The first night that I came home, I was welcomed by an intense loneliness.
After turning off the lights, it always takes a while for your eyes to adjust to the dark. But I gained an immediate clarity to the vague shapes of things in my room, as if the lights never went away. The ceiling fan that I have slept under for more than a decade. The stereo set that my parents bought in celebration of my birth. The makeshift wooden bookshelf that held many of my manga and light novels and anime figurines, all of which I have long since grown out of. Everything in my room seemed to represent me, to scream ME, ME, ME!, yet I felt like an impostor, laying silently inside a nest made for someone else that resembles me but certainly isn’t.
Coming back for a short holiday, for the first time since I started studying abroad made me realize that everything has changed. Vietnam has gone on without me. I’m like a fish moving from one fishbowl to another and is suddenly choking on the strange water. To borrow a line from The Shawshank Redemption: “The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry,” and Vietnam seemed like the center of change. The number of motorcycles increases, their loud horns numb me, and the chaos that is everyday road traffic shocked me. Street vendors set up shop directly on the pavement, acting like they own the place, selling food whose origins no one knows and seems to care. People are loud and sometimes inconsiderate towards each other, with some being borderline nosy. I was easily surprised by many things, big or small, which might not be an uncommon behavior for someone being away from home for a three-and-a-half-year stretch. But looking back on my eighteen-year upbringing in Vietnam, the consternation should not have even been there. For the first time, change, for me, is a mixed bag.
I found myself comparing things in Vietnam to Japan often after I came home. “In Japan whenever anyone blasts their horn, the whole road turns around to look,” I thought. “In Japan the food looks like it is made in proper restaurants with decent hygiene and not from the ghetto somewhere.” “In Japan people are so polite, while here…” Before finishing the sentence bubbling inside my head, a realization hit me that these comparisons had come out of me unconsciously, the same way I have compared Japan to Vietnam in the past, when I first arrived in the country in 2018. Is it possible that I have suffered from a reverse culture shock? I can imagine people saying “But how could you say that? You are Vietnamese! Experiencing a culture shock in your home country is just impossible!” But am I really Vietnamese? Is it that black and white? When people ask me who I am, what am I supposed to say? A Vietnamese, or a Vietnamese with a Japanese… perspective, or something along that line? Or should I use some other more cliché terms like “cosmopolitan” or “citizen of the world”?
In a way, those terms are like labels – labels that I have to apply onto myself in order to form a (presumed and continually changing) picture of my identity. When I was in high school a common problem to solve in Chemistry classes usually concerns how the labels to some chemical bottles were terribly misplaced, and it was our duty to correctly label the bottles before someone mixes the wrong chemicals and accidentally blows themselves up into bits. Even for a student so bad at Chemistry like yours truly, it always occurred to me that misplacing labels is such an incredibly irresponsible and impetuous behavior. In probably the most important form of modern society, the Curriculum Vitae, we have to make decisions with regards to our labels: nationality, gender, sexual identity, marital status, career position, hobby, personal preferences, etc. The more consistent our labels are through time, the more order we will have in life, and Order for me has long been one of life’s key principles. So it need not be said how perplexed I was when I found myself uncertain about my labels for the first time.
The thoughts about labels arose in my mind because, as labels are created, so are expectations. If one is active in the field of medical anthropology, he or she would undoubtedly be reminded of Ian Hacking and his “looping effect” theory, namely how the application of labels fundamentally changes how those who are labeled are understood, behave, and live, and vice versa. Let’s say you identify yourself as “Married” in the column for “Marital status” – you will be expected by those around you to act like a married person and not a bachelor, namely being more responsible and more of a family person. When the social expectation of what a married person does changes, your actions and behaviors will have to change as well. If I identify myself as a Vietnamese, I am probably expected by other Vietnamese to show some proof other than the nationality in my passport: how long I have lived in Vietnam, or how well I am acquainted with Vietnamese food, culture, and people – in short, how “Vietnamese” I am. The category for being a “Vietnamese” carries in itself certain social expectations. But if living in another country had made me gain some experience otherwise unobtainable within my home country, can I still call myself a Vietnamese? How much “Vietnamese-ness” do I have left, and how much “Japanese-ness” do I have now?
I used to praise myself for my high degree of adaptation to a foreign land and a new lifestyle. When I first came to Japan I wasted no time settling down and in a matter of weeks I’ve already felt at home in a land so far from what I used to be so familiar with. It is only now that I understand that this ability is both a blessing and a curse, as it made me slowly lose contact with my roots. When my mom told me after a year in Japan that I needed to come home and visit, I flatly refused, saying a year was too early. “I wouldn’t even feel like I’m studying abroad then, if I just go back to Vietnam after only a year.” I remember telling her. How foolish and naive I was back then, not a care in the world, still knee-deep in the pond that is adolescence, unaware that when I reach adulthood, I will be longing for the many things I had taken for granted back in those innocent days.
Despite changes happening all around me when I stepped out of the house, my room seemed to have stood still in time. It is still the same room as I left it three and a half years ago, when I left Vietnam for Japan, and I notice it through the utmost little things. Like how the Japanese textbooks in my bookshelf are still at elementary level, although I have passed the proficiency test for the intermediate level not so long ago, or how my old toys and Gundam figurines are still neatly stacked in boxes under my study desk, despite myself having grown out of them. Those small details make the room seem a little out of place, and although I have cleaned up everything and personalized my room so that it more resembles the current me, there is still a peculiar, lingering oddness that I couldn’t put my finger on. Like my eighteen-year-old self is still in the room with me, announcing his presence in every little memorabilia that I cherish too much to store away. Perhaps there is the past in every present, and no matter where we are, we carry the past with us.
Perhaps there is the past in every present, and no matter where we are, we carry the past with us.
In a sense, coming back to my old room in Vietnam is like opening a time capsule, but the short-lived nostalgia is quickly replaced by waves of alienness passing over me. It’s probably akin to the feeling of how sometimes you accidentally come across some of things you post on social media a couple years before and feel a slight cringe. Perhaps I unconsciously expected some changes; I expected to immediately feel at home in my own home, even after time and displacement had essentially unrecorded my existence and development there. Although I changed, I could not reasonably expect everything to change with me, nor could I be there to witness and be a part of the process, if it occurs at all. I must myself be an agent of change, not just a passive observer that expects everything to be in line with what I have in mind.
That being said, I feel it is only appropriate to close this up with a few lines from Bonedog, a poem by Eva H.D.:
You return home, moon-landed, foreign;
the Earth's gravitational pull
an effort now redoubled,
dragging your shoelaces loose
and your shoulders
etching deeper the stanza
of worry on your forehead.
You return home deepened,
a parched well linked to tomorrow
by a frail strand of…
Anyway…
You sigh into the onslaught of identical days.
One might as well, at a time…
Well…
Anyway…
You're back.
The Polyphony 