12/24/07

I’m sitting at Kansai Airport in front of my departure gate, waiting to board the airplane that takes me to Saigon. Had spent the previous two days wandering around Osaka with friends, so it’s strange to suddenly be alone, not knowing what to anticipate from this point onward. I know little about my uncle’s family or how they even look. My aunt, his wife, told me over the phone during the only conversation I’d ever had with her that they made a sign with my name written in green. Do you know your cousin Hoài? You’re uncle is the older mirror image, she tells me. He’ll hold the sign. Ah, OK, I say. The two parts should be enough to find you.

There’s over an hour before the plane’s scheduled boarding, so I kill some time rummaging through my backpack, fingering my ticket, flipping through books and papers brought along for such occasions. I eyeball the few other people sitting and wandering around, noticing in particular a woman with long blondish-dyed hair wearing a short gray faux fur coat, a miniskirt, and thigh high boots with spiky heels. She swings her hips a little as she passes by. All poise atop those tiny heels. A personality profile instantly whizzes through my head, admittedly not so flattering, but I stop my judgments there remembering my own frumpy librarian getup. We’re just totally different people.

The woman picks a seat right next to me and puts down her bag.

As she settles in her chair, I straighten myself and look up at her to offer a polite smile. She smiles in return.

“Bietonamujin desu ka?” she asks. This is the first time in ages I’ve not been immediately Japanese to someone. I nod. Judging by her amused expression, I must also look a little surprised, and she then says, “Chị có biết nói tiến việt không?”

I reply that, yes, I can speak some, brokenly.

She tells me this is her first flight back since leaving Vietnam for Japan over seven years ago when she traveled abroad to find work. It’s also her first time going on an airplane by herself, and she’s a bit nervous. I go, hmm. Then I try telling her that it’s quite a brave thing to do. This seems to make her feel better. She asks me if I’m flying on my own, my reasons for doing so, and then my reasons for being in Japan, so I explain it all as best I can with my grab bag of Viet vocabulary unaided by English inserts, wondering if the pasted together phrases actually make any sense. She absorbs my responses with nods and smiles; she fidgets and I can tell she’s rather antsy to get on the plane soon, but her eyes show she’s tuned in and genuinely eager to process my efforts at speech. We ask each other’s ages. It turns out we’re only a year apart. The discovery seems to cement things.

Over the next hour we exchange descriptions of our families, places to see, friends we’ve made. She laments her own broken Vietnamese, though for all I can tell it sounds far from bad, and I just keep letting thoughts run freely out of own my mouth in all their awkward construction. It’s been a while since someone’s made it this comfortable to try talking.

I finally ask her name. She says it’s Phuong. She shows me the Japanese version of it, something that reads closer to “Fong,” and we compare how Japan and America transform our country’s lovely, meaningful Vietnamese names into phonetic disasters. The boarding announcement finally interrupts.

After I find my seat on the plane, I wave to her as she continues down the aisle to a seat further back, telling her that maybe I’ll catch her after we land. She says, OK, I’ll talk to you then.

It’s the last we get to see of each other.

***

Onflight, I watch a TV news story about Pocket Film– films made on cellphones.

***

My aunt is right: my uncle looks just like my cousin. I catch a glimpse of the older Hoài with the sign with green writing waiting in front of the terminal crowd, and suddenly everything’s turned out okay.

***

First impression of Saigon streets on Christmas Eve – whoa, this place is nuts. Crotch rockets everywhere. The taxi swims slowly through the flood of people on bikes, honking and somehow maneuvering without hitting anyone. The amount of store fronts and signs around us feel endless. I tell my aunt that this place looks a lot like Bangkok, just maybe denser and a little dirtier and perhaps far less orderly. All this chaos definitely looks not like Japan. Can’t believe I’ve finally made it here.

We arrive home and my Vietnam relatives immediately give me the special guest treatment. They are relieved I can speak some Vietnamese, though are quick to point out its low quality. I pretend that makes me more special.

For dinner, they prepare a glorious spread.

They pour forth red wine and the constant questions about what I can eat and keep insisting that I try this! try this! be sure to have some of this with some of that! Between cracking shrimp and rolling rolls, I describe for them how I much I’ve missed fish sauce, and my uncle laughs when I say that the thought of it makes me weep. They prepare me on all the other delicious foods I can look forward to in these next two weeks.

Later that night, they send me out with cousin Chuong on his Honda to check out the city. I keep my helmet on my head and my knees tucked in while he zooms around the streets. We catch the lights and crowds of people gathered at the edges of the sidewalk or at the parks, just hanging out in their tank tops and shorts and thin button up shirts and flip flops. At one point, there is absolutely so much traffic congestion that we can only stand there in the road, stuck in the middle of a horde of Honda bikers, getting high on exhaust as Christmas pop music plays in the distance.

Once we finally make it out back onto the clearer areas, we zoom again past countless food shops, clothes shops, and grand scale coffee joints. People chilling everywhere. Saigon definitely stays up late.

***

I settle into the spare room on the 2nd floor of the house that they’ve set aside for me. There is a mattress and clothes rack all prepared. I’m a little taken aback about how much personal space I’ve been allotted, but my uncle tells me that the extra room is typically left empty anyway; my aunt and uncle prefer to unroll their thin reed mats on the living room floor downstairs and sleep there.

Endless noise fills my first restless Vietnamese night. The ambience starts with my baby nephew’s cries, transitions to snoring adults, then into the neighbor’s hollered conversations, to tomcats yelping terrifying mating calls, to twilight dogs barking… and at some point somewhere around 6AM, eyes left half-open, I realize I had finally drifted off to sleep and am being stirred awake by the sounds of the family getting ready for the day.

12/25/07

I climb down the steps to the kitchen. My uncle greets me and whips up a cup of coffee with condensed milk. I look at the cup with the thick hot drink and realize I’m consuming cà phê sữa đá again. Oh, my. Today is going to be a good.

“Merry Christmas,” I tell him.

A few hours later, Chuong’s wife Chúc takes me on a ride on her own Honda through the streets of Saigon, pointing out some major sites for me to photograph.

This Phở 2000, a joint made famous when former President Clinton stepped in for a bowl.

According to my cousin, this is an exact duplicate of the original Notre Dame cathedral in France. I haven’t bothered to check whether or not that’s completely true yet. However, I love how this Gothic centerpiece of austerity and power is accompanied by palm trees. How very Vietnamese.

Waiting at the light.

In anticipation of an upcoming trip to the beach, she also takes me bargain shopping for a Christmas swimsuit, flip flops, and sunscreen.

Yup, feels like the holidays.

Shot later that night from a rooftop coffee place.