was more tame than last year. After visiting the citadel, we broke into groups, and I had some Bun Bo Hue, which was really good. I had some matcha at a matcha tea house with lots of others, and then I helped Anya pick out a yoga mat at the Lotte Westlake Mall, one of my favorite malls in Hanoi. Asia really does malls differently. We met for dinner at a Lebanese restaurant, which was excellent. We found a spot near Westlake to watch the fireworks. A few people spent the time after orientation in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), so they arrived the evening of the 2nd, which, by the way, was a horrible time to be arriving in the city. After the fireworks, the city was overrun with people on their bikes and cars, and Lauren said it took her an hour to get a car from the mall back to the hotel. We counted down the clock until midnight for Anya’s birthday, and I said goodbye to some of the cohort that evening. The morning of the 3rd, we had an ongoing lobby party, as the 3rd was the day many of us got picked up by our hosts or went to the airport. From around 8-10 AM or so, like 8 people left every 10-20 minutes. I was the last of that morning cohort, as Chi Anh (my host) arrived around 10 AM. I fell asleep in the car, but I awoke during a short time when we sat in standstill traffic due to a 3-truck accident on the road. Our driver zipped and zagged his way through some other roads to get us to Lang Son.

Pho with roasted duck!

I really do love Lang Son already. Nearly everything, by comparison to my small village in Kyrgyzstan, is going to surprise me and feel more bougie or more accessible. I live close to a Vincom Mall. As a sidebar, Vingroup is one of the largest conglomerate companies in Vietnam; it’s sort of like Amazon. Vingroup owns Vinhomes, Vinuniversity, Vincom (which is a chain of malls across the country, I think), VinMec (hospitals), Vinpearl (resorts), etc. Vincom is a chain of malls I first saw in Hanoi. The Vincom mall here has a Highlands Coffee (Starbucks) plus a WinMart (supermarket). Lang Son seemingly really likes Christmas lights; they are wrapped around numerous trees, and Chi Anh says they are there year-round and they light up beautifully at night.

The weather seems to be much cooler. It has been hot a few times here, but in general, there is a lot of breeze, and especially at night, I wouldn’t say it is cold, but definitely cool. Cool enough that it is smart to wear a light jacket when riding a motorbike. It is not as painfully humid and unbearable as Hanoi. In Hanoi, even at night, I would step outside for a short walk and need to return to my room later and shower again. Walks here at night are bearable because of this. Everyone here says it does get cold (but how cold is relative) starting in October, which I am excited for. Some people in my cohort have great views and beaches; I can go to the beach in the summer, but I really need cool weather.

first day move in 

On the first day, there were like six or seven adults coming in and out of my room for an hour, helping me set up the washer, the TV, the wifi, and the AC unit. I managed to briefly talk to my neighbors, a couple, and the wife is an accountant at the college. They have the most adorable kids! Maybe the word “talk” is doing some heavy lifting; we had a conversation through Google Translate. Much like when I first arrived in Kyrgyzstan, and seemingly what looks like the foreseeable future, the first few days are full of people talking in rapid Vietnamese at me, talking about me, or talking around me. In the Peace Corps, it sometimes felt isolating at home or at school to be in meetings or at the dinner table and listening to conversations where you are the only one who can’t understand. As much as people try to be accommodating and use English, people with others default to their native language. Some of the heritage speakers in our cohort even told me that when they listen to rapid-fire Vietnamese, particularly in an academic setting, they can lose track of conversations.

