The Armenian Community I Carry in My Vietnamese Heart

It didn’t matter what everyone was up to or where each person happened to be in the house. By the time the tea kettle let out its whistle, we were all gathered around the living room table, quickly piling our plates with dried fruits, nuts, fresh berries, and baked goods. Nazook was my favorite—a dense, buttery pastry that crumbled and melted with each bite, giving way to a nutty filling within. Its subtle sweetness complemented our black tea. Such a spread always came at nightfall in the Armenian homes of my close childhood friends.

Around the coffee table, we handed treats to one another in a graceful dance. I kept quiet as their words swirled around. Certain phrases were familiar. Ari, ari, someone would say to a sibling too slow at passing the cookies. Merci, my friend’s mom said to her when the tea was poured. The word was so commonly used to show gratitude, I assumed it was Armenian until I found out as a teenager that it was borrowed from French. “Could I have the nabat?” I would chime in to ask for the bag of rock sugars flecked with saffron. Considered to be Persian in origin, nabat was used to sweeten our tea, and I always loved watching the rocks dissolve, leaving pieces of saffron to float.

Sometimes an aunt or uncle cracked a joke and the group erupted in laughter. I chuckled along, lost until someone rescued me with a quick translation. In these moments I wondered if this was how my Armenian friends felt when they saw my own mother, who spoke to them in unburdened streams of Vietnamese—often for minutes at a time. I thought about my mom and the Armenian women in our neighborhood, each carrying little understanding of English yet communicating through the few words they all knew and gestures that became a code.

My upbringing was one of mixed diasporas. I grew up Vietnamese in my parents’ home, but my intimacy with Armenian culture and history developed from the many afternoons spent at friends’ houses, learning their families’ stories, eating the food they shared with me. When my parents and I came from Vietnam in 1998, we settled in Glendale, California, home to the largest population of Armenians in America, and second largest outside of Armenia. Most of my father’s family established themselves there, and it felt natural for my parents to live in Glendale because of this. They chose it over Westminster and San Jose, where dense pockets of Vietnamese immigrants could be found. But proximity did not mean intimacy. Family gatherings were few and far between, and in the years to come, I would find myself spending more time with my close Armenian friends than I ever would with my Vietnamese cousins.

Glendale is both city and suburb, sandwiched between Burbank and Downtown Los Angeles, dotted with palm trees that are never still. One-story ranch style houses sprawl themselves across manicured lawns. Scattered throughout are dingbat apartments—boxy multi-level buildings overhanging parking spots out front made popular in the 1950s and ‘’60s. Many come with names in the form of script signs: The Palms or Riverside View. Every block guarantees an Armenian bakery, restaurant, grocery store, law office, florist, or tailor. Glendale was where I had my first lahmajun, a very thin pizza of sorts, topped with a paste of minced meat and herbs. A dish prevalent in multiple cultures spanning Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, and beyond, lahmajun was a treasured afternoon treat. Just as my own identity was influenced by the Armenian community, Armenian culture itself is infused with flavors, words, and ways of being from countries across Europe and the Middle East.

Armenia and Vietnam, though a continent apart, are connected by the diaspora of their people. April 24th and 30th respectively are two dates that mark violence and loss for both communities. I spent my first Armenian Genocide Day in Glendale wondering why all of the Armenian students in my class were absent. I learned later that they were with their families, remembering the millions of lives lost to and scattered by the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923. Many attended marches across Los Angeles County. Others stayed home to honor the victims and survivors in solitude. Days after, on the 30th, I came home from school to find my mother watching a live broadcast from the Vietnamese community in Westminster. She sat in silence as veterans and refugees on our TV gathered to mark the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. “If only it wasn’t a three-hour bus ride away,” she said, shaking her head.

As April 24th approached every year, teachers shared its meaning with documentaries or carefully planned lessons. The year I graduated from college was also the year that Armenian Genocide Commemoration Day became a district-wide holiday in Glendale. From across the country, I thought about that first Armenian Genocide Day and the following few years of learning why that day existed.

While working on a college project about Asian American women writers, I researched the Vietnam War in depth for the first time. My own parents’ stories were always hidden somewhere beyond reach. “Why talk about that time?” my father would reply if I asked him about his sister who left for America and never appeared on the other side. I started with Wikipedia and ended with a phone call to a distant uncle who escaped Saigon in 1975, crouched on a boat too small for the dozens of bodies on it. Over the crackle of bad service, he told me about his trip, about not knowing if the journey would end in life or death. I sat on my dorm bed, phone pressed tightly to my cheek, wishing that I had had learned more, had been taught more, about the Vietnam War when I was younger.

Sometimes I imagine a life in which my parents settled in a Vietnamese community instead. I wonder if I would have a clearer sense of identity if my parents raised my brother and me in Westminster, if I had grown up around Vietnamese friends, if I received family stories over the Vietnamese dessert pudding chè, instead of over nazook. These desires are true but always fleeting. My head whips around every time I catch sight of an Armenian name on an awning in Boston where I live now, the same way my heart jumps when I recognize the smell of Vietnamese food coming from a storefront before I even see it. They are two communities I carry within me.

I keep a bag of nabat in my kitchen cabinet today. I bring the bag out on evenings when I especially miss Glendale. Each morsel meets the cup’s bottom with a clink, reminding me of the stories that shaped me just as much as being Vietnamese has shaped me.

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