Searching for My Parallel Life in Vietnam

For reasons we never understood, our first home in Vietnam was called “Montana House.” The words were engraved on a gold placard hanging outside the screechy metal gate. It was a rental on an unnamed dirt alley in Hoi An, situated between an estuary and a freshwater shrimp farm. The tenants before us had also been a foreign family: a Canadian husband, an Irish wife, two blonde, blue-eyed girls. We met them briefly before they left for Dublin, inheriting their battered children’s books and unreliable blender. The youngest, Clodagh—a name I still remember because of how unfortunate it sounded—was three, burly, and destructive, in keeping with her name. She was also close in age to my daughter.

Our new neighbor was an Australian I’ll call Doug. He lived next door to Montana House and, when we met, was wearing a see-through tank top and boxer shorts. He couldn’t fathom what we were doing, relocating from San Francisco to the Vietnamese countryside. His exact words: “What are you doing here?” His bafflement was so profound he looked pained. I regret not asking the same of him.

Doug had lived and worked throughout Asia for more than twenty years. Something related to construction and high-rises. When we met, he was retired and married to a twenty-nine-year-old Vietnamese woman. She was more than half his age, ten years younger than me. Doug called her Mo because he couldn’t pronounce her full Vietnamese name. This was his second marriage, her first. They had a son. They only ever communicated in English, Doug’s first and only language, her second. She sometimes brought their son over to play.

I told Doug I came to Hoi An for an international school teaching job. I brought my husband and child along for the experience. This was back in July 2019. Trump was still in office. We’d experienced two major Northern California “fire seasons” by that point, everyone resigned to more burning on the horizon. I wasn’t certain when we’d return home. “Depending on how badly America unravels,” I joked.

“My family’s from Vietnam,” I continued, seeing the skepticism on his face. “My parents and three older siblings escaped the country by boat after the war.”

My grandparents on both sides left China under similar war-ravaged circumstances as teens in the 1930s, part of a mass Chinese exodus that spread across Southeast Asia. They too left by boat, resettling in Southern Vietnam, working and raising their families until a communist takeover forced them to flee again, forty years later. Movement has been intrinsic to my family’s survival. I grew up knowing this truth, knowing how quickly allegiances can come undone, how a flash decision by boat irrevocably alters the plot, reverberating for generations after.

Movement has been intrinsic to my family’s survival.

I was born in the United States but grew up speaking Vietnamese, eating Vietnamese food, and listening to childhood stories about Vietnam at the dinner table. Surely this justified my right to be here, to a next-door neighbor standing outside in his underwear.

What I didn’t tell Doug—what I couldn’t articulate to him or anyone else who asked because it didn’t yet make sense to me—was that I came to Vietnam in search of my parallel life. In my imagination, Vietnam contained the possibility of a different version and outcome for my family, had they never fled forty years ago. My return felt akin to flipping the pages back to the beginning of a Choose Your Own Adventure book and enacting an alternate choice. What might have happened if we had stayed? What would the life I might have had look like?

*

In Vietnam, I saw a version of my father seated on a red plastic chair on the sidewalk, leisurely sipping coffee and chatting with buddies, the whir of passing motorbike traffic serving as his early morning entertainment. I compared this to the cold, lonesome Minnesota winters of my childhood, my father irate and overworked from his small-town factory job, resigned to the La-Z-Boy and TV for solace.

I saw Vietnamese versions of myself: women my age born after the war, working mothers with young children. They included my dentist, my landlord, colleagues at school, restaurant and business owners. Many worked long hours. I watched as they carried plastic bags of ingredients from the market and hurried home in the late afternoons, usually with a child wedged on the front edge of their motorbike seat, their curled fists like paws resting between the handlebars.

I imagined the cooking and childcare Vietnamese women faced after a long day of work, just as I did. They likely lived in a multigenerational home. Very few in Hoi An had the opportunity and privilege to travel outside of their country, as I had. Nevertheless, they lived in an increasingly optimistic Vietnam, one that was making visible, feverish headway toward a higher standard of living.

