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Vietnam in Me
"It seems like race in America is usually reduced to black and white. For a long time I felt like if I wasn't black, I must be basically white."
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By Katri Foster
My father was raised Irish Catholic in the suburbs of Chicago. All of our family reunions are dedicated to him and his seven siblings toasting into the night about how Irish they are. My mother came from Saigon, Vietnam, about five years before the fall of the south to Ho Chi Minh, and spent most of her formative years bra-less and Birkenstocked, consumed in American hippie culture.
Nonetheless, I was raised to be proud of my mother's culture, and to own it as best I could. This can be hard, since it seems like race in America is usually reduced to black and white. For a long time I felt like if I wasn't black, I must be basically white. So even if I celebrated the New Year in February, or taught myself to eat every meal with chopsticks masterfully, there were only a few things separating a huge chunk of my identity from the rest of white American culture, I tried so hard to distance myself from.
It wasn't until I was 16, and went to Vietnam that I was really able to be clear about the significance of my ethnicity. One of the first things I noticed was how different I was physically: I was much lighter, and taller, and I was born with the eyelids that some of the rich city women get surgery for. But as the trip went on, I noticed how so many of the old women spoke like my grandmother, and how sisters sat and talked to each other in a way I thought was distinctive to my mom and my aunt. It took these things for me to fully realize what it was to be half Vietnamese-American.
Vietnamese-Americans don't have their own music, or any artistic movement that happened here unique to their culture. They don't have their own way to speak English. Usually Little Saigon, if it exists at all, is just some small appendage of the local China Town. But we, like all other ethnic groups, have our own ways of interacting, and raising family, and loving each other. True Vietnamese love; this is what lasts. And while I am very much my father, and above all else I am American, I am thankful to have witnessed and received the little bit of Vietnam my mother has given to me.
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