me and Chi Anh

I love my host, Chi Anh (Chi is a pronoun, pronounced like Chee,  but also sort of a title, like Mrs. It indicates a woman, usually an older woman, like late 30s to late 40s. Some of them prefer Cô, the term for teacher, but in this blog, I’ll use them almost interchangeably) . In Fulbright, we use the term “host” instead of counterpart, as not all of us are teaching with co-teachers. I have two hosts, Chi Anh and Chi Thi (the former is the head of the English department, the latter is the head of management and international cooperation). Chi Anh has some of the best English of the staff, and Chi Thi mostly helps me with logistics. Some other recurring people you may hear about in the upcoming blogs may include, Chi Mai (another English teacher who helped me buy stuff from the supermarket), Cô Trang (she’ll come up a lot in a second), Chi Thuy, and Anh Hoan. (Anh is the male pronoun that is a counterpart to Chi). Chi Thuy (pronounced like twee) is easily one of the funniest people I have met in Vietnam. She has less of a heavy accent, which I think is easily attributable to her spending time in North Carolina. Apparently, she is happily unmarried without children and loves to travel. I go around saying that me and Thuy (me and twee, get it?) are going to be having a grand good time. I arrived, and so did many of our cohort, before opening ceremony, the first day of school for nearly all high schools and colleges/universities across the country. I did not get an ao dai (traditional Vietnamese dress) before the event, so Chi Mai lent me one to wear. There was a national broadcast we all watched, and then we had a long photo session before doing karaoke at Cô Trang's house.

Chi Anh's son's art, Basquiat inspired

On my first day in Lang Son, I visited Chi Anh’s house. She has two children, twins, one who is a swimmer and another who is an artist. Chi Anh’s son is an art prodigy. He is only 14 but she and her husband have organized two art exhibitions for him, and he has sold over 40 paintings (3 of which were sold to the US), and one fetching the high price of 40 million dong (around 1500$). His art covers the walls of her house, and his paintings are inspired by Basquiat. Her son is insanely talented, and she teaches extra classes on top of her current workload to pay for her daughter’s swimming fees and her son’s art classes. She reminds me of Baktygul, my counterpart in Kyrgyzstan, a dutiful, hardworking, and incredibly kind and thoughtful person with excellent English who is in many ways self-sacrificing.

I guess my standards have been shaped by the Peace Corps, but I was happily surprised by talking to the female teachers at the college. Chi Anh’s husband actually cooks! Chi Trang's husband is a police officer, and he likes to cook! Men who cook! Long-time readers will know that in Kyrgyzstan, in rural areas, it is customary for men to not lift a single finger to help cook or do dishes, or do anything in the domestic sphere if there are women in the house.

The first few days here, I have been playing pickleball with the teachers.  Cô Trang (tr in Vietnamese is pronounced like “ch”, so it is said like “chang”, but Vietnamese also has the Ch letters, so it can be confusing, and she prefers to be called Cô, so I’ll use that for her) drives me to the courts to play pickleball. Vietnamese people are often busy, particularly teachers. Salaries can be really low here, so many, like Americans do, have additional jobs and work. We were warned early on that busy teachers mean we often need to find company and connection with our students, other foreigners/expats, locals with good English, etc. Cô Trang is older and doesn’t work additional hours, and she told me she plays pickleball EVERY DAY. I have no idea if I will be able to keep the stamina to play every day. The teachers here seem to play from 4-6 PM every day, which is crazy. I am really bad at pickleball, but at this rate, I will hopefully get much better. Sunset is early here, so by the time we finish pickleball, we depart the school in the dark. Some ETAs have compared nighttime to it feeling like Minecraft, an early and eerie darkness. I live close enough to the main roads that I don’t quite feel that. Restaurants and cafes and the roads are alive and open well until at least 10 PM. There are a ton of teachers I have been playing with, and they are all insanely good at pickleball, they don’t mess around. There are also 1 or 2 students I have managed to play with, and one is a super shy boy, who knows some English but refuses to say anything. He always wears the same green shirt and pants to play with us, and he is a boy of few words but is easy to make laugh.

