The dilemma of Vietnamese American ( Viet Kieu )

After the Vietnam war (1975), there was a big stream of people emigrating to other countries. Most of them go to the United States, Australia , Europe. Now they 're called Vietnamese American (Viet Kieu).

Having quite many opportunities to talk with them, I realize that they have some difficulties . In their thinking , they're American. However, in American's mind , they're Vietnamese . When they return to our country , people living here mostly don't consider them as Vietnamese. They're treated like foreigners, like " Viet Kieu" , i.e when a Viet Kieu is offered a job in a foreign language center as a teacher , he receives the same salary as foreign teachers. Moreover, in some cases, Vietnamese American have to pay more than Vietnamese, have to buy something with higher prices. Being asked what nationalities they are , they will answer â?o I am American â?o .Thatâ?Ts all of their replies .

So the problem is : which country do they belong to ? who are they ? where are they ? And deep in their mind, they wonder whether theyâ?Tre American or Vietnamese . Actually, they are confused of themselves.

Thatâ?Ts the problem I wanna discuss with you.



Dimi

The following is an essay on my personal experience returning to Vietnam twenty years after I left my home country at the age of two. It describes what I have experienced during my three weeks trip and, more importantly, how I feel returning to the place of my origin that I have never known. Please note that this essay is purely based on my personal experience that is determined by the history of my family and by the Western influence on my life while growing up as a Vietnamese in West
Germany and the United States. This means that this essay will neither serve as a tour guide that other returning immigrants can utilize nor will it serve as an introduction to the country of
Vietnam. It rather gives you a small glimpse on the experience and its implying emotional change of just one returning immigrant--namely mine.
My parents, my sister and I escaped out of Vietnam as boat people some five years after the end of the war. I was only two at that time and certainly cannot remember anything of my own home country. Having lived virtually all my life under western influence in Germany, I had never been attracted to my
Vietnamese identity. Only with my move to Southern California, and its resulting immersion into an Asian-American society with lots of Vietnamese friends, did I develop an intensifying interest in my own home country and an enthusiasm and proudness of being Vietnamese.
With my sudden interest in Vietnam, my parents have finally decided for my sister and me to return to Vietnam some twenty years after our initial escape This past trip has been my most anticipated journey, for I had hoped to find home, closeness, and cultural enrichment in my own country. I had hoped to be able to relate to my own people and to feel somewhat home. However, I have experienced a trip that has touched me in bi-directional way. On the one hand, I do feel home. I do feel comfortable as I walk along in the crowd and loud streets of Saigon. I do feel home when I get to know friends and far-away
relatives of my parents. I do feel home with every Vietnamese meal that I eat each day.
Yet, being constantly--and often instantly--recognized as a returning immigrant to Vietnam is something one has to get used to. With its resulting change in attitude towards you as tourist, I have learned to hate to be a Viet Kieu, as returning Vietnamese-born immigrants are called. I have learned to be
helplessly recognized as a foreigner and being treated as such. For that reason, I also felt like a stranger in a strange world. I felt like a foreigner in some tourist-hyped country where people only see profit in you and refuse to accept you as one of them. I was being stared and looked at. Ironically, I find this more disturbing than the looks that I received as a foreigner when I
entered high-class restaurants in Germany.
I feel as if they look down on me, as if I have left the country for the wrong reasons. Whether it was my choice to leave Vietnam and grow up in the western world, or whether this choice is morally justified or not might be irrelevant to them. I am simply not one of them. It seems like I have betrayed Vietnam, because I might have lost my Vietnamese identity with my initial
escape. I, therefore, often surprise people when I start to speak Vietnamese as they usually do not expect this from a Viet Kieu anymore. However, my Vietnamese is not good at all: it is about enough to communicate with each other without losing patience on either side. So the language barrier can be very profound.
I have learned to hate to be a Viet Kieu while shopping in Saigon's many markets. In Vietnam, shop owners tend to be more aggressive in their selling style than I was accustomed to in the States. People confront you the moment you just walk by a booth. This makes communication inevitable and, unfortunately, automatically reveals my foreign identity. As a result, people excessively attempt to sell me anything they can regardless of its value for me or try to charge me more for goods than they are usually sold at. They think that the Viet Kieu has a seemingly unlimited budget due to the strong immense
