Các bạn nữ nghĩ sao về nội dung bài này. Xấu hổ và Tự Hào. Trực diên với nguồn gốc Việt Nam

Đây là bài viết của một cô gái lớn lên ở Mỹ về thăm quê hương. Cô viết những suy nghĩ của cô nguyên văn tiếng Anh tôi có tranh luận với cô ta nhưng tôi muốn sự đóng góp ý kiện của các chị em phụ nữ cho thêm phần khách quan.
Tôi không thích lắm về đoạn văn này ( nó có vẽ Mỹ hoá quá) khi than phiền về tình trạng vũ phu ở VN:
The truth was, I was never quite sure that I should be proud of my heritage. Although I was fortunate enough to retain my fluency in Vietnamese and enjoyed Paris by Night and Vietnamese food, I wasn’t wholly sure that my heritage was something worth being proud of.
Tạm dịch: Sự thật là tôi chẳng bao giờ chắc rằng tôi nên tự hào về di sản (VN) của tôi. Dẫu rằng tôi may mắn còn thông thạo Việt Ngữ và thích thú xem Paris by Night và ẩm thực VN. I không hoàn toàn chắc rằng di sản của tôi là một điều gì đó đáng tự hào.

Dưới đây là nguyên văn bài viết của cô Olivia Hoang
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Of Shame and Pride: Confronting My Vietnamese Identity
Oftentimes, love and criticism go together. To fully embrace our Vietnamese heritage, we must be willing to rectify the bad, as well as nurture the good.
It was July 2002 when I stepped out of Tan Son Nhat International Airport, and into the streets of Saigon, revisiting my homeland and my past. The heavy humid air bore on me and my skin began forming beads of sweat. Here it was, the Vietnam that I had so missed when I first came to America in 1992 — the noisy crowded streets, the musty air, and the people who spoke my native tongue. As a child, I dreamt about coming back. And here I was, 10 years later, a teenager who had grown up in America.

Back at the hotel that night and sitting next to the windowsill, I peered out my window as the faint voice of a food peddler announced last rounds before she retreated for the night. I observed the scene with the fond heart of a native and the detached mind of a foreigner. The next morning, I awoke to the hustle and bustle of Saigon traffic and looked out my window to see what daylight revealed that the darkness of night could not.

I scanned the horizon and glanced past the streets congested with people on their mopeds and bikes to see a pinkish building jump out at me, apparently a relic of Vietnam’s French colonial past. Girls’ uniform ao dai’s flowed wistfully in the wind as they made their way to school, reminding me of the paintings that people sometimes brought back from Vietnamese tourist traps. Along the edge of the road right beneath my vision, a young man in his dress shirt and slacks rode his bicycle.
As I gazed out at them, it made me wonder what their lives were like. Where were they heading off to? Was she a good student? Was he going to study abroad? What will become of them? These were things that usually escaped my mind when observing people in a place where I lived daily.

People’s faces in the streets were a stark contrast to the metallic shields of cars and reflections from windshields that I saw everyday in America. Being able to see people as living bodies out in the streets instead of just getting glimpses of anonymous beings in their metallic pods lent a faint feeling of familiarity to them. It brought back memories and reminded me of the things I loved most about Vietnam.

I loved the circumambient air, the aesthetic beauty of girls in ao dai, the live faces I got to see on the streets, the fresh innocence of unworldly children, and mangosteens, rambutans, sapodillas, waterapples, and jackfruits. But despite my headiness at re-experiencing my exotic homeland, I couldn’t help being bothered as I recalled the way airport authorities tried to extract money from us as we checked out of the airport upon arrival.

I remembered the officer yelling at me and questioning me repeatedly on my intentions of visiting Vietnam—all because he had not seen any dollar bills slipped into my passport when he opened it. Really? Yes, a petite teenage girl such as myself really held a threat to national security and needed to be questioned over and over again as to why I was visiting. (Dude, that usually happens when you come to a rich country from a poor one, not the other way around!) We finally made our way out, but that incident still stuck with me.

How could anyone be loyal to a place like this? How can I be proud to come from a place where coercive government and domestic abuse still run rampant? Those were the defining questions that guided my identity formation in my teenage and college years.

The truth was, I was never quite sure that I should be proud of my heritage. Although I was fortunate enough to retain my fluency in Vietnamese and enjoyed Paris by Night and Vietnamese food, I wasn’t wholly sure that my heritage was something worth being proud of.

