An article I wrote for Doanh Nhân Sài Gòn Cuối Tuần, a Vietnamese magazine:
The proverbial glass remains half full and half empty depending on your perspective, but after my first five months of living in Vietnam, I have noticed that my glass always ends up finished; emptied of the coffee, beer, or nectar that was there hours ago. It is an extinguishing effort that paradoxically always fuels creation. Perhaps, this is not unique to just this country, but it is an undeniable essence of it. Killing time by nursing a glass of refreshment is a communal endeavor and even if work goes unmentioned in these gatherings, the task of camaraderie building is always progressed.
As one who harbors Vietnamese heritage yet has grown afar from home, the lens in which I observe Vietnam is unique. It is not with a sense of cultural distance that lingers in most foreigners, and it is not with the cultural familiarity of those who have grown up here, it is a tri-focal perspective that one might get looking through a stack of broken glass shards.
I have not looked through a stack of broken glass shards, but I have visited many temples throughout Vietnam. They range in size and location, from a mountain top cave temple called the Perfumed Pagoda to a lakeside temple call Truc Lam in my current home of Da Lat; they each are unique and similar in how they shine with the energy of their environments. A feature that I am utterly amazed by is the usage of broken glass.
A glass bottle or a porcelain bowl smashed is essentially ridden of its function as a container and left on the ground with freshly exposed edges it serves as a danger to all those around. At the temples, these shards are rebirth as the brilliant mosaic of colors and overall luster of the pillars and statues. It is this regenerative spirit that I see when looking up at the shard skin of a thirty feet high dragon statue, and it is this same regenerative spirit I sense when looking down at my cup of coffee surrounded by the friends I have made.
Sitting around a plastic table, it is often the content of our glasses that facilitates the conversations. Coffee will induce talks of the weather, work, and random thoughts. Beer will conjure talks of soccer games, shared memories, and random jokes. Nectar will inspire talks of fruits and earth. On this particularly cold Da Lat morning, we talked about the New Year.
This will be my first Tet in Vietnam, and I'm unprepared, anxious, and worried. The Lunar New Year is celebrated in America, but with a lack of zest. Often, if the New Year Eve were to fall on a workday, I would find myself at work. On those occasions, I fought the traffic to drive hours back home to visit my family for dinner. The children then wished our parents the happiest and healthiest of New Year, received our Ly Si, wished them a good night, and drive back to our lives for the start of the next workday. On the rare occasions that the New Year fell on a weekend, we had three days and celebrated with a large family gathering. The gatherings often ended with the family huddled around the television to watch the Chinese New Year's Parade in Chinatown. Needless to say, but I did anyways to my friend after two cups of coffee, that this year: “Tet will be very different for me.”
I wish to express to my grandparents how much this means to me, how grateful I am to have this one year out of the twenty-eights years of my life to be standing (arms-folded)in our family home to wish them the very best for this incoming new year out of the 87 years they have already lived. I have replayed the scenario in my mind many times, and each time, I saw myself crying, unable to finish saying what I want to say, knowing that many years have already passed before we will have this moment. And when the tears arise, I will see in the soft glaze, the same regenerative shine of the broken shards. Like those pieces, our family ties have been scattered, but like the scales of a dragon that the pieces are now, I truly believe and sincerely hope that our ties can grow again.
As the New Year nears, I find myself in Vietnam, sitting at a café with an empty cup nearby, thinking. The New Year, might be just another lunar cycle around the same spinning earth, circling around the same sun, but what a wonderful familiar bunch of circles it is. We welcome the newness of the year by wishing the same prosperity we have always wished for those we love. We hope for the best, and we pick up the pieces that have always been there.
Happy, healthy, wonderfully motivated new year to all my friends!