Opening ceremony

Vietnam is also a conservative country, but far less so than Kyrgyzstan, due to tourism and Western influence (and also the weather, low-key). I never once wore shorts while in Kyrgyzstan (when I went to DC, I was hesitant to wear them, being unused to for two years). Here, locals wear them, and even Chi Anh was comfortable enough to wear shorts above the knees around her colleagues. Pride apparently exists in Hanoi, too, if a little underground. I have difficulty in saying if it is more “modern” or higher income than Kyrgyzstan, though I’m sure the Human Development Index would help me figure it out as an objective standard (plus I have heard HCMC has like skyscrapers). One, the religious influence is very, very different. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I had pork in Kyrgyzstan, here, I have it like every other day. I only see people pray at the temples, whereas my host mother prayed literally five times a day. There is no taboo around passing things with your left hand or the usage of your left hand in general. I have seen only one or two squat toilets here, while it was ubiquitous in Kyrgyzstan (plus outhouses, don’t remind me of those).

The first two weeks here, or so, are for settling in and an observation period. In the Peace Corps, I only spent about a week observing before jumping in. There were one or two ETAs here, who will go unnamed, who jumped right in with little to no observation. Observations are important, both to see how students learn, the dynamics in the classroom, how local teachers teach and manage the students, and also as a time to settle in and adjust to the new environment. In general, my first few days have been spent playing pickleball, observing a class or two, taking a nap, hanging out or eating with Cô Trang or Chi Anh, and late at night, hanging out at Vincom mall. The first couple of days, I had been without an e-bike or means of transport and had been relying on the goodwill and kindness of the two female teachers to drive me around. The roasted duck here is particularly yummy, and my teachers tell me this province is famous for it! In addition to pickleball playing, Ms. Trang and I have gone to Chinese dance classes. Our teacher is excellent, and I think it’s a great way to learn. It is very late at night, usually around 9:15-10:30 PM, so I think I can manage twice a week, maybe. 

I finally got to start riding the e-bike, and boy, was it very difficult. People here start riding motorbikes/ebikes from a young age; I’ve seen what look like very young children riding bikes on some very heavily traffic filled roads. The bike they gave me is temporarily mine to use; it’s Chi Thi’s daughter’s. I need a smaller one, as the one they gave me is huge and bulky and a huge pain to move around. Anh Hoan said I am very weak and that he is very strong, and because of that, it is very easy for him to move around my bike. Super helpful, Hoan, thanks. He and Chi Thi showed me how to drive, and Anh Hoan watched me drive in circles around the campus for ten minutes before he took his bike out, told me to follow him, and took me out onto the busy main road of the city in the city center. Extraordinarily scary. I can count on one hand the number of traffic lights I have seen in the city; it is mostly roundabouts and vibes. 

Lang Son city center

I have mentioned how bad traffic in Vietnam can be, but I guess I did not say why exactly it is so bad. It is heavily congested, particularly in Hanoi and HCMC (they are like 9 million and 14 million), and the underutilization of public transit in both means that the streets are covered in motorbikes and cars. Motorbikes are a much faster means of transit for a single person, as bikes zig and zag and pass each other much faster than cars do, cars take up more space and are slower to turn and to pass other vehicles. It does mean that Vietnamese drivers are much more attentive to the road, at least I think, than American drivers. Motorbikes come from every direction, and without really any stop signs or signage in general, you always just have to be looking out for anyone or anything. That isn’t to imply there are no rules of the road; obviously there are, but it does run more on vibes than anything else. I think I mentioned in the past that we have seen traffic police in Hanoi; one time we saw them doing breathalyzer tests on motorbike drivers in the afternoon.

