NGUOI VIET - Musings about the term “Viet Kieu”

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Musings about the term “Viet Kieu”
July 15, 2004 By Andrew Lam

The scrawny street vendor in Saigon studies my eyes, my lips. “Brother,” he says, “yours is not a Vietnamese face. It’s a face that has not known suffering.” Then he adds through a sigh: “Had I escaped to America, maybe I too would have such a face – a Viet Keiu face.”

Viet Kieu literally means Vietnamese nationals living abroad. And when he returns to Vietnam, the Viet Kieu, especially if he’s from America, tends to serve as a romantic mirror in front of which his fellow countrymen measure their own lost potential.

And so, inevitably, in Vietnam my face and body take on mythological potential.

When a cousin proudly introduces me to a friend, someone who has tried a dozen times in vain to flee, the man promptly reaches over to squeeze my thigh. I have no doubt that his is an impersonal gesture. Visions of double-tiered freeways and glassy high rises are to be extracted out of the Viet Kieu’s flesh. Squeeze a little harder and, who knows, you might just see Disneyland.

At a dinner party thrown in my honor, people ask me to explain the intricacies of virtual reality, American foreign policy in the Middle East, and while I’m at it, genetic engineering.

Another party, my American passport is read like a comic book by my various relatives. As the entry and exit stamps of Greece, France, Mexico, Thailand, and a dozen other countries flutter past one cousin’s eyes, she looks up at me and declares dreamily: “Cousin, such happiness! It’s as if you have wings!”

Indeed, if in the last 3000 years or so it was generally understood that a Vietnamese soul is tied to home and hearth, in the last two decades a new idea has subverted the poetry of retrenchment: escape. In the decades that followed the end of the war, “vuot bien” – escape from Vietnam – has probably crossed every Vietnamese mind.

As it is, Vietnamese nationalism – that firebrand weapon that defeated the Chinese, Mongolians, French and Americans – seems to have withered from old age. While old Vietnamese leaders continue to emphasize the finer points of collective strength, involving memories of a war against invaders, the young of Vietnam have moved away from a parochial us-vs.-them mentality.

If Ho Chi Minh, the father of Vietnamese communism, once preached independence and freedom to his compatriots, today it’s the Viet Kieu, those like me and my family, persecuted by Ho’s followers and forced to escape overseas who, upon return, exude freedom and independence.

As a Viet Kieu, I am not just an individual, but to many an icon against hopelessness, a character who took the high-road and through whose life many can live vicariously.

Familiarity over the last few years may have diminished the glamour, but there is an expectation here that a Viet Kieu, were he willing to, can fulfill many an impoverished Vietnamese wish list.

I am mistaken on the streets of Saigon for Santa Claus. A 12-year-old street merchant named Tam nonchalantly asks if I might adopt him and send him to school.

A young woman named Phuong, her face deformed by a skin disease, begs for help. “Brother, you can perform a miracle: Pay for my operation.”

And how many times, I wonder, have complete strangers – custom officials, rickshaw drivers, shop owners, ex-Viet Cong guerillas – offered me their daughter’s hands in marriage?

In the old quarters of Hanoi, my aunt’s neighbor, a young piano teacher, has a crush on me. That I answered “Yes, I do like Chopin,” was clearly for her a declaration of romance. Chopin’s music in due course echoed for hours from next door, riding the humid air to my bedroom window.

In Vietnam as a child, I remember being moved by the national anthem that emphasized blood sacrifice to protect the sacred land. I remember feeling inspiration and awe staring at ripened rice fields at dusk. And I readily intuited why my mother placed my umbilical cord in an earthen jar and buried deep in our garden after I was born.

But that, as they say, was another life, long ago.

For me, as well as for many other Vietnamese of my generation, those birth ties were severed and our innocence died the day we crossed the ocean to the distant shores.

Returning today, a gap opens between my countrymen and me. If I am to them a modern day Odysseus, I feel as if a stranger in my own homeland, someone overwhelmed by a collective yearning in which he is it principle icon.

In Saigon, there was a movie called “People’s Love” made by a Vietnamese director about a Viet Kieu. In it, a Vietnamese American doctor, disillusioned with American life, returns home to find love and redemption. Such is the predicable sentimental script, funded by the state. It drew very few viewers.

I think the untold Vietnamese epic is closer to the reverse.

Our nation’s innocence died three decades ago with the birth of Viet Kieu. Vietnamese 21st century romance is not with land, but with cosmopolitan glamour and borderless life.

Still I can no more deny my own sense of displacement than can I deny my new role in the new Vietnamese imagination: No wings sprout from my back, I nonetheless have brought a boon back to my own homeland: myself. I am evidence that the outside world exists.

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