bánh mì chấm sữa

“I never realised that bánh mì chấm sữa was a whole Vietnamese thing,” I said to Mum over lunch. “I thought it was just something that Ông Ngoại invented.”

 

She laughed, “Not at all. We’d have it every day if it didn’t make us fat.”

 

“I thought we had to mix hot milk and sugar together because we were too poor to afford condensed milk.” 

 

“Maybe back in my days in Vietnam, but it’s cheap here.” She recounted how much she and her brother would take turns eating the condensed milk Bà Ngoại tried to hide under their childhood bed. He’d drink half of the can and she’d rush to get the last drops. 

 

I changed the topic. “Didn’t Ông Ngoại fight in the War? Or at least in the reserves?” 

 

“Not at all,” she said, slurping her noodles casually. “He was too cherished. He was the only son on both sides of the family.”

 

I sipped my water. I was too embarrassed to ask more. All my life I thought he was a soldier. I didn’t know he had sisters. I don’t even know his name. 

 

It’s just one of those things. The western assimilation. It took me twenty-one years to find the words to describe the feeling. The Insider-Outsider. I am inside the Vietnamese identity but the westernisation kept me on the outskirts. The ‘white woman with yellow skin’ feeling. A traitor of sorts. Pseudo-asian.

 

But I’m getting better at speaking Vietnamese, even though it’s basic things and I still trip up on my words. Sometimes I say nghĩa when it should be nghỉ, or gợi instead of gựi. I celebrate the Lunar New Year and Mid Autumn Festival, but I can’t explain why we do the things we do, why we decorate with marigolds and gladiolus. I love the cuisine, but I’m disgusted when the family eats trứng vịt lộn.

 

Some days I wonder. Will I be able to teach my children Vietnamese off of my own elementary-level? Would I be able to retell the stories of our family when I barely know their lives back in Vietnam? Name our ancestors? Recount the country’s history and its mythology and hardships? I barely remember the name of our She-King when she fought back the Chinese from the Thousand-year rule, nor the Fairy and Dragon from which we were children of. 

 

I know I’m Vietnamese. I embrace it completely, but I hold my arms out to emptiness; there is a twenty-year hole in my heart that I cannot fill. 

 

I know I’m Vietnamese. I visited the motherland and I hesitated, my whiteness blanching my confidence. 

 

There is a lotus above the water, her roots are hidden in the muck. 

 

I know I’m Vietnamese but sometimes I don’t feel like I am.