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saturdaysickness · 1 year ago

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4.3.24 - the liminal space called assimilation

it's been almost 2 years since my last journal entry. in those 2 years. there was a lot of personal development happening that has helped me reach some kind of stability that the me in previous journal entries struggled to find. guess you could say i "grew" in those 2 years. i've finally become a bit more "rational" (using this word loosely because i don't consider myself to be completely rational just yet).

well, i'm 24 now, which means i have technically entered the mid 20's, phasing out of the early 20's of entries from 2 years ago. i don't remember exactly what my 22-year-old self imagined my current self to be, but i'm sure glad i'm not in that space anymore!!!!!!!!! god, it was awful.

im finally finishing my undergrad this summer, which has me thinking a lot recently. themes around growing up as an immigrant, being the first in the family to go through the american higher education system and having to navigate it by myself, and a yearning to reclaim what was missing during my coming-of-age years keep circulating my thoughts. i guess the adulthood growing pains i discussed 2 years ago, the feeling of being torn between wanting to stay as a child versus having to grow up still lingers, though this time around, i feel like i am finally ready to step into full-blown adulthood while honoring/healing the child in me (using "healing the child" loosely, again, because this concept is tossed around so much that i feel like it has kind of lost its weight and became a kind of buzzword).

anyhow, i wrote this a few days ago while tossing and turning in bed, struggling to sleep on the night before my first day of class for the last term of my undergrad studies. i couldn't stop thinking about how close i am to finishing school, but at what cost. the journey has been painful, to say the least. i kept imagining in my head what i would say if someone were to ask me on the day of my graduation how i feel now that i have graduated, in which i see myself responding with: "it wasn't worth it, if it takes you more than 4 years to complete an undergrad then maybe just give up, maybe i should've given up". obviously, that's not my general outlook on higher education because as we know, navigating higher education is not a linear path nor should there be some kind of deadline that everyone must follow. rather, i am projecting. i am projecting what life would be if i didn't feel the burden to be the first in my family to hold a degree. i am projecting what life would be like if i didn't "waste" time stretching out my schooling, i could have been completing graduate school instead if i had stayed on track. i am projecting where i would potentially be now had i just gave up on school. part of me still feel that perhaps i would be more Free if i had just given up entirely and focused on something else that makes me happy rather than fulfilling my family's hopes. nonetheless, this is where i am now, i am proud of myself for returning to school and following through with it after so many struggles and failures, despite the pain that it brings me. i am proud of myself, for my resilience, not what i will be accomplishing, which is quite sad and very "first-world problems" of me because i should be very grateful that i have had the opportunity to participate in higher education. anyway, that's enough prefacing, below are my 5am thoughts.

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when i was young, i couldn’t wait to grow older so that i could finally wear the white áo dài that high schoolers wear, too bad i left viet nam a few years before that dream came true.

at the beginning of the pandemic, i had a lot of time to reflect on my relationship with my identity and feelings about living in diaspora, all at the ripe age of 20. i yearned for home yet struggled with feeling like that connection was far too damaged in my process of assimilation. i couldn't write in vietnamese without consulting google translate on every other word, and my reading comprehension degraded so bad that i no longer had the ability to scan texts. i felt shameful, how could someone born, lived, and partially grown up there turn out this way - it's a disgrace. so i began texting my parents in vietnamese. first without the accent marks, because i was embarrassed about making spelling errors, then finally incorporating them once i've gained enough confidence- this was the first time i had texted them in vietnamese in the 10 years that we've immigrated. i was ashamed of my immigrant identity in grade school and chose to abolish all traces connecting to that piece of me; i went as far as lying about being born in the us to internet friends, even though my voice rang with an accent whenever we skyped. but i was content with erasing that part of myself if it meant i could shield myself from scrutiny. i worked on my accent- to sound like Everyone Else; i would repeat certain words/phrases until they sounded Correct; i would practice my speech in front of the mirror to see how my words and manners would be perceived; i recorded my voice to hear what it Truly sounds like to others because i had read from somewhere that sometimes your ears deceive you of the actual sounds you are making. i would (somewhat forced myself to) read books and watch shows to further perfect this american accent and develop my vocabulary. is this why i can't bear to sit down and enjoy a fictional novel or shows/movies anymore as an adult? i didn't want to sound dumb because i believed that people think immigrants are dumb.

