bad metaphor

Little baby Aria, shown with her favorite auntie.

My sister, doing her part to improve upon the family genetic strain.

She makes these tough little power fists when she’s hungry.

Raspberry smiles.

Between my parents, I never imagined that it would be my mother who would first make the generational jump and join Facebook.

This is the woman so utterly defeated by email that I didn’t think she’d recover. Last Christmas, I bought her a shiny new (well, new to her) iMac and tried to train her how to use it, but she would repeatedly insist that she was too sleepy and would rather go watch the pirated DVDs she rents from the local video store instead. I’ve burned her mix CDs before (replete with Mom-friendly music, of course), to find out later that she has recorded these CDs onto tapes using her early 1990′s boombox. She’ll record songs she particularly likes twice or even three times in a row, so she won’t have to rewind.

I had given up on the idea of my mother abandoning her Luddite ways. “On the bright side, she’ll surely never join Facebook and see the X number of photos of me with a beer or a wine or ten in the vicinity.”

And even when I saw that my Aunt Rosie had joined facebook, I was not concerned because she’s the most tech-savvy of our aunts. She would try to talk the other aunties into buying DDR, for instance, because it was “a good workout.” And the other aunties would nod sagely and return to gossiping about us kids.

Then today, my sister hits me with the absolutely shocking news: Mom has somehow stumbled onto Facebook, and has created an account.

My first reaction was to rush to my profile page and de-tag frantically. After a good few minutes of this, which resulted in Facebook crashing for me and refusing to cooperate (damnable evidence, I bid thee SINK into the ocean), I had my second reaction: “wait a minute, why hasn’t she friended me yet?”

As a matter of fact, none of my other aunties have friended me, either. I could friend them, I suppose, but I’d rather not as I’m not sure I want to really reveal my life to my whole extended family and whatnot. Not that I am ashamed of how I live, or that I have photos of me shooting up in a ditch or something. In fact my photos are super tame and actually kind of boring. I’m just not really quite ready to reveal much about my life to my own family for some reason. I guess in some odd way I am more comfortable with complete strangers knowing the thoughts rattling around in my head than family members or even some of my friends. I was definitely impressed when krissy, for instance, related chatting about her PMS cramps with her father. Oh my god. I can’t even imagine talking about Aunt Flo with dad, and I am twenty-six. I have to leave the room even at the thought of it!

“Hmm,” said my sister, “maybe she tried to friend the other ‘karenology’.” It turns out that my sister has a friend who has the exact same name as me, and it is a little weird when I look at her profile and see a comment that really does not sound like anything I would ever say, and I go “whoa, has my account been hacked?” and then I remember that it is bizarro me.

“Phew,” said I, “That must be it. Bizarro karenology is totally taking the hit for me, and befriending my newly Facebooking aunties and mom.”

Now if this is the case – I guess I should be slightly annoyed that my family members don’t know what I look like well enough to realize that I don’t look a thing like Bizarro karenology – “hello, don’t you know what I look like? Also haven’t you learned by now that your own daughter never wears make up and dresses like a broke college student?”

But maybe this is a good thing. BK is apparently quite the shopping enthusiast, fashion plate and Asian club princess. Closer to the kind of good, normal Asian daughter that my parents want me to be. No distressing politics links or rants about the anti-abortion posters on our campus or beer or anything uncomfortable. Well, I don’t know that for sure, since BK’s profile is not public. Maybe she posts that kind of stuff too, which would be cool – and a little creepy, too. There can only be ONE!

Woke up early, whether due to jet lag, or maybe my body has become accustomed to sleeping in cramped seats on planes, trains, taxis, subways – and isn’t able to fall asleep that well on such a soft, luxuriously pillowy king-sized mattress (a surprise and extremely generous gift from our roommate while E and I were away). Or maybe somehow, I can still hear the call of my aunt’s neighbor’s rooster: a triumphal annunciation of dawn in Saigon, taking twelve hours to float across the ocean to wake me up at precisely six in the morning here in Kansas. Whatever the reason, I got out of bed and got onto a bicycle seat, riding along the river, trying to sort in my head all the places I’ve been.