How could I be when I’ve seen what my motherland allowed? The beating and oppression of women bothered me the most since I am a woman. And having grown up in a tra***ional household where I was expected to do chores while my brothers were not, this kind of subject really spoke to me. How can a woman be proud of coming from a place that treated women as being lesser than men?

As I grew older, my philosophy gained more coherency from its previously fragmented state. Just as I was still an American despite hamburgers, widespread violence in the media, imperialistic foreign policy, and school bullying, I was still Vietnamese whether I liked it or not. My heritage has influenced who I am as a person and how people chose to treat me.

No matter how American my philosophies are, the outside world will always see me as an Asian girl at first glance, and treat me as they have been con***ioned to treat an Asian woman. So to me, the importance of knowing where I came from was intertwined with the necessity of learning to navigate the stereotypes that people bestowed upon me. Understanding the source of that stereotype opened up my empathy for Vietnamese women, and for myself. Then I understood that my Vietnameseness ran deeper than the color of my skin or my black hair.

My heritage was to me like a baby is to its mother, and a mother is to her baby. You cannot choose certain things; you are stuck with its idiosyncrasies. But to nurture that which is close to you, you need to see what’s ugly about it to help you rectify the problem or at the very least, not make it an even bigger one. Denying that there’s a problem will not help, yet denying that which is a part of you is to lose the totality of who you are. And so I chose to cultivate my Vietnamese-American identity the same way a great mother cultivates her baby: to accept wholeheartedly what is hers, to nurture that which is beautiful and good, and to call out for rectification the bad behavior.

[This piece started out as a piece on why a lot of Vietnamese-American kids don’t like to speak Vietnamese because they think it is ugly, but my writing took on a different path as I recalled my own shame of Vietnamese culture. There are a lot of factors involved in this shame: peers making fun of Asians, not seeing enough positive representations of Asians in the public eye, not seeing good role models around, not having positive experiences with Vietnamese culture as a child, etc.

But the sources of this shame have been discussed before, and it still hasn’t done enough to encourage Vietnamese American kids to embrace their roots. What is needed now isn’t more dissection of the problem, but more good examples of Vietnamese Americans successfully navigating the two worlds while embracing and leveraging their Vietnamese heritage to live a meaningful life and ways in which we can encourage our youth to do the same. More to come in future posts as I formulate my thinking more on these topics. I encourage you to post your suggested solutions to this problem. Hopefully, as a community, we can help Vietnamese-American kids overcome this hurdle in forming a strong core.]
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cô gái nddắchc đã tiếp thu tư tưởng phương Tây quá nhiều hay sao ý, cô ấy nói cô ấy lớn lên trong 1 gia đình truyền thống, vậy mà cô ấy lại thể hiện k giống như vậy thật buồn

Tôi tranh luận với cô ta như sau:
Reading what you wrote made me think your post is nothing but a glimpse of Saigon under an American tourist view if you know what I mean. If I did not read your name you could be passed by a real American woman . I do not feel a touch not even a little flashback of a long lost daughter coming back to where she used to be one herself.
Let's discuss some issues that you raise.
Q.How could anyone be loyal to a place like this? How can I be proud to come from a place where coercive government and domestic abuse still run rampant.A. A corruptive officer: A government job in Vietnam usually has to be bought and he tries to take back what he gave for his job. Administration mismanagement is a long story and it has nothing to do with culture. Do a search "American domestic violence" and criticize Vietnamese domestic abuse later. When I see an American kid calls his mother you f**king bitch I do not have an intention to tell her such act never happens in Vietnamese culture.
Q. But you can't deny that Western philosophy is ahead of the curve in terms of women's rights.
A. When I think of white serial killers in US, I do not think all Americans are. My sister in law is a University lecturer and she has never complained about women's rights or does housework. It is naive to compare one culture with the other. Please go to Islamic countries and debate with them rights and wrongs, pros and cons of polygamy practice.
Q.This piece started out as a piece on why a lot of Vietnamese-American kids don’t like to speak Vietnamese because they think it is ugly, but my writing took on a different path as I recalled my own shame of Vietnamese culture.
A. Their parents are so lost or suffer serious inferiority complex and do not know how to teach their kids to be proud. And when they grow up, are they parents awared that they will go through the same ordeal like you mentioned in your post? And I still wonder how come there are Vietnamese living in US who are so proud to call themselves Vietnamese AMERICANS ( and how many white Americans really think and treat them as equal as they are. Any survey, any statistics anyone? or any of those vietnamese americans go to www.stormfront.org to argue with the members that they're Americans)

Và đây là phần trả lời của cô ta:
Thanks for participating, Andrew. You are entitled to feel what you feel, and I respect that.