16: Phương Vy to Susan, legally

i no longer looked forward to wearing the white áo dài as a high schooler since that objective has now become obsolete, instead, i was counting down to the day when i naturalize because then i knew that legally, i can no longer be ostracized. i could then flex a travel picture on instagram with my blue american passport and substitute teachers could no longer mispronounce my name. i used to get extremely anxious when there would be a sub for class because that meant they would butcher my name and someone would laugh. i lived in this fear up until high school where i developed a fool-proof strategy: to tell the sub ahead of time before roll call that i go by Susan instead of Vy (pronounced: vee). i would even mispronounce my own name on purpose as vai so that they could find it on the list.

and the day came, i was 16, our family had been in the us for 6 years, and we had finally gathered enough money to afford the application process. i was lucky to not have to take the test, but my parents pored over the practice questions every night after work for months. my dad was the first to take the citizenship test - it was the same day i was getting my braces off. he called my mom and i after my appointment to let us know that he has passed. instead of feeling joy for him, i felt a selfish relief for myself. 16, now with straight pearly whites AND a us citizenship? i was as american as one could be. first order of business was to get my name changed, i was adamant that it was done quickly. my mom took out time from work going back and forth with the city court for a few months to legally change my name to Susan. i struggled to determine whether i wanted to keep Phương Vy or just Vy as my legal middle name, in which i ended up settling with just Vy because those with longer names usually find themselves having a harder time in bureaucratic processes, as i have witnessed by my own mom. her legal birth name contains 5 words, she was the last in our family to get her green card when we first arrived, and the last to naturalize because of it. she immediately changed and shortened her name upon naturalization. ridding Phương from my name felt painful, because it is an homage to my late aunt, because it is a part of my identity as Phương Vy - a vietnamese social custom to refer to someone by both their middle and individual name for identifying purposes because many people have the same individual name. my old friends called me Phương Vy, my teachers called me Phương Vy, the name tags stitched onto my school uniforms bore that name for years, and most importantly, i knew myself as Phương Vy until i was told to become Susan because it was easier for americans to pronounce. deciding to rid Phương in the legal name change felt like i was shutting away an important part of my identity, but i thought that it was a necessary step in my plan to achieve the American Identity. and so, my name was legally changed, i was no longer Lâm Phương Vy, this is a new chapter for a girl now legally named Susan Vy Lam (*notice the stylistic choice to include/not include accent marks).

i was now proudly able to post pictures of my class schedules and new school ID pictures on sinsta with my new full name blasted (!! i know a lot of people call it finsta but in my locale we referred to it as sinsta - secret insta/sin insta - love word-play). no more fear of accidentally showing my fob name! i was living the american dream! (*using fob - fresh off the boat- here as means of reclaiming the power to the word, both of its negative/pejorative connotation as well as my past rejection of the identity) and at last, i was able to do what i had always dreamt of, an instagram story of my blue american passport with a boarding ticket for Susan Lam tucked in it - destination: viet nam. funny juxtaposition.

20 to 21: đụ má

back to my identity crisis at 20. after 10 years of suppressing my fob identity, i realized that perhaps all those struggles i have gone through may have all been in vain - it has done far too much damage by now that teenage me couldn’t have foreseen. i could barely write and read in vietnamese, i could hardly say a full sentence without using an english word or stuttering while trying to find the correct term. at least my accent was still acceptable. i found my first vietnamese friend in the us at 20, and they were also born in vietnam! for the first time, the piece of me that i have locked away for so long feels seen and recognized. they understood my experiences living there and here. i was still embarrassed to speak vietnamese at the beginning of our friendship, i was barely able say đụ má correctly without sounding americanized. this is hilarious thinking back on this instance because đụ má is a curse word/phrase, yet it is so integral to vietnamese colloquial language, it's the first thing that most people would teach non-vietnamese speakers - it is an essence of the vietnamese identity. i first learned the phrase as a little kindergartener and used to secretly and quietly learn how to say it grammatically and situationally Correct in a corner with my kindergarten friends. i would use đụ má behind adults' backs in elementary school with friends and cousins, along with a plethora of other curse words and phrases to show that i was Cool and Rebellious - đụ má was never foreign to me, until it was. by 20, i haven't used the word verbally for 10 years because i couldn't curse at home nor did i have vietnamese friends. i was disgusted by the sounds i heard when i tried to say it out loud again at 20 - it was so foreign, so american, so việt kiều. similar to how i used to repeat english words until i got the mannerism and accent down, i did the same to đụ má- obsessively repeating the word to myself until i got it Right. and one day, i said it out loud around my viet friends, and i did get it Right, i was so proud of myself.

it's quite funny how much the tables have turned since the time that i left high school 6 years ago until now. now i work with vietnamese youths and adults, speaking, reading, and writing in the language regularly on both conversational and professional levels. i've mc'd 3 years in a row for community tết events wearing áo dài publically. i joke around with my students in vietnamese and correct people on mispronouncing names. i write and speak about my experiences as a vietnamese immigrant without fear. i don't think teenage me could have fathomed how this could've even come about, and neither can i. in my interview 3 years ago for my current job, even though the entirety of the interview was conducted in english, i purposely sabotaged myself and butchered my own accent in a very simple vietnamese test the interviewer has given me because i was embarrassed of sounding too fob. i have a perfectly fluent vietnamese accent yet i forced myself to sound americanized to establish myself as Vietnamese-American, not Vietnamese. because to me, Vietnamese = fob = i'm new to the country = i'm not eloquent/qualified enough for american institutions. i was 21 at the time. i don't think i was able to shred myself of this internalized xenophobia until a year into my work. it is exposure to my culture, people, and language that helped me feel comfortable embracing it again in recent years.