Were they happier, surrounded by family, by a shared language and culture, working toward a brighter future in their ancestral homeland? Or was I better off for having the ability to leave my home and travel, contemplating my parallel life as a perennial outsider? I wondered if their lives felt less conflicted than mine.

*

In Vietnam, I am neither Vietnamese nor American. There is a specific term that has been created for people like me, Việt kiều, which literally translates as “Vietnamese overseas.” It refers to the millions of Vietnamese (and their descendants) who fled the country because of the war. It includes Vietnamese in the US but also Australia, Denmark, France, Russia, Norway, Canada, Japan, and on and on. We are Việt kiều because the choice to abandon everything and start over, akin to becoming a helpless child again, was preferable to staying.

I appreciate Vietnam naming its diaspora. It signals an acknowledgment of the past and the desperate factors that forced us to leave. It means we have not been forgotten. We are still bonded to Vietnam, Việt, but generously allowed to be elsewhere, kiều, too.

What I failed to appreciate, when using Việt kiều to identify myself in Hoi An, was the way it indicated an overseas status. My family left; therefore, it was expected that I would remain outside of the country as well.

Like Doug, the majority of Vietnamese people I encountered couldn’t understand what an American-born-and-raised Việt kiều woman was doing in Hoi An. My interactions included hard stares and then an onslaught of confused questions.

“Are you Korean?” they’d ask in Vietnamese, uncertain where to place my accent and appearance.

“No, I’m Việt kiều.”

“You look Korean, though.”

“I’m definitely not.” Pause. Stare. “My parents are from Vietnam. They used to live here. My grandparents came to Vietnam from China.”

“Where are you from?”

“I was born in America.”

“Ah, so you’re Việt kiều.”

“Exactly.”

“What are you doing back in the homeland?”

None of my three older siblings, all of whom were born in Vietnam, share my enthusiasm for living there. I have several cousins, aunts, and uncles who left as teenagers and have refused to go back. My sympathy for Vietnam stems in part from the fact that I wasn’t forced to flee. I do not carry the trauma of displacement.

I grew up on nostalgic stories from my family’s past instead—neighbors remembered in such intimate detail that I mistook them for relatives; kaleidoscopic fruit resembling Dr. Seuss creatures; daytime pajamas; afternoon siestas; ăn chơi, or play-eating, at all hours of the day—shape-shifted memories that eliminated the bad in order to move forward. Perhaps it’s no wonder I returned to Vietnam in search of my imagined life. So much of the Vietnam in my mind relied on joyful remembrances, mythmaking as my inheritance.

*

When Covid-19 arrived seven months after we’d moved into Montana House, in January 2020, it felt as though the universe had intended for me to be in Vietnam during this time. I was the daughter of refugees experiencing Vietnam as a place of refuge, Vietnam making up for past hurts and hauntings.

Perhaps it’s no wonder I returned to Vietnam in search of my imagined life. 

For the next year and a half, I watched the pandemic rage across much of the world, escalating to terrifying levels in the US. I couldn’t believe my good fortune in choosing Vietnam, one of the few countries that had successfully managed to contain the virus in 2020.

Vietnam’s early success can be attributed to its swift government action, including red-stamped (that means business in Vietnam) directives authorized with little warning, sometimes occurring overnight. I was given a morning’s notice for my first school closure; all schools in Quang Nam province remained closed for the next three months, from February 3 until May 4, 2020. During this time, we lived in a state of partial lockdown: Restaurants and cafés were closed or only served takeout. The beaches were cordoned off with yellow caution tape. Large indoor gatherings were prohibited. I knew the lockdown had taken a serious turn when karaoke was banned from personal home use. This, the lifeblood-curdling scream therapy of nearly every Hoi Anian, now erased from my evening soundtrack.

There was the sense that if the police didn’t stop you, your watchful neighbors might. Everyone rallied in support of the country’s fight against Covid, including a Vietnamese pop star who sang a viral handwashing song. This, in turn, sparked a viral TikTok dance video and dance challenge across the country. Vietnam had declared war against the virus, relying on song and dance as weapons. It felt unpatriotic, traitorous even, if you didn’t do your part to follow the protocols of social distancing.

