For Nana-chan,

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind.

Rebecca Solnit, ‘The faraway nearby’

What do you see when looking at objects that you no longer touch? 

I see life’s artifacts, the beginnings of who I am today, the old shells of who I used to be and sometimes, glimpses of a world in the past. When examining old objects, I feel like an archeologist – excavating memories, following traces to spin out the history of my family and myself.

1. From Russia with love

Objects: Russian matryoshkas, a decorated wooden spoon and bowl and Pauvstovsky’s “Goldren Rose and Rainy Dawn”

Russia is the first foreign country and Russian the first foreign language that I know of. The first time I heard the name, I was four, perhaps. My mum went to Russia to study for two years and her absence swept the Russia on my mind with a soft grey of longing. I later saw black and white pictures of her and other Vietnamese friends in a park, surrounded by blankets of snow reflecting sunlight. A broad smile radiated her sweet face and behind her, the gentle glow of the birch trees’ silvery barks. 

I’ve never been to Russia but that vast country left a profound imprint on my parents’ youth, even until now. Their annual Russia alumni meetings, my mum’s stories about the old Polish ladies who were so kind to her, my dad’s Russian friends who came to our house for dinner when we always had a bowl of Russian salad (perhaps, that’s where my dad’s obsession with mayonnaise comes from) and the melancholic rhythm of Dva Berega (““We are two banks of the same river”) that my mum sometimes hums when she’s cooking. 

The most beautiful book that I have ever had in my childhood was a Russian book, “Doctor Ai-bo-lit” from Rainbow publisher. It was one of the only three books that I had when I was four, which I carried with me everywhere like little flat dolls. “Doctor Ai-bo-lit” was completely different from my two other books – one is “The stories of fruits and flowers” by Pham Dinh Ho and the other one, a cookbook called “How to make candied fruits”, or all other Vietnamese books in the 80s and 90s. The Vietnamese books always came with a very thin cover and small texts printed on yellow or brown paper. This book was the only book with hardcover, big round texts printed on thick white paper, and coloured illustrations. Each page filled me with wonder, like seeing rainbows and thousands of fluttering butterflies. 

I was born in 1987, one year after Doi Moi, two years before the Berlin wall collapsed. The world I lived in in the first few years of my life carried remnants of the Cold War. The Russia that I grew up hearing and reading about is a completely different entity – the Soviet Union or the USSR, a name I only came to know when I started to read English books. I still remember vividly an essay written by Ilya Ehrenburg, “For the love of a country”, in my sixth grade’s Literature textbook: “The love of a country begins with loving the most trivial things: the tree in front of your house, the little town near a river, the fresh sour fragrance of autumn’s pears or the breath of wine in the smell of pasture’s grass. The Ukraines miss the silhouettes of rowans ruminating on the roadside, the serenity of a golden summer afternoon; People from Moscow are nostalgic about old winding streets, meandering like memories; Northerners keep thinking about the forests along Vilyuy river with tree branches bending over the water, reminiscing the bright and rosy sky of June nights.” 

Those were the years when in the North, the best foreign language to study was Russian and the best foreign country to study in was always the Soviet. And yet, at the other side of the globe, perhaps American kids my age grew up with a completely opposite image of the Soviet – cold, menacing, draconian. I only started to wonder much later after having watched Hollywood movies where the bad guys were always Russians and the Russia portrayed was always grim and grey. 

I’m not sure if the world today has moved away from the polarized world of the Cold War but my world view has. I’ve since grown up, picked up English and made several attempts to learn a few others. I formed an interest in history and the ambitious habit of reading a country’s history during my visit – the familiar version in Vietnamese, the confident and absolute narrative in their national museums, the intimate stories in poems and fictions or the critical stance of oppositions. I read different stories about Russia too. It’s no longer the sunny peaceful land that I dreamed of when I was a kid, nor is it a perpetually dark place. It is a vast, complex country with a long turbulent history. And it still has a special place in my heart – the country where my parents had spent the most wonderful years of their youth and the land that inspired my sister’s name – Thuỳ Dương (‘рябина’ – rowan).

2. Foldable space and fluid home

Objects: A foldable table and a foldable chair 

When I was a kid, my family moved a lot. We moved to different parts of Hanoi but the place we moved into was always a tiny one-room apartment in an old block. My parents became experts in creating space where there was none. Balconies became birdnest bedroom; the common corridor became a part of the kitchen. We always had this big plywood TV cabinet that was also our closet and storage to partition a bedroom out of the living room. Sometimes, this bedroom that was in the middle of a social space and hardly felt private was the room that my sister and I shared, sometimes it was my parents’. 