sum that US dollars gather in VN currency.
Once people find out that I am a Viet Kieu, they expect that I would easily spend large amounts of money without thinking. Of course, buying a pair of good shoes for the equivalent of $10 is very little to my simple standards, but conceptually it upsets me that people are constantly trying to overcharge me for goods. I was very careful during my first days in Vietnam not to buy anything before I had consulted my aunts on whether or not a quoted price was reasonable for Vietnamese standards. Naturally, one can get used to price ranges of common goods after a while, but being overcharged at the beginning of my trip was not a rare incident.
On top of that, every now and then I find it outraging when the Vietnamese government implements Viet Kieu discriminating policies: the train trip from Saigon to Nha Trang costs 66% more for a Viet Kieu and the hydrofoil trip from Vung Tau to Saigon is almost twice as expensive as for citizens. This policy is implemented in a highly visible fashion at the train station: there are two separate lines at the counter, one for citizens and one for the Viet Kieu. The fact that this parallels Jim Crowe and demotes tourism probably has not come to the government officials' minds. At the same time, because people think
that Viet Kieu have an unlimited amount of money to use, we are expected to constantly give away money to people. Each time we visit relatives and friends, we are expected to give them money, even though we might not necessarily relate to them or even though my parents' relationship to them have not been fruitful while they were still living there. If a Viet Kieu does not
give a related family money, it looks bad on the Viet Kieu, or so I have been told. If my grandmother did not point that out when I visited far-away relative on the countryside, I probably would not have done so. My sister and I ended up giving people money we personally do not know. I am sure that my parents do not know them either.
Although the wages that I earn in the United States converts to a huge sum in Vietnam, I also have to make it clear to Vietnamese people that everything is also more expensive here. The fact that my hourly wage can keep several Vietnamese people alive for several weeks does not make me a rich person. I still have to depend heavily on financial aid and loans. Just because I am all of a sudden a "rich millionaire", I will not stop to think while spending money. I will
not stop bargaining for a cheaper price at Vietnamese markets for goods as it is accustomed there. Yet, when I do so, people talk bad behind my back expressing their fury over why a Viet Kieu needs to bargain in the first place. It is the concept of the rich Viet Kieu who does not think while spending money that has disturbed me enormously.
With all these negative aspects of being Viet Kieu, I have learned to hate to be one or to be recognized as such. The term Viet Kieu has become such a derogatory term to describe people like me.
However, describing my trip to Vietnam with so many negative aspects would be wrong. One gets used to this sense of isolation, but Vietnam has given me something else instead--a tremendous advancement in understanding of the history of my family and my own identity. Within a few weeks, I have had such
an enriching experience getting to know my two aunts and grandmother that I have never met, as well as learning about my parents' and grandparents' identity and history. It is not the case that I have not known my parents' or grandparents' history up until now, but hearing the detailed, true, individual stories about them told by my grandmother or by old friends living in the
neighborhood is such an adventure into my ancestors' world, and, thus, my own origin. That is the reason why my trip to Vietnam was so worthy.
I value those hours spent with my recently acquainted
grandmother in the hot and sunny Vietnam afternoon
continuously telling each other stories about our family while everyone else is taking their famous Vietnam afternoon nap.
As she tells me about how my parents got to know each other, how my grandfather met my grandmother, how my immediate family escaped from the communist Vietnam as boat people, how my grandma received the telegram from Singapore stating that we were alive after several weeks of sea travel,
how my well-beloved uncle died at an early age, or how my grandmother's death sent my grandfather and my mom into grief and despair for the longest time, I was able to put together small little puzzle pieces that my parents gave me over the years into one big picture. The clouds that have long covered the
faces and identities of my relatives slowly disappeared, and I started to discover the relationships among them and how they relate to me. It feels as if the house I have lived in all of a sudden has a foundation that it is built on, and I wonder how I could have ever lived in this house without noticing this
