.png)
Lost in Origin
- Sarah Tran Nhu An Myers
- Aug 12
- 7 min read
TW: contains topics on abuse and suicidal thoughts
Growing up, my mother put out bamboo on the kitchen counter for the second new moon of each year. She collected them more like a hoarding habit than a festive celebration. They would line the blue marble-patterned counter as she cooked chả giò for us to eat. Making those egg rolls was one of the sole Vietnamese endeavors that I shared with my mother. There weren’t many Vietnamese people in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, so I didn’t have many opportunities to do anything like that, if at all, except with her.
When Lunar New Year came around, our Vietnamese family friends would hand us red envelopes, before quickly telling us to go play as we each pulled out one or two dollars from each one. If I was in Fremont at my bà ngoại’s house, my grandmother would hand all of the kids younger than ten, the same little red envelopes decorated with ornate gold ink. Each time someone who looked Vietnamese gave me an envelope, I felt as though I was being invited to celebrate the holiday, too.
Yes, technically it is also my holiday. At least, Americans even think so. One person even once told me, “Happy New Year!” during the 2024 Lunar New Year. But it’s been twenty years since I stopped celebrating with my family when I was a teenager.
“Thanks…” I would say. Yet my first reaction was to confess, “Oh, it’s not really a happy New Year for me, I just celebrate it because my family celebrates it.”
In my mind, I imagine my relatives, mother, and cousins sitting at a table full of Vietnamese and East Asian cuisine, maybe even eating hot pot with their social circle. As for me, I am the only one who is half white.
As a child, I would accompany my mother to the one little Asian grocery store on the strip within the Chinatown of St. Louis. I’d poke sticks at the live crabs in the open containers near the entryway. I’d watch the lobsters try to climb their way up the glass walls. I’d take in the cracking tiles as a sign that I was at home. The flickering fluorescent lights and the dirty sea meat containers with the heavy fish smell would remind me that these were my people. This was part of the world I identified with Mom, even if it was only half of who I was. There was imperfection, live-action slaughtering, and Pocky sticks.
An experience tends not to segregate a whole person. A split is typically only interpreted internally.
My family, and even the Vietnamese student groups in college, didn’t treat me any differently for being white. Any sense of alienation I have felt has been more self-imposed.
When I look in the mirror, I can tell that I am much paler than they are. I don’t have the same Asian features entirely, but my mother tells me that I get her olive-toned skin coloring from her, whereas the rest of our relatives have tanner, darker features.
When I tell people I am half Vietnamese, they are often surprised. “I couldn’t tell at all!” they exclaim.
This comes from any person of any race, unless they are also part, if not all, Asian. However after I say it, they usually squint their eyes at me and tell me that they can now kind of see it. But there are many people who say they can’t.
When I was seventeen, I ran away from home. I escaped the house because of my mother and as a result, I barely speak with her today. The stereotypical Tiger Mother parenting was what people thought was going on, and it was also the excuse I relied on when I couldn’t find the words for the other things. Just an Asian thing that I could sweep under the rug, I thought. It needed no further clarification.
As an adult, however, I visited her at her house more after my parents divorced. When visiting, she roamed the house like a king, with diamonds from Costco on her neck, while checking on her whole raw chicken that she left overnight in the sink to thaw. I don’t remember her seeing her in any other clothes aside from her pajamas or large, oversized sweats–in or out of the house, even with the diamonds.
Standing at four feet eleven inches, she was always an oxymoron to people. How can someone that short, cute, and Asian, be so horrible? That’s not something I can make people see. It was always the Asian part that people were most fixated on. She’s just a cute little old Asian woman. Yes, I thought. But people can be anything, regardless of their race, age and appearance.
When I was 28, I relocated to New York City for a graduate program. While here, I have been reflecting on my relationships with her, being surrounded by the abundance of cultural diversity. In February of 2024, I decided to call my mother and try to learn more about her.
“What was it like in Vietnam?” I asked.
“Honey, it was a war! We have a chicken coop inside the house!”