We learned the art of ‘furniture enabling’ which is enabling a space to perform a function it didn’t know it could. Almost everything we owned was foldable, easy-to-assemble and disassemble and our apartments often felt like Lego houses. At night, the dining table and chairs were folded, placed against the wall so that the kitchen became a parking lot for my dad’s motorbike. On the days when we hosted dinner, the mattress in the bedroom – our makeshift bed – was pushed against the wall and our little bird nest bedroom was turned into the second dining room with a peculiar floral backdrop. 

We were stretching space in all directions for more than 20 years as far as I can remember. My parents have now settled in a spacious apartment where they can have unfoldable tables and chairs, permanent beds and walls that are not made of TV cabinets, curtains or mattresses. As for me, the restlessness stuck. I’m still living as if I’m about to pack up and move. And it doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

3. “I’m too old for this”

Objects: a pair of high heels and a padded bra 

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When I was 25, I could not imagine myself without heels. Throughout my 20s, I wore heels whenever I went, and together with heels, tight dresses or hot shorts and a plethora of lacy padded bras. The bra and the heels in the sketches are the epitomes of my twenties fashion style and in a way, my idea of femininity. I dressed for others at the expense of my own comfort. Padded bras that doubled the size of my breasts but digged into my ribs; bodycon dresses that show off my curves but so tight it was difficult to sit on a motorbike, shorts that revealed my butt cheeks if I didn’t use one hand to pull them down once in a while; heels that rendered me seductive sways but forced me to tip-toe whenever I wanted to walk fast. 

In a subtle way, they wore me. I was adorned in a kind of decorative femininity that I thought was the default of how a woman should look. My 20s were the time when I struggled to hear my own voice which was faint, like a disembodied sound echoing through thick fog. In my 20s, the voice of others defined the edge of my identity and my dreams. I relentlessly pursued all the default milestones and nervously stuck achievements to the imagined timeline that magically ended in the 30th year of my life just to, on my 30th birthday, wondered why, despite having gotten so close to those milestones, I still felt so anxious.

I used to jokingly tell my friends that I envied the old men in the parks – sunbathing, seemingly utterly contented, their white tank tops rolled up to reveal their plenitude of bellies without any hint of shame. I wanted to sit and do nothing, without pretending to be pursuing something (and calling it a goal-oriented do-nothing day), and I wanted to not care about how others think about my look. 

I am now 33. The heels have been gathering dust for several years, and no more tight bodycon dresses, even in my wildest dream. I replaced the padded bras with bralettes and one day, nothing. It feels comfortable. It feels free. Not at first though. I was worried that someone would stop me on the street to tell me to put on a bra. In that imagined encounter, I found myself apologetically defending the virtue of braless-ness, assuring them that I am not a slut. A reflex from years of dressing for others and incidents of strangers commenting on the way I dressed. I did go out, fully clothed but braless. No one looked. No one stopped me on the street. No one cared. 

Maybe all of us, worrying so much about what others think of ourselves, actually have our heads down most of the time, too occupied by our own baggage to even look at the others. Maybe that’s me as well, and my 30th motto “I’m too old for this”. I’m too old to be told what to wear. I’m too old to be stuck in a femininity mould that I was sold to in the past. I’m too old to take aggressive advice from proclaimed well-meaning strangers. I’m too old to give a shit to the bullshit. I am too old to not be free! 

4. Second chance hope

Objects: carton boxes, empty water bottles and other so-called garbage. 

My parents are utterly optimistic. They refuse to think that the utility of a box ends the moment its content is out. The top of our closets and cabinets are always full of empty things: carton boxes nesting inside carton boxes like paper matryoshkas and 1 liter plastic bottles stacked on top of each other. And scattered in our apartment, old containers now shelter something new: biscuit tin cans turned medicine boxes, sesame salt replaced yoghurt in the Da Lat milk container and riped apricots are brewing wine in the old baby cucumber pickle jar. Perhaps, my parents are giving these boxes and jars and cans a second chance. Perhaps, they are just doing backward old people’s stuff which is hoarding, like how us smart kids like to call it. 

What is modernity? A synonym of progress? All the stuff labelled Emergent in a commercial semiotic report – where the one direction arrow points to, what stands opposite to everything ancient and backward that is called Residual? In the marketing world, we favour trendy stuff. New is always better. 

I started working 12 years ago, plunged into the exciting world of modern consumption – an atheist converted to this religion of buying things under abstract excuses of dreams or love or self-worth. 12 years of working in this industry, I’ve become an expert in finding abstract reasons for people to want to consume more, turning urges into callings. Because life needs to be lived to the fullest! Because you need to do what you can’t now! Because you deserve it!

