Nhà của Đặng Minh Hạnh (Đặng Minh Hạnh’s home)

“How do you say your name?”

“Đặng Minh Hạnh”

“Wait what?”

A question that has been answered too many times and an answer that has been questioned too many times. An inquiry that would make me shift uneasily from side to side as the inquirer eyes me with intensity. How much can a Vietnamese person take when someone says “Ni hao” to them? How much can a Vietnamese person take when someone passes by and says “Happy Chinese New Year”? How much can a person supposed to take when entering a foreign country with indistinguishable features from a neighbouring nation? These questions never really occurred to me until stepping foot in America, the land of diversity. It made me question my identity of who I was and where I came from. Identity home has always been Hanoi, Vietnam to me, but if I can’t bring myself to say my native name, do I really deserve to call it home?

I’m a firm believer that real sense of home is within yourself. If you cannot feel home in your own body, you will struggle to find a home for your body. It has taken me an extensive span of time to make myself at home in my own skin, and I am still working on it every time, everyday.

When an American child (or even an adult) sees me and speaks Chinese, my heart drops involuntarily. It takes a deep breath for me to turn around and clarify that I was from Vietnam. You see, I am proud of my home, and like a mom who’s proud of her cleanly mopped house. I want people to come, to visit my home, and allow me to show them around, but somehow, someway people always get lost on their way, intentionally or unintentionally. So after justifying myself, there’s always the expected awkward pause of shame from the opponent that followed with me laughing it off because so many people have made the same mistake. It doesn’t hurt any less though.

I will shamefully admit that I’ve always taken Vietnamese for granted. Learning English at a young age, I had the advantage of avoiding the usage of my native tongue. I sugarcoat it with a fluent English accent, never tasted the bitterness of my family’s effort when they first taught me how to speak,  never rolled the tongue into what should be familiar tones. As a result, I ended up being more comfortable using English than Vietnamese. My tongue was more comfortable rolling off the word “Mom” rather than “Mẹ” to the Vietnamese woman who had given birth to me on this land and had raised me to be a dutiful Vietnamese daughter, well she tried. I turned out to be a rebellious daughter who can’t speak a coherent Vietnamese sentence that happens to be in a very accepting family who haven’t kicked me out yet. I wonder if you can imagine surrounded by what’s familiar to you: from people to culture to scenaries, and feeling like drowning. It’s scary.

For the sake of this essay, I could make up a story about how I’ve found home and learned to appreciate my native language and how it tastes on my tongue. But I don’t. I still feel the artificial sugar melting on the tip of my tongue and dissolving in my mouth. Like a child I refuse to stop feeding myself more sweets and gnaw until I forget what bitterness taste like and everything becomes numb. But I’m so ashamed of it that I keep my mouth closed all time to stop the bittersweet from dripping out like a forbidden poison. Home is somewhere I do not know. Home is somewhere I still struggle to find. That is fine though, it might be challenging for me to find home, but when I do, it will be worth it. Vietnamese, afterall, is a beautiful and complex language that only if you’ve been speaking it since you were born, you can fully understand the beauty of each word. English is the cab I take for shortcut, when all along, I should’ve been walking on my bare feet, just like my ancestors.