All this occurred at a time when Vietnam’s population of 96 million had fewer than three hundred Covid cases total—every one contact-traced and placed under strict quarantine facilities—and zero Covid-related deaths. As outsiders looking in, my family and I saw an overzealousness bordering on hysteria. But this hysteria eventually led to zero Covid cases for two consecutive weeks at the end of April 2020. Then another government directive: Hoi An reopened on Tuesday, April 28. For much of the next year, until April 2021, life in Vietnam was near normal.

We had some minor hiccups here and there—a small outbreak and school closure in August 2020, another in February 2021. But overall, we were exhilarating in our freedom while much of the rest of the world was sheltering in place. It turned out that living under an authoritarian regime was enormously useful during a global pandemic.

For the first time since I’d arrived, I was congratulated for my prescience in choosing to live in Vietnam. I listened to the tofu lady at Ba Le Market sing Vietnam’s praises. Puffed up and eyes shining, she repeated what I’d been reading in the news. The country had successfully contained the virus, proving to be one of the safest countries during the pandemic. Domestic tourism skyrocketed that summer, giving a boost to Hoi An’s depressed economy.

The market was buzzing that morning, a feeling of optimism in the air. Before I left, the tofu lady grabbed my arm. “Just think if you’d stayed in America,” she said. “You’d be dead by now.”

I remember her words with clarity because I’d heard a similar refrain as a child. Just think if we’d stayed in Vietnam. We’d be in prison or dead. Vietnamese grown-ups said this, often lightheartedly, while gathered around a dining table. Friends and relatives, fellow refugees, wearing unfamiliar wool sweaters and socks. Empty cans of Budweiser scattered between platters of food. Some had been in the South Vietnamese army like my father. They joked, perhaps, but there was no denying the truth. They chose a life in the US, rather than face uncertainty in Vietnam. A generation later, I found myself living in an upside-down future in which a pandemic had ravaged the world and now the opposite rang true.

The tragedy, as is so often the case in poor countries of this world, is that Vietnam’s success did not continue. As I write this in October 2021, the country is experiencing a massive and debilitating Covid outbreak, accompanied by a painstaking 14 percent full-vaccination rate. When talk of an impending lockdown, the strictest one yet, took place in the spring, my husband and I knew. We packed our things and made plans to leave.

We returned to San Francisco on June 15, 2021, California’s official day of reopening. If America had unraveled in the two years that we’d been away, on this bright cloudless day, it felt like a celebration of its renewal.

Four hours after we landed, I walked into a CVS pharmacy and received my first shot of a Covid vaccine. I looked at the Band-Aid on my arm and thought of my Vietnamese counterparts, women my age born after the war, mothers, daughters, and sisters, locked at home and caring for their families, desperate for the jab I’d just received.

I am still uncertain what to make of this injustice, which is to say I’m uncertain what to make of me, a US-passport holder and beneficiary of my parents’ decision forty years ago to board a fishing boat at night, three children under the age of seven huddled by their side. Their youngest, my sister Phuong, was three, the same age as my daughter when I moved to Vietnam in 2019.

I returned to San Francisco this past summer and was told how lucky I was, what “impeccable timing” I had to live in Vietnam during the first year of Covid, then to return to the US in time for my vaccination. I’m clairvoyant, I enjoyed saying in response. But the truth is more complicated than that.

As a writer working on telling my family story, I’ve frequently struggled with setting—the basics of time and location that form the backdrop of a literary work—because so much of my history, my ancestry, includes an unmoored sensibility. Home has never come easily for us. If my timing was lucky, it’s because strains of luck appear, perhaps, after so much, for so long before me, remained in flux.

These days, I can’t help thinking about Montana House, my home and temporary refuge in Hoi An. Named after the Spanish word mountain, evoking a time and place out of sync with Vietnam, but it makes perfect sense to me.

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