“What do you mean… like the chickens were raised in the living room?”
“Yes. My mom built it.”
“Did you have to hide from bombs? See dead bodies or anything like that?”
“Yes of course! We have to run away from them, so we go to the church or we go to my uncle house.”
As the interview continued, I had flashbacks to when I was a child, running away as she chased me into my father’s study. She would yell at me, telling me to study and stop watching TV. The sound of her plastic weapon, which she used to beat me with, hitting the walls and furniture, echoed in my ears alongside her tight and focused disciplinary demeanor. The only refuge I found was my white father’s study, the parent who showed me the most love.
The effects of strict parenting weren’t apparent to me until I began missing school 25% of the time during middle school.
Instead of school, I would lie in bed and cry. No amount of my mother standing at the foot of my bed yelling at me to get up, work hard, and drink more water would get me to go. My father, being more kind-hearted, would call in sick for me. It was also he who began taking me to a therapist.
But my mother refused. “Nothing is wrong with her!” she would say. And yet, I talked to my therapist about how my mother made me want to kill myself so much, that one day, the counselor said that she would need to take me to the psychiatric hospital immediately, otherwise she was going to call Child Protection Services.
It was during this time that my mother stopped talking to me in Vietnamese. It was then that I began to lose the language of my second native tongue.
Thirteen years later, I had the opportunity to clarify in English, even if broken.
“Mom… I have to ask… do you hear voices other people don’t?” I asked. She laughed. Pause.
“Everyone hear that!” she said. “But if you think about it, it happen. If you don’t think about it, it doesn’t happen.”
“Do you think I have mental health issues?” I asked her.
She laughed again. “Nope,” she said. “I don’t want to say what I really think because this is why me and your dad fighting when you were young. I don’t think you have it, but I don’t want to fight anymore.”
I put the phone down relieved that after twenty years, we had made at least some kind of peace pact.
Recently when revisiting a Vietnamese Boat People podcast episode, I discovered that I might not be as alone as I think. The episode in mind details the journey of Philip, a son of two Vietnamese Boat People, who grew up in less-than-ideal situations, made friends with primarily Black students, and resented his parents for “not being there”. I can only imagine that “not being there” surely did not scratch the surface.
He ended up being deployed to Afghanistan, quickly realizing that war was something that he and his parents now had in common. He started to view them in a new light. I have a feeling that he likely has the same dilemma as I do, about how to honor our families and respect our heritage, while also maintaining our side of pain as first-generation Americans raised by those same people.
I don’t know if it’s easier for either of us in our different ethnic appearances. Maybe it’s an unspoken thing that any mixed or whole person of Vietnamese heritage has to live with until we find words for things we didn’t understand. For things that existed in our lives far beyond the time we were even born. It is a shame that the only experiences I remember most with my mother were those of egg rolls and abuse. I know there is more to Vietnamese culture than that, but in my mind, the two are so intertwined, and the abuse made me less willing to seek out more forms of my heritage until I got much older.
But now, I see that America is in a moment where we are just starting to reveal what it is like for families of non-white backgrounds, and discovering what that might mean for me.
Today, when I go to Chinatown in New York City to shop for groceries, I try to ask the Vietnamese ladies for bốn mangoes, please. Four. The woman behind the stand usually seems to be an immigrant who doesn’t speak any English. She likely speaks less English than my mother. She smiles and laughs at me, understanding, sure, but also not quite knowing what I am saying. She avoids making long eye contact, her black hair is pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck, and her hands move with purpose as she gathers my fruit into a plastic bag. I keep looking at her, hoping to share at least a second’s worth of eye contact.
Perhaps I can share a moment with her. She doesn’t welcome me the same way my family used to. She doesn’t immediately feel comfortable, I can tell. But one day, I want to be comfortable with her.
Sarah is a Vietnamese American through her mother's side. Her family fled the war in 1975. Sarah is a writer focusing on the intersection of mental health, spirituality, and cultural heritage.
Comments