Japan, with its fastidious attention to detail: nothing is left to chance there, not even the unfurling of tree limbs. Korea, flocked with duck-billed visor bearing women, vigilantly shielding their faces from the sun in an attempt to preserve their beauty (and ironically enough, looking awfully silly in the process). I think of all the countries, I had the toughest time in Vietnam – not just because I have the language capacities of a two year old (and a particularly slow one at that), nor simply because like a slow two-year old, I couldn’t cross the street without holding my aunt by the hand. It was in Vietnam that I had to deal with conflicting loyalties and identities. Here I could blend in, certainly better than E, who got the devil’s eye from an elderly woman in a market (who possibly took offense at his devil-colored hair) – but never fully. Even before I’d open my mouth to reveal my poor command of Vietnamese, my plumper frame and general look of wide-eyed cluelessness identifies me as foreigner, and I’d get stuck with the foreigner price. Vietnam is freshest in my mind, so I’ll begin recounting my days there – even though my journey actually started on the gaudy, noisy streets of Shinjuku.

Vietnam has price differentials – if you’re a foreigner, expect to get charged more than locals. This puts off a lot of tourists, including some of our friends who visited recently and got really tired of getting ripped off all the time. After awhile, though, I concluded that this is not because Vietnamese people hate foreigners or anything (although some might, like that old lady in the market). It’s not so much that they’re gouging foreigners, as they are helping themselves. First: Vietnam is still a third world country, in the process of rapid expansion, but getting a late start because of decades of ravaging war. So people are still very, very poor. Second: Vietnamese are extremely loyal to their kindred. Whenever possible, they’ll cut deals or try to go easy on their fellow countrymen, who they know probably need the help. Foreigners (and plump Vietnamese-Americans who can’t even speak the language) are probably rich and therefore don’t need the local “discounts.”

Every now and then I wondered how my life would have turned out had, instead of being born in the States, I grew up here. If my parents hadn’t traded rice paddies for wheat fields as scenery. If I grew up eating fresh mang cut every day, knew instinctively the proper pedestrian technique for avoiding death by herd of motorcycles, donned a face mask to shield my lower chin from sun-induced darkness. If there hadn’t been a terrible, protracted war that forced my parents to abandon their beloved homeland. If twenty million gallons of Agent Orange hadn’t been dumped onto this land, melting Viet Cong-shielding leaves from trees, skin from bones. As I toured the War Remnants Museum, looking at the photographs of the devastation inflicted upon my parents’ country by my own, the thought came to my mind: gosh, what if my family had been fighting for the wrong side?

But then, my family and other South Vietnamese suffered at the hands of their brethren up north. My uncle, much beloved by his sisters and mother, was shot by Viet Cong while serving an extended tour of duty (he re-enlisted to protect his younger brother from having to serve). I remember my dad’s voice, choked with rarely displayed emotion as he declared he’d kiss the soil, once the people responsible for wreaking utter devastation upon his hometown were brought to justice for their crimes.

I must stop here, because I don’t mean to make my vacation to Vietnam sound like a constant angst-fest. I had a wonderful time, eating the freshest, ripest, sweetest fruit – fruit whose paler, less flavorful cousins might be accessible to you in the States if you’re lucky – and spending time with dear old Auntie Needles, who doted on me like I was her daughter for the week. She’s the sweetest auntie one could hope for, and now it seems silly to me that I was so afraid of her as a wee lass – though, witnessing some of the ire she directed at cab drivers and waitresses, maybe I could see why a ten year old would fear her. For her part, she was ecstatic that I had made the trek to visit her, pinched my cheeks red in the manner of doting aunties, was endlessly patient with my bad Vietnamese and E’s culinary pickiness, and went to great lengths to make sure we had an amazing time there. I’ll miss having an Auntie Needles around to guide me through traffic and yell at taxi drivers!

More to come later, and as soon as I find my card reader for my camera, photos.

