Đọc bài viết này bằng tiếng Việt tại đây
I write this blog to remember another Covid summer. Today Saigon continues the second round of social lock down.
I only go out once a week these days because I live with my parents who are in their seventies. As I can’t go out to sketch, I turn my attention to objects inside my house and think about the idea of “home”.
Home is, first of all, family, my parents, the sounds they make, their scents, their silhouettes. A day at home means waking up with the rattles of my mum cooking in the kitchen, the creak of the drying rack as dad brings clothes down before lunch, the high-pitched chatter from a Korean soap opera in the dining room when dad and mum measure their blood pressure while crunching melon seeds. I did made a few sketches of my parents but some look dreadful, the others look a tad too crude like the one where dad is collecting dried clothes on the background of the underwears of my mum’s and mine (even though I think that scene looks genuine and lovely) and so, my parents bolt whenever they see me turning to them holding a pen or a camera.
Home is my parent’s house with all their clunky junk and ancient objects.
A corner in our dining area. The table was crammed with bottles and jars which I had removed from the sketch. 
Lots of dishes and racks not shown here
Objects and plants mark time passed and laden with memories.
The corn plant, the Japanese honeysuckle, the jasmine and the paper flower plant in our balcony. There was also an addition of an osmanthus that I bought for dad on his birthday. Its chartreuse blossoms have been fuming the air with a fresh sweet scent ever since.
Dad bought this treadmill in 2000 which costed him 6 million which was a lot in that time. Now it looks more like a clumsy spaceship residing in this corner, hardly ever used in its decades of residency. Mum and I kept asking him to give it away but covid months like these when gyms are closed make the treadmill an utilitarian object again.
Home is my own room. As I worked and lived far from Hanoi for almost ten years, my room is filled with my parents’ furniture or what they bought for me. The dressing table brought from our old apartment carries sixteen years on its shiny surface. This swivel chair still has hundreds of scratches by the two cats we had when I was in university. As I touch the back of the chair, I think about a 2006’s summer evening when my two silly kitties were mauling the chair while looking at me to see when they would be chased away. They had been dead for decades. I wonder whether some of their claws might still stuck in the back of my chair.
Home provides a cool and safe window from where I can freely savour the view. I love the bedroom’s view. The buildings around ours are mostly three or four storeyed and the high rises lie much further allowing me an unobstructive piece of sky. A precious piece! In summer, Hanoi is out of its usual gloom and pollution; layer upon layer of fluffly clouds spread their soft shadow on the azure sky. Every summer morning when I wake up, I don’t get up right away but stay in bed and look up to the crystal sky outside. As I quietly watch the clouds passing by, my heart softly sings its little happy song, joyful and glorious like the peach coloured light of early dawn.
Outside my window is not just skies and clouds but also a world of greens: the sapodilla tree dangling its russet fruits, the ablazing golden shower casting its pulpy clusters to passerbys, the palm tree and its dishelvelled leaves (but the young leaves look more like swords pointing to the sky), the flamboyant tree lacing its few early red flowers to the feathery leaves and the sữa tree (I find the English name uninspiring) blinks its slender leaves like green eyes. There is an enormous pleasure in looking at this summer scene, like eating a juicy berry while soaking my feet in a cold mountain stream. There is nothing else I could want.
Home is not only a shelter for people but for other creatures as well. In this sketch, I draw a lizard frozen on the wall as I suddenly walked into the bathroom. It was a funny scene (not for the lizard though) – a fat lizard paralysed on the corner of the wall, too scared to move even its tail. He was still there even after I went back to my room to get the camera. It took him a while to pull himself together and scuttered away.
The little reddish brown spot under the soap stand is the resident spider. I don’t like spiders but always try to resist my temptation to kill. The spider does me no harm but seeing it (he/she?) dangling near me everytime I use the toilet doesn’t feel great. And so every moment in the bathroom is a moment of self-restraint, an effort to surpress the temptation to kill and restore order.
When covid is out there and I have to stay inside, home is merely a suffocating little box, safe and smothering at the same time. In times like this, I still feel fortunate to have a life without much to worry about: my parents are relatively healthy, I don’t have any child to feed and a few months of unemployment is not a big deal for me.
