Post Vietnam

I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be just an average American again, floating through this world where people’s values are suddenly so foreign to me. My first day back I walked into a grocery store, then a shopping center and saw nothing worth having. Nothing about this world demonstrated any appreciation for the natural and cultural beauty that’s left an indelible imprint on my mind. Even driving in the car on the highway felt like an out-of-body experience. It’s not as if I didn’t ride in taxis in Vietnam; riding in a car certainly isn’t a uniquely American experience. Still, it had never occurred to me before, but in a car you can’t feel yourself moving. It’s stiff and sterile, as if you’re floating in space completely disconnected from the people moving alongside you. I want to see their faces, hear their exuberant chatter with the person riding with them, feel the brush of a silky audoi as the woman next to me heads off to work. Vietnamese traffic is its own life force. Even taxis are crammed in with masses of motorbikes, weaving in and out of them as part of the same entity. Here in America, everyone seems disconnected.

I can’t seem to adjust to the English language either. Of course I always spoke English while I was in Vietnam. In fact, it was sometimes a refuge in a country speaking a language I never quite got the hang of. But now that it’s all I hear, English sounds coarse and severe. I miss the musical quality of Vietnamese and in a way I miss not understanding everything that was said around me. True, understanding a language makes you more connected with the people who speak it, but not understanding makes you more connected with yourself. I feel somewhat selfish and hypocritical for saying, this given how I carry on about being a culture junkie and trying to bond with the people around me, but I miss the solitude too. When I couldn’t understand what was being said around me, I became much more introspective. I learned to rely on feelings instead of words, a skill I’m finding it hard to retrieve now that I’m back.

My head is filled with thoughts of Vietnam but I can’t seem to share my thoughts with anyone around me. I’m afraid I might bore them by talking about nothing but Vietnam, but I do have a willing audience so that can’t be the only problem. Perhaps I am still relying on feelings as I did in Vietnam, because now my words seem to fail me. Every time I start talking about something that happened in Vietnam, a memory passes through my mind. I try desperately to describe the memory using every sense I experienced it with, but I just end up rambling aimlessly like a kid who hasn’t learned how to effectively tell a story yet. All my memories seem pointless when I try to put them into words, but they’re still so vibrant in my head. I’m frustrated when I try to talk about my experiences, but listless when I don’t. I found myself in Vietnam but now I feel like I’ve lost part of that. My only consolation is that the part I lost is still there in Vietnam.

I still feel like I’m a part of Vietnam even though I’m not physically there anymore. If I try hard enough, I can still smell pho in the morning; I can still taste the basil and chili paste in that perfect instant right before the broth goes down your throat. I’ll open the window in the car and imagine I’m back on a motorbike in Saigon, with the wind blowing on my face and the hum of motorbikes around me. When I close my eyes, I still see mountains, deltas, gibbons, markets, Buddhist temples, and Van Anh eating snails. I left a piece of my soul in Vietnam and one of these days I’m going to have to go get it back…or join it.