Poor people are not invisible. They are there, on the streets, hustling and working, their bodies along with traffic, machines, motorbikes, streets under construction, they are the one still holding on to the invisible economy of small markets, producing and selling products they grow themselves, competing with more and more foreign-funded supermarkets growing with a fast pace all over the city. Middle class people like me just learned how to not look at them. I rode by so many people with clear markers of class without uttering a question in my mind - who are these people and what do they do to survive in this changing economy? Are the old occupations gone now? How do they invent new jobs? The old people of the older generations without technology skills and/or supposedly required skills to deal with the new economy, what kind of work could they do except disposable hard work? I don’t know. I learned not to ask questions about those I came across everyday. Like the security man sitting outside my neighborhood, his whole job was to memorize people’s face and open the gate for residents when a car needs to come in or out. I don’t talk to him, I see his face every day and nod my head to say hi to him, but I don’t know his name and I don’t remember his face. And it didn’t make me feel uneasy. I learned not to see people like him.
2. Everytime I go back to Vietnam, I see something new. A bridge, a new street, a highway, new buildings, Starbuck, foreign money, white ex-pats. I turned on those social media outlets and online dating apps and the faces and names become more and more like when I was back in the state. It is a sense of familiarity and alienation at the same time. This is what globalization looks like. Space, time, economy, boundaries become integrated, yet some bodies become more and more invisible, non-existent. If I rely on the internet and the representation of mainstream media to learn about who is occupying my country I’d not see the faces that I ignore while on the street. I imagine I’d feel like I’m still at San Diego. And that somehow makes me a little bit suffocated.
3. Nobody tells you that the longer you stay in another country the more you become grounded in who you are - because you get to walk in between the fine line of space, time, culture, social, and get to choose whatever you think fits well with your world. But nobody tells you that it will be hard for you to fall back with your eyes closed. You don’t know where you belong anymore. Freedom is a house without a roof or a ground. You will have to fly for the rest of your life. You talk to those with their feet stuck on the ground and they don’t understand why you need to fly. You talk to those who fly elsewhere just to put their feet down and they don’t understand why you don’t do the same. But you couldn’t, because you have left the ground and you couldn’t imagine give up flying, even when it’s lonely, it’s painful, laborious, and tiring. You do it anyway - while looking back at those who look up at you with confusion on their faces.
4. My voice doesn’t belong to me anymore. One of my friends said that I sound funnier and wittier in English. I don’t know what that means - I’m just speaking as who I am, but somehow there’s that distinction between the person who presents herself in English and the original body whose cultural and social practices have been put under erasure. That’s disturbing. I didn’t sign up for conscious schizophrenic doubling. It doesn’t matter - the way I speak Vietnamese now reminds me of who I was and what I forwent. It rings in my consciousness a kind of memory that haunts me and all of the confusion of a 22 year old girl who hates being herself yet love herself to the point she will follow through till the end to see who she is capable of becoming. I wish living is easier with your heart finally open to all the possibilities of love and failure. But here I am wondering what life could have been and what it could be, and where I will be at ten years from now. Do I still have the same questions, or somehow the answers will take me over.
