Story of a return to the country of origin: how I reconnected with Vietnam and with my family history

I was born and have lived my whole life in the outskirts of Paris, in Seine-Saint-Denis. Around me, all the children were heirs of a different culture: all our families came “from elsewhere”, had their origins elsewhere.

In my maternal family, where I grew up, we were Asian. I always knew we were Vietnamese, of course, but no one had ever really told me about it. As in many immigrant families, there were unspoken things in our history. Family secrets, things we often find too difficult to tell children, even if they are important to know. Child, even though I knew it, I dared not ask questions. I did not want to disturb.

Growing questions about my identity

It was while growing up that I began to question my identity. As part of my university studies, I studied in a place where I was one of the few racialized people, one of the few to work alongside my studies, one of the only ones to come from the periphery … a lot of racist and class violence.

It was then that I realized it it was not the norm for everyone to have plural identities. To understand the racism I was experiencing, I started reading essays, and became interested in the decolonial question. The wretched of the earth by Frantz Fanon, which for me was a rather violent trigger, Césaire… I found in these books explanations on the mechanisms of violence that I have experienced and that I did not understand.

In all these writings, the Vietnam issue was recurring. I started to understand it the history of my country of origin was very painful, and that the way it was told in France, especially in history lessons, was very vague, and that it was told from the colonial point of view. So I read Vietnamese literature, I learned the history of Vietnam from the Vietnamese point of view.

And without knowing it, I read my family story. So I started asking questions.

How I rediscovered my family history

I lost my grandmother when I was very young and it was a deep wound for my family. Talking about Vietnam was talking about her and I knew it was very sad for those I interviewed. I felt a form of modesty, a little reluctance to reopen these doors. It is also surprising that all of this interests me.

I started by asking how my grandparents got to France, the reasons for their exile. It’s a building block of family life, yet I felt like my mother and her siblings had never talked about it with each other. As if we were rediscovering our history together.

From then on, they started joining “research teams” and dug up old photos and archives. Between the discovery of my grandfather’s notebooks and the stories of an aunt, we began to trace our history together. The joyful things, like the meeting with my grandfather and my grandmother, but also the traumas and the story of the war that tore apart so many families and completely shaped my trajectory.

At first, I felt a little guilty for shaking everything up when everyone seemed to be well settled in their lives, because no one had asked for anything. But in the end, I feel that it did us good to do it and that this work has brought us a lot closer. Find out what my ancestors lived, the power of these stories made me very proud to belong to this people.

My first return to Vietnam

At the same time, I started taking lessons in Vietnamese, a language I didn’t speak and my mother hadn’t taught me – at the time, parents were told not to speak a language other than French at home. I have found that words in this language have quite strong emotional implications.

When you are part of the Vietnamese diaspora, you don’t say “go” to Vietnam. We always say we come back, even for the first time. It is one of the first words I learned and it moved me a lot: Về.

After a few years, I began to think about my return. Oddly, I felt like I wasn’t ready, like I had to meet a number of conditions to be able to return to Vietnam. However, we are never ready to return to a country we have never been to.

In 2019, just before Covid, I flew with my boyfriend to Vietnam for the first time. It was messy, I was emotionally unstable and a little overwhelmed by everything going on around me. However, just being there allowed me to understand things: seeing how people behave, habits, body positions … I realized that certain ways of being in my family that weren’t French were common. in Vietnam, and that they were part of a culture that I had inherited without knowing it.

Discovering the country made me super happy, but I felt something strange. Whenever I didn’t understand when people spoke to me in Vietnamese, when I didn’t understand something there, I felt a kind of disappointment in myself, as if I noticed the extent of the shortcomings I felt, the extent of what was not transmitted to me.

I told myself “From now on I will compensate for everything. I will go to Vietnam every year “. I had also planned to go back alone, to live there for a while, in March 2020.

A few months later, the pandemic began.

I have experienced many upheavals during this time. I felt that we would never get out, that I might never return to Vietnam and, despite the sadness of my second trip being canceled, I said to myself: “I am lucky to still have my family around me, I can still continue to deepen my research from here. “

I continued to learn Vietnamese, putting myself fully in my classes to try to recover this language. I spent time with my family, I kept listening to the stories that make it up.

In this period of Covid-19, faced with the increase in asiophobia and the acceleration of violence against racialized people, I took refuge in many asiofeminist collectives and movements. It gave me a lot of strength.

Two years later, at the beginning of 2022 something happened, some sort of alignment of the planets that gave me a window of opportunity to return to Vietnam. I rushed into the breach and left for a few weeks.

My second return to Vietnam

This time I went alone and it had nothing to do with the first one. I was going to a place I knew, I was speaking Viet – which was very meaningful to me – it’s like I’m a new person!

This time I was ready. I no longer had expectations, I no longer had the feeling of “having” to do or be certain things, only the happiness of finding all this again. I started with a notebook, in which I had planned to draw everything I saw so that I could do it keep track of everything, for me and my family. I felt like it was super important, after all the unspoken.

The first time I went there, there were many holes in my family history. This time I had my full story, I had read many books and learned more about the history of the country.

I returned to the region of my grandparents, that of my family, and each place echoed a part of my story. It was like an initiatory journey in which I had the impression of being part of this history of Vietnam.

I was shocked to say to myself: “Now I’m alive and I’m here” thinking about my grandparents who had left the country without knowing it was a one-way trip. I thought of my grandfather, who was never able to go back until her death, my grandmother who could only return very late in her life, and my mother and her sisters, who only returned a few times in the 1970s. years.

Wanting to get back there as soon as possible, and with the same strength, is very specific to my generation. This feedback is important because it can be done consciously, peacefully, while understanding the weight of this possibility that the generations that preceded me did not have.

Because I decided to write a book

Walking everywhere, drawing everything I saw and heard, anchoring and tracing everything in my notebook, made me feel like I had materialized and curated something. I had the impression of rendering our history, of tracing it. It was very powerful.

My return to France was difficult and easy at the same time. Due to an accident I was immobilized at home: I did not resume my “normal” life. It’s like I’ve never come back from there. I was in my bubble, in my memories, in the analysis of what I had experienced.

It was there that the relatives saw my drawings and advised me to make a book of them. I have used this time alone to give substance to all these reflections, and the final point of this return is that it has given an object: Về, this word that designates the return and that had moved me so much, is the title of my book, which I self-published!

At first I thought above all of giving it to my family, to discuss it together, and that everyone had this object that represents all our discussions, all the things we have shared and of which I wanted to leave a trace.

But by showing my project to people from other diasporas, I found that my story resonated with them and that many people were interested in it.

So, I tell myself it might be interesting to open these discussions. I hope that all the people who will see this project pass, even those who don’t read it and don’t buy it, they will want to take an interest in their family, discover their stories, be proud of it.

This is what we all miss, generations later »Exile. A lack of transmission, of roots. So I wanted to convey this message: our identities are important, we must take care of them, transmit them.

Cover image: personal photograph provided by Mai