Enter Vietnam

Here I am in the capital city of Vietnam, visiting Uncle Ho resting in his Mausoleum in Hanoi, not in Ho Chi Minh City as one would expect. Either way, I came here to learn the language, my mother tongue. It was my first language, but I quickly left it behind for English, or you might say, Ebonics. Vietnamese had no place at my preschool. It was a nice place with murals celebrating the ethnic leaders, with an upper terrace for a schoolyard. Its amenities included stainless steel tricycles and a fully operational jungle gym. My best friend and I would spend our recesses playing kick-ball if we weren’t whispering about those mysterious beings on the other side of the playground—girls. There was one other Vietnamese girl in my class, although I think her parents were Chinese, if that makes any sense. She seemed confused whenever I spoke to her, so I tried English, which didn’t seem to help much, but at least it got a flinch of recognition before she ran to the tire-swing with the other girls. It was then I decided to concentrate on the class’ lingua franca, English.

It took a while before I became interested again in the language my mother spoke to me as an infant. The few summers of Sunday Vietnamese school traumatized me thoroughly enough to make me wish the language would just die and go to heaven, like every good language should. By the time I could read the vowels in Vietnamese, I was ready to completely leave it behind. By the third weekend of reciting vowels, I cried out of frustration. What could be worth the torture of waking up 7am in the morning to be deserted by mother, placed in cold plastic chair and a cold particleboard desk? I missed the point, but these summers reminded me of the words commonly attributed to Mark Twain: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

It was only until high school when I started valuing my mixed-race heritage, and the fact that I was born speaking two languages. Unfortunately, they didn’t offer Vietnamese at my high school, so it was then I decided I would find an exchange program that would allow me to learn Vietnamese in its natural setting. Besides, I’ve always believed that languages could only be learned through immersion, and so I wasn’t two concerned with wasting my time drudging through practice drills in the school’s language lab in Spanish or French. I wanted to do something a little less common, and so I ended up taking Japanese in high school. I ended up going to Japan through an exchange program because Vietnam wasn’t on the list.

Finally, in my last year of college, I’ve been able to make it here to Vietnam’s capital city, Hanoi, on a study abroad program through UC Berkeley. It’s a very well structured program with trips all over the country, from Ha Long Bay to Saigon, and a program director who is very knowledgeable about the countries history, economics, and politics. While I’m here, I’ll be learning Vietnamese, taking classes on Globalization and International Business, and of course, on Vietnamese culture and society.

In this last class, we’ll each have to interview people of various professions and livelihoods, in Vietnamese and English, and publish it in an anthology I’ll be editing with ten other students. When I’m not doing this, I’ll be backpacking through the Vietnamese countryside and exploring South East Asia on the weekends. I look forward to the rest of the semester.