Home for the holidays. For my students at least.
For me, 37 years ago, I was feeling on edge. One-way with no return.
Yet, it has been possible for me to return and work here in Vietnam. To see students prepared for studying abroad. But their leaving has a promise of a return (two-way).
Many are leaving for home on this long holiday. Home where we all leave 0ur hearts behind.
If I had known there would someday be a return, I wouldn’t have cried so much. I wouldn’t have turned my back on mother’s land and mother’s tongue.
I wouldn’t have wasted my time taking classes on tangent subjects such as Buddhism in America (Summer) or Radio production (required).
My degree in media was hardly put to use. Now Social Media is taking over.
New generation, new ways to connect.
Oh well. I wouldn’t have taken my heart with me on that fateful trip to America aboard the USS ship.
I would have left my heart behind.
I wouldn’t have short-changed my heritage for bad attitude under the euphemism called assertiveness training.
I would have preserved my core values e.g. filial son of Vietnam. Ironically, I can now reclaim this, only after my parents were buried in Virginia and I, am still alive, in Vietnam. Should have been the other way around. They would have preferred it that way. So while in Vietnam, I miss Virginia. And vice versa. It is to show that the heart is least understood and most abused.
How do I know this? Seeing young people rushing home, while I as an expat got no place to go.
That’s why I know. That’s how I feel. Odd ball on the dance floor. You can travel the thousands miles, but can’t do much with the heart with a fix on a certain place, person and period. That’s what makes us human. That we miss something or someone. To the point of dying for it. Or feel like it in its absence. I guess that’s what I did some three and a half decade ago: leaving my heart behind on that dock no 5 of the Saigon River.