22 to 24: returning to college

at 22, i understood that i was not on track to complete the traditional 4-year college course. june of 2022 came, my once-projected college graduation date, my classmates from high school were graduating college while i'm sitting at home and had dropped out of school for almost a year. their photos flooded my instagram feed - i couldn't bear to look at them because of how shameful i felt. i've always been a good and diligent kid, how could i have gone so far off the path? then i started daydreaming about what i would've worn if i had graduated that june - of course, it HAS to be the white áo dài, absolutely. i HAVE to walk across that stage in a white áo dài.

so for the next 2 years, i revisited my priorities and decided to go back to school after failing classes left and right for a full year and taking another completely off from school to work and reexamine my relationship with education. i struggled to get back on track for school at the beginning, but i buckled up and got serious with it. age 23 and currently the beginning of 24 is hell, i work and go to school full time, simultaneously. if i wasn't doing in-person work, my butt is glued to the computer chair. tuesdays and thursdays i am working in person all day; monday, wednesday, and friday mornings until 5 were preserved for meetings, writing emails, obsessively checking teams messages, and work projects/assignments. down time during the work days are used for homework, but after 5 until night is strictly homework time. i often skip meals, most days barely getting enough nutrients to fuel myself, and is often highly disappointed and upset at myself for not being productive enough on school work. i hate it, i'm highly critical of my own performance, seeing my self-worth reflected only in my level of productivity and my on-trackness to graduation; i barely see the world outside aside from time spent commuting to and from work or solely for work purposes; i don't have time to see my friends, and I'm getting sick of only spending time at home that i become unreasonably agitated with my parents. i cry all the time and is always angry, frustrated, hopeless, disappointed, exhausted. i would go for a few days without showering and weeks without washing my hair because as soon as i shut off the computer, i'm too tired to take care of myself. i keep asking myself: who am i doing this for? i became resentful of my parents for immigrating and placing me into this predicament. they say i would have had no future if we had stayed in viet nam, that i am receiving world-class education because we got the opportunity to immigrate, but instructors of my so-called world-class education see my country of origin as nothing but a case study of an undeveloped country. i became resentful of my parents for not exposing me to the local vietnamese community and thwarted me into schools where vietnamese kids can be counted using ten fingers, and i am envious of my own students who have been able to participate in an immersion vietnamese dual language program since elementary school that my schools did not have. i became resentful of my parents for not being equipped with the academic language and familiarity with higher education to support me in school. i became resentful of my parents for telling my elementary school 14 years ago that i would go by the name Susan when i didn't choose that name for myself. in reality, these resentments are wrongly directed to them solely because i have no idea where i should be directing them. they did all that was within their ability to provide me a(n objectively) good/better future and protect me from persecution of american society. i often think about what life would have been like if i had stayed in viet nam, would i really have had no future? is my education really world-class when there is clearly an order of world-classness levels among universities and degrees? i resented my parents for not knowing enough about the convoluted reality of america that i, myself, barely have a grasp on it. and so i set my ill-directed resentments aside and abide by the hopes and dreams of all immigrant families: be a first-generation college graduate.

i still struggle to define where i fall in the Vietnamese-American spectrum. lately, i find myself feeling envious when i see tiktoks of vietnamese people living in viet nam, imagining them as myself, living in the sài gòn concrete jungle that i love, not in some neck of the woods in oregon. maybe that's why i love visiting nyc because its crampiness and vibrancy remind me of the home that i once knew. but the gap is too wide, i cannot be them anymore, i am too distanced from the country and the culture today, all i know about viet nam is left in 2010, anything beyond that is from the perspective of a visitor. all i could do now is come to terms with the fact that i am now a Vietnamese-American, living in diaspora and constantly searching for enclaves of my own culture for a reminder of my own identity. i fought so hard to be seen as Vietnamese-American the first 10 or so years of my life here, yet now i seem to strongly reject this identity. i am not Vietnamese enough for the people of my homeland, i am not american enough for America.

i don't have a conclusion to this giant free-write essay that i just conjured up - in fact, a conclusion is not necessary because this isn't the end. i'm not finished in this journey of self-identity and struggling to find my own self living in diaspora. maybe one day i'll have an answer, maybe one day everything will be much clearer to understand. maybe i could just turn all of these thoughts off and stop overanalyzing everything, but i can't. and so, i will continue to wrestle with these conflicting feelings, and perhaps, one day i will be Free.

-s

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