Notes from my first trip back in twenty years

I left Vietnam when I was six and didn't go back until I was twenty-six. In between, I built an entire identity around a place I could barely remember — a few fragmented images of a courtyard, a smell I couldn't name until I encountered it again decades later and immediately, involuntarily, started crying in a stranger's driveway.

The trip itself was disorienting in ways I hadn't prepared for. I'd expected to feel like I was returning somewhere. Instead I felt like a tourist with an unusually specific, unusually painful itinerary — visiting my grandparents' old house, now occupied by a family with no connection to us, standing outside because I couldn't think of a version of knocking that wouldn't feel absurd.

What surprised me most wasn't the physical change, though there was plenty of that — a rice paddy my mother described from memory is now a strip of auto parts shops. It was realizing how much of "Vietnam" I'd been carrying around was really just my parents' Vietnam, frozen at the exact moment they left, updated by nothing since except their own selective, aching memory. The actual country had spent thirty years becoming something else entirely, something my parents themselves would find unfamiliar in places.

I don't have a tidy conclusion for what the trip meant. I came back more confused about my own relationship to the place than when I left, not less — but it's a different, more honest kind of confusion. I'm no longer mourning a country I never actually knew. I'm starting, slowly, to get curious about the one that's actually there.