foundation before.
These stories, however, were not the only "enlightening" factors. I went over very old photo albums getting to know the faces of my relatives, I went over the various, almost destroyed historical documents such as marriage and birth certificates or touching letters sent home from Germany describing how
fortunate we are to find another home there. This was accompanied with the unique experience of actually meeting my parents' friends and relatives, as my sister and I traversed down a list of people my parents asked us to visit. It is an enriching experience visiting them as each person added their personal anecdotes that gave the big picture a frame. It is sometimes funny to think of them as my parents' friends. Putting myself into their perspectives, it is like getting to know my current college friends' future children.
How about this: every now and then, we were being visited by old people who entered our front door with a smile and asked, "I have heard that Tin and Nhan's two little children are returning to Vietnam. I would like to see them" or as I walk in the small, but lively alleys of our neighborhood, I hear people
asking, "Is this Tin's son? He looks like him, doesn't he?" With this constant recognition, I encountered the prestige my parents held in this community. The fact that they were well known, loved and missed in this neighborhood moves me enormously. People repeating how much they loved them made me, ironic
as it sounds, so proud of them, and the respect I have gained is irreversible.
As a result, I realized how much my parents have sacrificed in order to give their children a hopeful future. I have come to realize how tragic my parents' lives were under the influence of the war, poverty and communism and how they virtually sacrificed almost everything they have for the survival and the well-being of two lives--namely my sister's and mine. When I walked in the crowd streets of Saigon, I was constantly being approached by children of all ages desperately trying to sell cigarettes, lottery tickets or chewing gums. I know that I could have easily ended up as one of them. I could have been in the very same situation lacking the lively childhood, proper meals, and decent education that I enjoy so much in the United States. Vietnam has not much offered me the touristic joy of exploring my travel across the country, but it has given me the joy of exploration of my own past as well gaining respect and
admiration for my parents. This only has made my three weeks trip worthwhile, and I have promised myself to take my future children to Vietnam as well when I know that they can comprehend and appreciate their journey as much as I did.
Vietnam is a country and a culture that I cannot necessarily easily relate to,but it still is and always will be the country of my origin. When people ask me where I am from, I will tell them that I am from Vietnam, and I will do so for the rest of my life. I will teach my children, despite the fact that they might grow up as Asian Americans that their home is Vietnam and I will do so with my children's children. I ask myself often whether I would be able to live in Vietnam for good when communism ceases to exists there, and I am afraid that the answer would be 'No.' I am too much accustomed to western luxury, technology, and mentality. But if I am unable to picture myself living in Vietnam, how can I ever picture my children there?

We as first generation immigrants are imprisoned to live a life like this due to a war that should never has happened, but we will strive to preserve our culture and heritage, although it turns out to be a very difficult task. Nevertheless, as long as I continue to be proud to be Vietnamese, as long as I have my big framed portrait of Vietnam hanging on my four mental walls, I consider this internal cultural struggle to be victorious.
Send in perhaps of NMT.

Nice essay!
It's been a while since the bombing, the shooting and the killing were a matter of the past, there are still cries, wrath ,dreams and hopes. The country you landed on are no longer like the one it used to be some 30 years ago. Things have been different and people have changed accordingly. It will be an eternal vicious circle if there are no positive thoughts about the present and the future of the country
Other than some drawbacks that you have experienced, the country is worth to be further explored. Weed out the image of the luxury and convienience of western life that I am sure you will be sick of at some point in your life . Instead, keep focusing on what you are looking for in both spiritual and visual way. A next journey may be another nice experiece.

It's not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered,to be generous, to be independent

Được johntrung sửa chữa / chuyển vào 03:42 ngày 23/11/2002
Được johntrung sửa chữa / chuyển vào 03:44 ngày 23/11/2002
Được johntrung sửa chữa / chuyển vào 13:33 ngày 24/11/2002

Nice!
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