Since my family moved house often, my home and my room shifted around to different neighborhoods. Our home used to be in Kim Lien, a large area of old Soviet styled residential blocks (“nhà tập thể”), and my room, a birdnest (a facade extension) like this. After the Kim Lien apartment, we moved to several other places but it was always a residential block and my room was always in a birdnest. Because of those years, wherever I go, I often find myself drawn to residential blocks which usually emit an air of peaceful chaos with its protruding plants and facades rather than the cold straight lines and predictably grey flat surface of modern condos.
Ironically, when I moved to Singapore, I chose a comfortable condo on a quiet street in Toa Payoh even though the area was the heartland of HDB – residential blocks in Singapore. I guess comfort and big glass windows however much heat they trap wins. On the weekends, I still found myself wander through the lively corridors of the HDBs around my condo, like a nostalgic fish making a round in its old pond.
When I was younger, in my twenties and brewing a lot of internal excess energy, I just wanted to get out of my house. Home was the place of imposing rules and perpetual scarcity of space and silence when all I needed was a quiet place to hear my own voice. When I was twenty, I decided to take an internship in Saigon without hesitation. I just wanted to leave. And I kept staying far from home ever since, never having any thoughts of coming back. Everytime I was home, I was reminded of all the things I had to do, yet I thought I no longer “have to” do anything. And so I kept on leaving. When both Home and I have become more mature and calmer, no one thinks that the other has to do anything anymore. No one has to go home; only when they want to be home. And being home means staying until one wants to leave. “Being home” means feeling at home.
I once left home to escape expectations but I myself cling on to all the “should” and “must” that society imagines for me. A few months ago, I was obssessed with finding an apartment for myself. I wanted to find my own place because I thought a thirty-something needed her own home. My home means a house under my name and everything inside it has to be exactly what I want. When life feels disrupted and unpredictable, the idea of home ownership gives me purpose and a glimpse of stability. Everything would be alright and fall into its place once I had my own home. Later I realise it was merely an arrival fallacy. My intention to buy a house is not coming from a true need. I wanted to buy a house because of peer pressure – everyone my age has their own house and owning a real estate sounds better than being able to purchase one but rather not. As much as I would like to mental masturbate myself into believing that I have an independent mind, in retrospect, I’m certainly influenced by social values and stereotypes. Society stiches an individual’s maturity to their separation from their parents’ house. Home ownership is also a marker of wealth and success. Once I crunched some numbers to weigh renting and buying as well as wrote down my needs, I realised all of these, the values, the labels are merely imagined. They are all in our heads. Just because many people appreciate that same value or label doesn’t mean I have to think the same. To me, home ownership is not a marker of maturity. Neither does it say success in my terms.
I think about the months and years living far from home; even until now, I still like to move to somewhere and stay there like a local for a few months. My job allows me to work remotely so I can easily switch my home to some distant town. Last year I spent a few months in Gia Lai to escape pollution, covid and give myself some space. For such a trip, home is neatly organized into two suitcases, condensed and mobile (but bringing a rice cooker is a must). In recent years, I often bring along several small objects which make me feel like home whenever I move. The first object is a plastic Maruko clock, white, smooth and square which has been tik-tak-ing quietly eversince I got it from Muji. The second object is a Vietnamese rattan box, rough, honey yellow like woven sunlights. Later I added a Hei-Tiki wood-cut art piece which was a gift from a Kiwi client. Whenever I open my suitcase and put the clock, the rattan box and the wood-cut piece on a shelf, their natural material and squareness breathes warmth and tranquility into the new space. The room, once a stranger’s room, starts to feel more like home.
My life these days feels quiet. No trips, no busy fieldwork and deadlines, these are summer days of solitude and quiet joy of doing exactly what I like: sketch, write, read, listen to podcast, think and read some more. This time feels like a moment last year when I was sitting in my Pleiku studio, watching the sweet Highland sunset riping outside my window; I’m slowly savouring the feeling of being at home – being myself, doing what I like, savouring what I love.
L.L
Hanoi, a summer day in 2021