* * Trigger warning for sexual abuse **
Every year around this time I am given an opportunity for an assessment of my internal world: how am I feeling towards Têt? How is this different from the year before? From other previous years?
Têt is the Vietnamese New Year, celebrating the same Lunar New Year as what most people know as the Chinese New Year. [If you know me, I get really annoyed every year when people only call it Chinese New Year; but then I realized, maybe the Chinese did impose it on Viet Nam during their occupation/dynasties. And yes, Viet Nam, two words. Both of these are topics for another time.] Celebrations start this coming week, approx. from 11th Feb - 16th of Feb. In Viet Nam, people might take a week (or more) to prepare for Têt and then celebrate for a week. I’ve never celebrated Têt in Viet Nam. As a child, my birth family and extended birth family would make a meal and gather folks. As an adult, I have celebrated in varying degrees, ranging from making a social media post to inviting friends over to learn how to make bánh bao and then having a feast. Last year, I picked up some cherry blossoms from a Chinese grocery store, hung some red envelopes, and made a small deal out of it with my new chosen family. I put out fruit and nuts, lit incense, and discussed some of the traditions with the kids in my new chosen family.
This year, similar to many other years, I haven’t thought too much about it until a handful of days prior (i.e right now). Têt this year will be celebrated the same weekend as I’m also celebrating my three year anniversary with my partner, and we are still in this pandemic, the UK still in our “2nd” lockdown. I haven’t bought cherry blossoms, thought about what I’d make for food, or planned to make sure our house is spotless. A few additional factors have also surfaced to make this a uniquely timed experience of the holiday for me.
As is now cliché of pandemic times, I’ve started baking bread. I’ve gotten to better understand bread flour, plain flour, and self-rising flour. I bought self-rising flour because that’s really all we had from the “American” grocery story in my birth parents’ house growing up. We also had bột gạo (rice flour), bột đậu (mung bean flour), and bột nếp (glutinous rice flour). We bought Iron Kid’s white bread (I was child of the 80’s and 90’s) that we ate as toast with eggs, or with bologña and Kraft American cheese for sandwiches. There was no such thing as bread flour in my house. Nevertheless, this morning I’m looking at the self-rising flour and thinking - “I can make bánh bao. Oh yeah, it’s the new year. What do I want to do? I don’t feel chipper enough to carry this tradition alone in my new family of three White British folks.”
And why don’t I feel chipper? To my ardent followers, it comes as no surprise that I have an ambivalent relationship with my Vietnamese heritage. Both my birth parents were part of the “Boat People” generation, escaping South Viet Nam in 1979. After being turned away from the borders of Thailand, they entered a refugee camp in Cambodia and lived there for a year before being granted refugee status in the US. There’s a lot more history that that I’ll share someday but it is all told by my birth mother, who I no longer consider a reliable source of information.
My birth parents - both my mother and my father - were my abusers. I’ve been public about that for a long time now. And yet, it is because of them that I am Vietnamese. That my face resembles their features, that people mistake me for being from the Phillipines…It is because of my paternal grandfather that my name is Đặng Thị Ngọc Minh and when I earn my PhD in hopefully 2-3 months from now, I will be Dr. Minh Dang. It is because of them, that when I look at the words Dr. Dang, I will have to consciously remember that I am building a new legacy for the family name. That despite carrying the DNA and last name of someone who raped his daughter, I have “made a name” for myself. I have embraced an Asian-American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) identity and a Vietnamese-American identity.
I’ve been working to re-claim the cultural traditions and language of Vietnamese people over the years, but it is quite challenging. I have tried claiming my foremothers as the likes of Audrey Lorde, bell hooks, Maya Angelou, Yuri Kochiyama, and my forefathers as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglass. That works in a spiritual sense but in day to day life, what do I accept as my cultural heritage? What cultural practices to I incorporate into my life? It’s not like I’m completely empty of cultural heritage and it doesn’t make sense to put on, or appropriate, others’ cultures as if they are my own. And what does it mean to “carry on the tradition” of cultural practices when I still remain disconnected from the Vietnamese community?
In England, I have met people mostly from Central Viet Nam and/or Northern Viet Nam. That’s no problem in theory, but imagine someone speaking in Cockney Slang and you’re from Yorkshire. And then imagine that you’re from Yorkshire but you have an elementary grasp of English. That’s me. I have a first grade ability to speak, read, and write a Southern dialect of Vietnamese.
And then imagine if your formative experiences with your community were abusive, and members of the extended community participated in or turned a blind eye to your abuse. I don’t know how to say “my father raped me” and my “parents sold me sexually” in Vietnamese. The best I have done is say to people - “My father did very wrong things with me” and “My parents made me be a prostitute.” People are shocked. They ask me if those were my “real” parents, if we were poor, and they have said, “but look at you now.” I can hardly stand to address enslavement and human trafficking in the Vietnamese community because I have to stand face to face with the reality that there are actually very lovely, good, Vietnamese people, and that my parents just weren’t two of them. I also have to face the denial, misogny, and pity of others. I have to confront my deep pain of never having a ba và mẹ (father and mother) who loved me. I have to answer questions about why I’m not in touch with them, my older brother, or with any of my cousins or extended family. Once, I tried lying to my hair dresser and saying that my parents died when I was little. I later told her the truth. In true Vietnamese motherly fashion, she offered me food. I ate and I cried - inside and outside. The same way I would cry when I heard or saw my Vietnamese friends in college interact with their parents. They held similar guilt as I did about our parents’ hardships, but they also seemed to have love for their parents in a way that I could not relate. I dealt with that by pretending it wasn’t real.
Recently, I had to fill out a health questionnaire and two of the questions were:
1. Have you ever been pregnant?
2. With your current partner? Previous partner?
Just writing these words makes me shake my head. My father got me pregnant when I was a child. The first time it happened, I found out by having a miscarriage in the middle school bathroom. I haven’t shared this publicly very often because it is a painful truth to tell. I share it now because after coming to grips with it for many years, I can now share it and share how it impacts my experience of being Vietnamese. Our cultural heritage comes from our birth parents. As a society, we have become enamored with testing our DNA to trace our lineage. For White people in America in particular, working to end racism includes finding out one’s distant heritage and roots - Irish, Scottish, Celtic, German, Caucasian (Caucasus Mountains), etc. Our phenotypical presence in the world does not hide our roots.
What happens when your biology, your facial features, your very cells (despite them shedding and regrowing), is linked to your rapist? What happens when cultural holidays themselves were occasions of heightened abuse?
For me, the answer is this post. My sharing this with the hope that it will aid my healing, and help to put words to my experience so that others can empathise with me. The answer is shedding tears and distracting from the pain in whatever way I can.
The answer is my activism. The email I wrote to my health provider, pushing them to incorporate trauma-informed practices. Informing them them that 1 in 5 women in the UK have been sexually assaulted (Rapecrisis.org) and there must be many women who would answer the questions above with Yes and Neither. And informing them that repeating trauma over and over in settings not designed for trauma recovery is actually harmful.
The answer is also my life. My living as I am, clinging to any small cutural traditions that aren’t as painful. Like making bánh bao, in the safety of my home, rented with my own money, in the company of my own chosen family.