For winter break, my family dedicated a lot of money towards a 10 day Vietnam trip. Everyone was pretty excited for it, considering that most of my family hadn’t been back to Vietnam in years.
TD, TQ and my dad went a few days before my mom and I left since I had a few finals I needed to take before being able to go on break. It was a quick and seamless flight to LA, and then to Taiwan, and then to Saigon. I mostly slept on the way there. Because of time zones, we got there at 10am and my body wasn’t very accustomed to all the different time zones we had recently been in. The day we arrived my mom and I immediately met up with her cousins and went out for food. Very good food. I love Vietnam. After that we walked around the streets of our hotel for a while just so my mom and I could watch around. I’m not too sure what else we did that day, let me think. I do not remember.
That night, we met up with my dad and my sisters at the hotel and we settled in. There was a MiniStop(that corner store you see in the kdramas omg)underneath our building so we frequently bought snacks from there throughout the trip. The hotel itself was very nice, spacious and pretty clean, also a really great view from all the rooms.
Yknow this trip was about 3 months ago and I probably should’ve written this blog sooner so that my memories would be somewhat fresh, but that’s nearly impossible now because I’m #drawingablank on what we did in chronological order, so I’m just gonna go off the rails from here.
We met up with Di Mi and Di Ti quite a few times, and their kids. Very cute. Di Mi has her 2 daughters; Kiwi and Miki, and Di Ti has her 3 kids; Ken, Tiger, and Ruby. I actually have no idea what their real names are because Vietnamese names are a little confusing to me because why does one person have so many different names they go by? Anyways, we also met up with Angel’s sisters, Nghi and Diep, a lot too. One day, they took my sisters and I out for the day around the city. We went to the mall and a few shopping centers, bingsu, and this cute little DIY activity shop. One night they also took us and Kiwi and Miki to a dog/cat cafe which was the greatest thing ever. I am severely allergic to dogs and I was, in fact, a sneezing mess and by the we got home and I had to take 2 very aggressive showers one after the other to make it stop. But it was so worth it. The cats were very cute and there were just so many dogs. It was also pretty cool to hang out with family members that I barely ever saw. I got along with Nghi pretty well, as usual, it was a little awkward at first but when we had to sit next to each other in a car it all came back naturally.
It’s also pretty cool to see my mom back in her home country. She seems very comfortable and at peace there. It kinda dawned on me that these people were her cousins, in the same way that Nhi or Khang and Nam are my cousins. Except the difference is that my mom lives across the ocean from them, and I see my family relatively pretty often. My mom’s family is pretty lively and funny, I can tell how close she is with them despite being so physically far.
At the start of this semester, my English teacher had us write a short essay on an impactful moment in our lives that made us think differently about our lives. I wrote it about this trip. It’s not my first time in Vietnam but I think I will always remember it more because of how much older I am. In that short essay, I wrote about how I realized how much my mom had left behind when she moved to America. Driving through streets and seeing my mom point out where she had gone to school, the swimming pool she went to, her old house, I remembered how my mom had a life before I was born. In fact, it was kind of an epiphany. My mom has also been 15 years old, just like me, and she went to high school, and she went out with her friends too. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I understood how much of a role she had in my life, despite only knowing me for less than half her life. Here I was, in a foreign country where I had distant roots in, and my mom had just melted into the scenery. All the family members I met seemed like a tiny part of my mom’s personality, and I cannot imagine how she has to live so far from them. In the 10 days we were in Vietnam, I saw my mom come to life around her family, her childhood.
Yeah it was a pretty cool trip.