What does modernity mean? People in my focus groups often associated it with punctuality, with “industrial style”, with the developed world, somewhere North. In that vision, our agrarian past and present is not included. And I remember an image shared by a young woman to describe her idea of modernity: a woman in office dress, high heels, a laptop in her bag; she’s walking fast and on her hand, a take-away Starbuck coffee. 

If that image is turned into a sequence, what would come next? Does she go to her office and wash the cup or does she throw it away? The idea of modernity is somehow unquestionably tied to extreme convenience, the epitome of which is in the act of disposing. But that’s not how it is called in the ads. It is about being smart. It is about achieving. It is control. And yet, after thousands of plastic and styrofoam boxes of take-away meals and hundreds of cups and straws and stirs and branded bags for take-away drinks – all consumed while I was doing something else, mostly work, I no longer believed in that version of modern lifestyle. 

Maybe disillusionment kicked in when I was lying on my bed on a Sunday, counting in my head all the vegetables I needed to throw away because I didn’t have the time to cook because I had to work. Or when I had an hour to read and realised that my country had been a dumping ground for the garbage that busy consumers in developed countries discarded. Or when I saw the bitter faces of the villagers who had put up a barricade around a landfill near Hanoi, and heard their plea – “Take the garbage away”. When I knew that in the mountains of garbage that had been rotting the air they breathe, there lies my convenience. 

Progress for me, doesn’t have to be a linear one direction arrow. It doesn’t stop at the consuming part but takes into account the dumping part, and after that, and after that, and after that. Maybe it’s a circle. I went back home and like my parents, have my own second-chance bag where I sort boxes, bottles and bags for eco shops or recycling points and let the weight of everything else that can’t be reused heavy on me whenever I consider a purchase. In a way, it feels harder than before, but also lighter, and free.

5. Memento Mori

Objects: An empty jar of hair cream and an empty Morrocan hair oil bottle

If you know the conversation you’re having with someone would be your last one with them, what would you say? 

In my last conversation with her, I whined about my dry hair and asked if she had some spare hair products. We laughed about our digestion (a common problem amongst women in their 30s) and nodded at the idea of sweet potato breakfast. She asked if I had a boyfriend and I lied, like how I always lie to conceal my more private and unsettling part from my family. We never revealed our vulnerable side to each other. I’m not sure why. 

When someone’s name now means their corpse

When you have to retype what you wrote because you left the verbs in the present tense. Perhaps it was you being Vietnamese using Vietnamese verbs which don’t make a clear cut between the past and the present. Perhaps, a part of you wants and needs the illusion that they are still there, only a flight away. 

The abrupt vanishment of someone who has been consistently present in one’s life even only at the backdrop, is always so unfathomable. 

How do family of suicide victims feel when they first got the news? Shock? Guilt? Anger? All these emotions? It was unthinkable at first, and then, they would slowly notice the little breadcrumbs that had led their loved one to the dark cliff where they jumped. And in the next months or years, they would never stop questioning themselves. How could they not know? Why didn’t they try harder? 

The two empty containers had been on their altar – my bathroom shelf – for months, in limbo, carrying the weight of sorrow for an abrupt end to her youthful life and my regret, lots of it. I’d forever look at my childhood photos with a different kind of nostalgia. The happy and complete family photos carry a sarcastic veneer, mocking the state of the current one. And I’d stopped reading Sylvia Plath. You don’t want to read Sylvia Plath if she’s your loved one. 

I made a sketch of the containers several days ago and moved them from the shelf to the second-chance bag. I’m still holding on to them for now but one step closer to letting go. They are after all, merely old vessels of a memory that I already hold dear in my heart. 

Ending

This piece is essentially about myself – the more vulnerable, embarrassing side of me. Writing about it feels like performing an autopsy on my own corpse in a neon-lit room full of strangers. It’s terrifying. So I resorted to writing in English, my second language, first. Perhaps I have to travel to a foreign land in order to be able to see mine clearly. Yet, my story is full of “maybe” and “perhaps”. 

Why write if it feels so uncomfortable? Like sketching, writing comes from the desire to understand and the quest for meaning, a way to connect erratic dots that carry no inherent patterns. It allows me to be absorbed by solitude and emerge with newly found calmness and hope. 

“From now on, the past is crystal clear. I can continue to live anew”

“Từ nay, quá khứ thế là rõ ràng. Tôi lại có thể sống tiếp với một đầu óc trong sáng.”

Paustovsky, “Meadow Rose”

L.L

8th Sept 2021