Lang son Vincom Mall area

After a few days of practicing, I finally got the hang of it. However, I am still horrible at parking and moving the bike. Riding it is easy. In Vietnam, people cluster their bikes together in parking areas, but it isn’t uncommon to have to move other people’s bikes to access yours. At least it is not like Hanoi here; in Hanoi, motorbikes covered all the sidewalks so it was impossible to walk anywhere, instead we were spilling over onto the regular road. I took a long Saturday drive around the city, taking some detours, getting lost a few times. Ms. Trang helped me buy a stand to attach my phone to the bike, but as I’m currently using a borrowed bike, I will hold off. So, unlike most of the time I have driven, I’m driving the ebike now with just the road signs and my visual memory. There is something so old school and freeing about it. The major reason I have needed to learn to drive the bike is that the pickleball I have been playing is at a different campus. The college I work at has 3 different campuses, and I have been to two. I work at and live near campus 2, but pickleball is at campus 1, a 15 minute drive away. On Saturday, I challenged myself to drive to the campus without a map, which I eventually managed. I clocked 15km of total driving distance in the city. Some errors were made, a red light may have been passed through, detours were taken. It’s fine. On Sunday, I did it again in the rain, which with some fast winds, was a very dreary experience. 

This past Friday, my school had a large college wide meeting at the first campus. I was invited, but to be honest, it was a huge waste of time. Ms. Trang picked me up at 1:30 for a 2 pm start time, and it lasted until 5:45. Much like my time in teacher meetings at my old school in Jalal-Abad, it was a lot of talking, much of which I couldn’t understand. A volunteer used to tell me that during long meetings and conversations in foreign languages, he would tune out or start to almost disassociate. What else is there to do when you can’t understand? No one was even paying attention. Something Andy and Skylar told us was that here it is common for people to just not be paying attention or actively talking over you. Andy said that it was normal for his class of 40, for several students to just be talking. I feel like American business culture or our professionalism makes us all try to give the illusion that we are paying attention in zoom calls or professional business calls, but it seems people here don’t give such illusions at all. At the teacher meeting, except for the administration in the front and department heads, most of the teachers were on their phones (me included!). Several brought laptops to do work on. At some point, Ms. Trang and I left to go to the canteen to get snacks. We eventually all had dinner. 

my Chinese dance teacher

In Vietnam, there are popular drinking toasts ( this link here, I learned the long version). As I learned at Hanoi Pedagogical University, it is common for guests to go around large parties and do rounds of rice wine with each table. Anh Hoan invited me to go meet some of the other teachers and do such. Rice wine is deceptive; it is extremely clear like water (like vodka) but is only about 20%, higher than most wine but lower than vodka. I think it is okay. I feel like in Kyrgyzstan, although I lived in the south there where many people did not drink, it was often qualified with the Soviet and Russian drinking influence. I once read a saying that Kyrgyz people are Muslims, but they’re also Soviet Muslims. Hence, why in the north, drinking shots was common, even at school. Here, no such compunctions or qualms for drinking, they do it freely.

night market 

After the evening party, Ms. Trang asked if I would accompany her to buy an iPhone for her daughter. I had nothing to do and no plans, so I said sure. We arrived at the shop at 7:15 and did not return home until 10:40 PM. The shop was close to the night market and walking streets, a famous part of Lang Son that has beautiful lights. She knew several people working at the stalls, and she got us discounts while we waited for the electronics store employees to set up the iPhone. I got a few things, and while we were at it, she tried to get me to practice my Vietnamese with the store employees. I have endured some painfully awkward conversations where you can’t really understand the other person and have strong language barriers. This was definitely one of them. Much like Kyrgyzstan, everyone immediately wants to ask if you are married or have a boyfriend. One employee kept asking me, in Chinese, though his Chinese wasn't very good. I told him no, but do you have a boyfriend? That is always my witty response whenever someone asks me, and when directed at a man or boy, it usually always works as they laugh and brush me off. I forgot to mention the presence of Chinese. Because Lang Son is so close to the Chinese border, many people here speak or understand Chinese or have desires to study Chinese. It is a unique part of living in very northern Vietnam. I haven’t tried any Chinese food here yet, I shall soon. With my Vietnamese skills being so lacking, I often default to Chinese. During that long teacher meeting, I spent a good 30 minutes texting in Chinese to one of the Chinese language teachers. It is a boon to me to practice the language I studied in college, though worrisome for the actual classes I'll be teaching and student motivation. 

