Home

My initial reaction to Christine telling us that the theme of this class was going to be “Home”, I honestly didn’t quite understand. It didn’t quite register in my mind to associate the Asian American books that we would be reading with the theme of “home”. In response to the prompt for this week, when I think of “home”, I think of more than one place. Like many of you already know, I wasn’t born here, I was born in France. My parents are from Vietnam and I, personally, have never been to Vietnam and wish very much to go there soon! Through the vivid descriptions of my parents and my relatives, I have a picture of Vietnam (specifically my mother’s hometown of Saigon) in my head that I will never forget and someday, hope to compare to the real thing.

Although I have never physically been there, I consider Vietnam somewhat of a virtual home. It is where my parents were born and bred and where my parents’ parents were born and bred. And on a more relevant matter, it is where my parents were taught the same culture ideas and values that they have taught my brother and me. So in that sense, it was really important that I don’t forget that I am very much Vietnamese just as I am American. I can relate to the character of Gogol in The Namesake in the aspect that in the end, Gogol realized he needed to hang on to his Indian identity because it makes up very much of who he is.

At the beginning of the semester, for the narrative essay I decided to describe the exact day of my move from France to America down to the very last detail of my leaving our apartment. It was a good experience for me to put down on paper what I remember of it because I hadn’t thought very much about that day in a while. I read my essay again last night and it reminded me of My Country Versus Me and how Wen Ho Lee liked to include little details of his home in the midst of describing his struggle with trying to prove he was innocent of espionage, except I’m not a spy either.

So back to the point, I consider France to have been my home for the first 7 years of my life. Although granted, I didn’t learn any significant life lessons other than don’t touch a burning pot, the environment that I lived in fostered a lot of my family’s struggles as immigrants, as well as my parents’ struggles as newlyweds. We made it as a family though and did pretty well for ourselves until my mother decided that we could do better in America.

Having been in America for the past 12 years, I consider it my main home, more specifically I consider the city of Costa Mesa my home. My family is situated there and stable.

And Precious, I know how you feel about missing home, I’ve been longing to eat my mother’s steak and actually, hear my dad karaoke every night, haha. Don’t worry and hang in there, you will be back to those things soon, no?

I’m sorry I couldn’t do a longer journal entry, I have a final tomorrow! Bye!

Dao Nguyen