Parent is a Portal
reflections on family, cultural assimilation, and revolution
Winter hits so beautifully and heavily these longer nights have me thinking about the parent-child relationship and how it evolves into adulthood. Lately I’ve been talking on the phone with my Ba a lot, sometimes so he can spill some gossip and other times just to listen to him play synthesizers over the phone. Reflecting on the seasons - peaks and valleys of communication - how these waves impact the way see my race + ethnicity. You see, even though Vietnam is just a $2k flight, and I am Asian. The experiences with my Ba are often the ones that validate and uplift such parts of me. When you are a mixed race child and you don’t have access to homelands, the parent often becomes a vessel to the culture. There are times when I get to step into the portal with my parents - when I do I know I must live so vividly in the present because this is what I have right now. Banh mi at b&n with my ba is my portal to home. It is sizzling rice soup at pho anh while ba talks about his first dog. It is watching YouTube videos of street markets at full blast. It is burning your memory with the only pictures of your family from 1998.
Assimilation tells us to live and do everything alone. Independence is seen as success. It says come here to start a new life and forget your old one, forget your family. I grew up with an evangelical mother and Catholic father, practicing such religions are a big piece of assimilating to western culture. There are so many ways forced assimilation shows up in our lives - being forced to learn English, wearing goddamn tights when you need pants, being polite, being quiet, being nice, appearing nice even when your face doesn’t sit that way. And if you want to bring your family here the “right” way you’ll have to wait decades for paperwork to push through. It tells us to mix up everything we are into the fabric of American society or be treated like you are invisible.
THERE IS NO END
TO WHAT A LIVING WORLD
WILL DEMAND OF YOU
Earthseed: The Books of the Living I
Verse 21; Octavia Bulter, Parable of the Sower
Neocolonialism is a disease and it has ravaged through my family over many generations. As my father ages he has softened much more - coping with ptsd has become manageable. We talk about going together to visit Vietnam after he retires and it is all I can hope for. To step through another plane together. It feels very American of me to fantasize about a motherland - especially when I was born in Grand Rapids. Can I ever even claim Vietnam as home? What the fuck does that even mean? What does it mean when your closest source to the ‘motherland’ hasn’t been home in 28 years?
One night in a frantic state, I posted my woes on a Vietnamese Reddit thread, while I received some ideas and support one person just said, “I wish you luck” thank you but also ouch. They knew this is gonna be a journey for me and for my family. Upon reflection, witnessing this journey will be a dedication to small actions - finding my family, uncomfortable conversation, saving coin to travel, passport, learning Vietnamese, listening, being okay with words being lost in translation and layers of misinterpretation.
“Small is good, small is all.” — adrienne maree brown
I promise you the revolution will show up in the mundane, it will show up in the boring tasks, it will show up in the tasks that no one wants to do. YES Seriously this revolution is about the work not just performance - helping your trans friends move out of unsafe situations, it is helping your elders file their medicaid, or deep cleaning a bathroom or cleaning up shit because you care.