I am guessing you feel that way perhaps because you are reading the piece within your own internal framework of how nostalgic one should be when visiting.

You might have left Vietnam at a later age than I did, and so the emotional longing for your homeland might have been stronger than mine. Or even if you did leave Vietnam at my age or *******, each person has different levels of nostalgia depending on their level of assimilation into American culture.

So it is entirely understandable that you felt I wasn't emotionally tied to Vietnam enough.

But perhaps that is a good thing for me because it allows me enough detachment to see things as they are.

Memories frame our lives and helps give it meaning, but being too tied to nostalgia can impede one from growing and moving forward in life.

Memories can make us smile or shed tears, and help us feel human.

But to me, a life worth living is one that appreciates the possibilities of the future and engages in the present while still acknowledging and respecting the past.

Perhaps we will never see eye to eye on this, but that is the point. This article was written for young people who have gone or are going through the same ordeal (there are many of them in the hyphenated community).

If the issues mentioned in the article never caused internal conflicts for you, then I congratulate you for having never experienced that. It is an enviable position to always have a strong sense of identity without faltering once.
Whether or not corruption has anything to do with the technicalities with the word "culture" is not really the point of the post. It is something that exists very blatantly in Vietnam, and yes, many of us ******* generations coming back to visit does start to question whether we have something to be proud of when we encounter such incidents.

Using one off examples or examples from a long tail does not really add to your argument. Serial killers and your sister in law does not make a majority of the population while domestic abuse and oppression of women IS a real and widespread occurrence in Vietnam.

I am glad to see that you care so much for Vietnam. For those of us ******* generations who are educated in America and have been given a lot of advantages due to us being raised here, we have no problem attaching the American piece to the Vietnamese.

My view is: we cannot undo the past, so why not create a better future by leveraging the opportunities we have here?

We can continue to be angry at past injustices, but that doesn't get us any closer to resolution.

đã copy bài viết của bạn về rồi đấy...nhưng chưa có thời gian đọc.......

thật khó để có thể làm con người này thông suốt sau 1 quãng thời gian dài ở nước ngoài, cô nàng này làm tôi thật sự thất vọng quá, liệu còn được bn kiều bào VN ta vẫn còn hào khí dân tộc nhỉ
thanks bạn thanhmtl

Cô bé này có vẻ lẫn chính quyền, chính trị vô với chữ heritage (phần bôi đỏ, sự hối lộ).

Tuy nhiên cô cũng nêu ra những chuyện mà dân VN tại Mỹ đã thấy, và cho rằng sai (phần bôi huyết dụ), đó là vụ trong nam khinh nữ. Tuy nhiên cô ta không biết, hoặc không muốn nêu ra là những chuyện đó vẫn còn xẩy ra trong một số gia đình VN tại Mỹ.

Nói tóm lại thì bài viết cho người đọc thấy rằng lối suy nghĩ của cô ta thể hiện sự "phóng khoáng", sự tự nhiên của những người sống (hay lớn lên) tại Mỹ. Tức là nghĩ sao nói vậy, không cần biết đúng hay sai, mà chỉ biết là đúng với niềm tin của người viết. Đối với dân ta thì là điều không nên, nhưng đối với dân Mỹ là chuyện tự nhiên như trời mưa thôi. Đây là một trong những dữ kiện chương trình giáo dục Mỹ dùng để phân biệt học trò giỏi.

Vì đây là quan niệm của cô ta cho nên chúng ta không nên rút kết luận qua lời cô ta được. Không thể cho cô ta là biểu tượng của dân VN tại Mỹ được. Nhưng nếu bác còn tiếp tục tranh luận thì nên tiếp tục vì đây là một topic hay.

sao lại vậy nhỉ?

Nói chung người nước nào cũng vậy thôi, và người nào cũng vậy có lúc tự vấn về tự hào và xấu hổ. Một người Mỹ qua VN khen VN hết lời chê nước Mỹ xem, dân VN chẳng yêu mến người đó nhưng dân Mỹ họ thấy chướng tai gai mắt đến mức nào??

Rất không thích những chủ đề mang tính chủng tộc như thế này.