As I mentioned in my last post, pretty soon E and I are going to be hopping the pond (that other one, filled with tsunamis and shit) to visit Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Though we’ve both kind of vaguely wanted to go on an Asia trip before this – even so far as considering teaching in Korea for a year, like all our other peers who don’t know what to do with their lives – our reasons for going now are twofold. 1) E is turning 30 soon and doesn’t want to officially turn “old” in the states and 2) we actually do have a number of friends who are teaching in Japan and Korea, and I have a battalion’s worth of aunties stationed in Vietnam. We won’t always have free housing and tour guides available in the places where we want to go, so we decided we needed to take advantage of these soon.

Now, for some odd reason, the “Vietnam” portion of the trip is making me the most nervous. Perhaps it’s because my Vietnamese is embarrassingly poor. I…well, I know the names of dishes my mom makes that I like. I can also say “sorry,” which will probably come in very handy. After that, I’m bracing for a chorus of “không biet nói Tieng Viet* Ha ha ha!!” Yeah, whatever, um, just put me and my boyfriend up for the night, mmm kay?

Maybe another reason is the traffic in Saigon:

Yeah. Um. If that’s how it’s going to be, I’m probably not going to see much of Saigon, beyond a narrow city block around the airport!

For awhile I was actually kind of reluctant to tell my parents that I was going. I’m not sure why, beyond just this vague apprehension of offending my father, who has offered to take me to Vietnam in the past year. I eventually told him, and then my mother, and from both parents I was kind of met by this…silence. I don’t know if it was shock or surprise that I wanted to go on my own, or what. I told my sister about this reaction.

“Well, I don’t know about Dad,” she said, “but I think Mom is worried you’re going to get kidnapped.”

What?! Oh, that’s right, it’s just my reliably paranoid mom. Apparently since I don’t speak the language, that makes me ripe for kidnapping. I have the intelligence and street smarts of a four year old, see, and I would just willingly climb into the back of a car with anyone, even if I didn’t understand what they were saying! My sister has been suggesting a trip to Vietnam for years, and my mother’s always put it off, claiming to be too busy. But since I’ve told Mom of my plans, she has started seriously thinking about using her minimal vacation time to come visit when I am there.
I’m touched and would actually be really thrilled about having my mom there, to show me around and stuff – but they just cut her hours at work! And she’ll have a grandbaby to come visit soon, as well! I can’t help but think of what Suze Orman would say.

And then there was the issue of telling one of the aunties, who we’d be staying with. For the longest time I hesitated about contacting this auntie, who I’ll call Auntie Needles because she taught me sewing lessons when I was little. I learned how to sew by making traditional Vietnamese style dresses for my troll doll. Back then she was known as the sternest of the aunties, and my cousins and I were a little scared of her. Sloppy hems and other transgressions were met with sharp scolding. But in retrospect, all that scolding resulted in what was probably the most well-dressed troll doll, ever. And when Auntie Needles tired of America and went back home to Vietnam, something changed in her demeanor – she relaxed, laughed, and seemed delighted even to have us noisy kids running around!

I haven’t seen this auntie since I was ten, so I really have no idea if she’s relapsed to her grumpy auntie ways. Or if she’d be happy to see me, or annoyed that this random stranger-like niece was contacting her out of the blue, to crash on her couch. Or if she even remembered English – hell, my Vietnamese has vastly deteriorated since I last spoke to her.

Our departure date for Japan is coming up very rapidly, so I finally got off my duff and emailed her. If she was going to be slightly annoyed at me trying to bum her couch, then it would follow that she’d be REALLY annoyed if I did so without advance notice.

Here was her response:

welcome you and your boyfriend,very happy.Ok you stay with me and uncle My .we are ready everything for you…I love you and hope see you soon

She’s family. Of course she’d welcome me! Sometimes it’s easy to forget, the way we live here in the states, drifting apart on our own little islands.

Still, I’m a little nervous about my upcoming reunion with Auntie Needles. I kind of wish I still had that troll doll.

*Translation: “you don’t know how to speak Vietnamese?” The one phrase I will never forget, as I’ve had it barked at me by disapproving relatives all my life. I had no idea how to write that, by the way, and am just guessing using an online translator.