In the next 4 Months...

Before coming to Vietnam, I already knew that I was coming to do research.  

I know that I want to become involved with and do work in an informal, marginalized community.  I hope to get the chance to become familiar with local people not just as a student with her imposing, but maybe as a friend.  My understanding of the day to day struggles of people in the Global South has thus far been limited to text.  I'd like this to change over the next 4 months.  It's funny how in life how things just sometimes just fall into place... but I've made a great, new friend who's really opened a major door for me today.  I think that her connection to the community and her insight is going to be invaluable to my work, and I'm crazy grateful to her for the help. Now that she's given me this opportunity, I'm going to take full advantage of it.  I am going try my hardest to accomplish the above by doing the following:

(1) trying not to be lazy 

(2) reading more

(3) not shopping for stupid things

(4) doing more work

(5) being grateful for what I have

(6) complaining less

(7) making fewer excuses for myself

   

Autobiography

My mom came from a wealthy Catholic Hanoi family, one of many that left the city in 1954.  Her family never returned to the North and she never knew Hà Nội.  My dad came from a poor Catholic family that left miền Bắc for Saì Gòn in 1954. I don’t know too much about my dad’s past except what I have been told by an uncle.  My paternal grandfather died when he was a child and his eldest brother was away in the war, so my dad left school to work the fields with my grandmother at a young age. 

Both of my parents were able to leave Việt Nam in 1975 and were sponsored to West Virginia by Christian families.  Most of the Vietnamese families brought to West Virginia then found their way to Virginia, where they had more opportunities to find work, learn English, and go to school.  At some point my parents met, married and had my younger brother and me. My dad went to a local technical school for engineering and my mom got a job in the booming telecom industry.  Both of my parents had good, stable jobs and so they stayed behind while their brothers and sisters left for California. 

My brother and I grew up in the small town of Vienna, Virginia where I had an idyllic childhood. We had lots of kids to play with, all of the neighbors knew each other and everyone took care of one another.  We had trees to climb, a sandbox next door, and a mini forest type thing to explore.  In the fall there were leaves to rake, hayrides, apple cider, and pumpkin patches.  In the winter there was hot chocolate with marshmallows, snowmen, ice forts, snowball fights, and sledding.  In the spring we fed ducks at the park, flew kites, picked four leaf clovers, and played games outdoors.  Summers were spent catching up on cartoons, swimming at the pool, chasing the ice cream truck, going away to camp, and running through sprinklers.

My younger brother and I were pretty much inseparable as kids.  Every morning I made us pop tarts or cereal and packed our lunches, we rode the bus to and from school together, I would make us snacks once we got home, corrected his homework, and we’d sneak in a few cartoons afterwards.  Because there were no boys his age in the neighborhood, he didn’t have much choice but to follow me around.  Everytime I went anywhere my mom was always like “cho em đi chới với”.  So my brother would tag along, bring his Ninja Turtles out to my neighbor’s Barbie Dream House, and we would have his Ninja Turtles play house with Barbie and Skipper. Life was good and easy.

When my brother and I were in elementary school my mom went back to college for her bachelor’s degree.  For a few years she worked during the day and went to school at night.  Soon after graduating she transitioned to a career in marketing.  She made a lot of friends, did really well and moved up the corporate ladder pretty quickly.  During this same time a lot of the senior engineers in my dad’s field were being let go and their jobs taken over by younger, cheaper, more ambitious engineers.  By the ninth grade my parents bought my mom’s dream house, and the family moved to McLean.  My brother and I were transplanted into a completely different world.  We were now going to Langley High with diplomats’, senators’ and judges’ kids (was that way that too many apostrophes??). My brother and I came from an immigrant background into a world full of waspy old money with my mom’s new money.  I felt like a fraud.  It was complete culture shock. By high school my mom had advanced to marketing director at her company while my dad was constantly transitioning from one company to the next. Things got steadily worse for my dad, entire engineering departments were being outsourced, making his work increasingly unstable.  As my mom’s career took off my dad was experiencing downward mobility.  Things got complicated, and their marriage became strained.  We only lived in my mom’s dream house for two years before things began to fall apart.  In what felt like an instant, my parents separated, divorced, and I left for California.  I tried coming back, but I just couldn’t do it. 

I’ve been away from home now for the last eleven or so years, in college, wandering a bit, working, and now in graduate school.  Most of those eleven years were an angry, messy blur, but I have few regrets.  I’m in this weird place where I don’t feel like I’ve had a real home since I was a kid in grade school.  I’ve sort of just shuffled around for a long while and lived with a bunch of different people.  My aunt and uncle call me con bụi đời.  I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I get the feeling it’s not a good thing.  When I do go “home” for the holidays I go to my mom’s new place, so it’s not really home. I call it my mom’s new house because she bought it after the divorce while I was away, so it’s new to me… but it’s not actually new because she’s lived there for the last seven years I think.  The point is that I hate it there.  It’s not where I grew up, I have no real memories there, and it’s just weird and foreign.  Holidays are strange.  

Sorry, this is an abrupt transition…  I’m a serial monogamist and have been in a couple of really long relationships for most of my entire adult life. I don’t know why I do this, but I don’t think it’s intentional.  I’m now onto my third and newest.  I’m mostly happy, a little restless, a wavering commitment phobe, and am a bit of an escape artist.  My boyfriend thinks he’s got this figured out, but I’m not sure that I believe him... yet. I probably need psychoanalysis or maybe just a few months with Cesar Milan and my baby puppy doggy Mignonnie.  My guess is I’m still trying to find my place somewhere with someone.  But this is sort of hard to do when you're sort of cynical about relationships.  So this is where I am now.  Still kind of lost, but much less so.  

That was really personal so don’t tell anyone!!!!!  I'm serious.  

 

 

Assignment 1: Obituary

Robert McNamara died on July 06, 2009 at the age of 93. 

When browsing through the obituaries on the Economist, Robert McNamara’s name immediately caught my attention.  I don’t know much about him and was hoping to get more insight into his life. I am aware that he played a key role in the Vietnam War (known here as Chiến Tranh Mỹ) as Secretary of Defense, but nothing else. This assignment is sort of strange…  We’re learning about someone’s life by reading about them in death.  Sadly after reading the short and insufficient excerpt, I still know very little about the man.

After reading McNamara’s obituary, I felt bad for him.  The first three quarters of the piece in the Economist was on his life’s devotion to quantitative analyses.  I’m not sure that this is how he would have liked to have been remembered, maybe it’s that I wouldn’t want that for myself.  Towards the end of the obit, there was then the Vietnam War part of his life.  McNamara bore a great deal of responsibility for the deployment of U.S. troops and escalation of the Vietnam War.  By 1968, after having been called a “baby-burner”, having his son march against him in protest and losing his obstinate objectivity, he resigned from office. He came to realize that the soldiers drafted to fight in Vietnam were not strategy or statistics, but husbands, brothers, and sons.  He later wrote a memoir, remorseful and apologetic, confessing that he had not understood war.

Initially, this obituary didn’t really mean much to me.  It wasn’t until I read it a few times and sort of put myself into his shoes that any meaning began to take shape.  From what little I could pull from the obituary, I imagined McNamara to be a lonely man alienated by the war and plagued by his conscience.  He was at one point hated by the public and maybe even by his own son.  And although the public had reason to hate him, beneath the cold and calculating objectivity was a tortured old man.  For me, and it may sound really simplistic, but the lesson I learned is that we are all human.  Maybe some more so then others…  Cliché, but it’s easy to judge and it’s easy to hate, but it takes so much more to have empathy and to be compassionate.