student and I 

Everyone here uses Zalo and Grab; they are the equivalent of iMessage and Uber (or Whatsapp/Telegram and Yandex for Kyrgyz people). Personally, I find Zalo to be fun because you can easily add people with QR codes, you can really easily translate messages from Vietnamese into English through the app, and they have fun stickers you can send! They also have a fun feature I haven’t seen on any other messaging app where you can like messages multiple times. One ETA showed us one message they sent to one student that the student liked 35 times. Most of the people I text only like my messages once, or twice if I’m lucky. It is also very normal to have groupchats with teachers and students and private messages 1:1 with teachers and a student through Zalo. Vietnamese classrooms also usually have a “class monitor”, someone who helps with administrative stuff, attendance, but mostly keeps the class quiet and listening to the teacher. I befriended the classroom monitor of a class of 2nd year students. She is an older student, 27, with children, and by night, she works at a primary English center as a teaching assistant (an English Teaching Assistant… an ETA if you will… hahahaaaaaa). Anyway, she is hilarious and has excellent English. She drove me around the city and helped me buy a helmet.

The nature of Fulbright, and at least the circumstances of our work here, mean that despite the isolation of the Peace Corps, somehow it can be easier to feel alone here. I have had three years after I graduated to settle into more introverted hours and living a life as a full adult with a semi, quasi real job. I haven’t mastered waking up early, though, or going to sleep early yet. For non-native speakers, the language barrier can feel more enormous due to the shortened language training. The lack of a host family means we often are clawing for close connection, seizing onto students or any adults at school or expats around the city like people about to drown in a sea of loneliness. For now, it means hopping onto Discord to chat with the other ETAs, many of us who are still in relative limbo regarding our bikes, our working schedules, our Vietnamese lessons, all of it. It means saying yes to everything. 

I started to learn this lesson a long time ago, but it is a lesson I feel the need to relearn and re-remind myself over and over again. I suppose it is wisdom I bequeath to any ETAs in my cohort reading this now. There was a great quote in a NYT op-ed or something, regarding FOMO, that said something along the lines that no one person can live the experience of humanity, and that each and every one of us together create the beauty and frailty of it. No single ETA in our cohort can experience the totality of Vietnam and what it has to offer; heck, no single Vietnamese person in their lifetime can hope to accomplish that, much less one of us in 10 months. We will all oscillate between being the happiest among us and perhaps the most unhappy during the course of the year. I currently feel as if I sit in the middle, maybe on the higher scale just because my expectations were quite low. No single ETA will be as happy as all of us put together, so it is a fool’s errand to compare a single experience to the joys of 22. As Skylar said quite wisely, comparison really is the thief of joy. I don’t have all the things Da Nang has, but I also don’t have the insane traffic (plus it can be easy to disappear into crowds in big cities just in America, much less somewhere like Vietnam). I don’t have the beaches of Quy Nhon, but I do have cool weather and mountains. As the days crawl by, and each day can feel as exciting or nonexciting as the days of orientation, every single positive step and positive experience is one worth celebrating. To practice riding my motorbike, I rode at night (night being like 8 PM), where the streets were emptier, and the Christmas lights wrapped around trees shone bright. I thought to myself, riding the e-bike myself down the streets of lights, with the cool wind in my hair, that this was what I dreamt of when I applied for Fulbright. This is what all of us who ever applied for Fulbright wanted, and I know that there are a whole host of others who didn’t get it.  Orientation was a small microcosm of time to bask in all the newness and wonderfulness of new people and Vietnam, but this is what we signed up for. This is it. I hope it is everything we ever dreamt and imagined it would be.

À Bientôt,

Grace

P.S. Although I don't live with a host family this time, I eat out a decent amount. Sometimes alone, sometimes with students or teachers. My room I'm staying in has a hotplate, which I have used to make ramen, udon, eggs, pesto pasta, etc. Once my Vietnamese is better, I hope to go out to eat more and feel comfortable doing it.