Dear Friends and Family,

Yes, last summer I did quit my job in Saudi Arabia, return to the States, and began graduate school. And yes, perhaps it did appear that I had had my fun abroad, sown my wild oats—so to speak!—and that I had returned to settle into convention, cramming together a new life with two jobs, full-time uni studies, shopping at Trader Joe’s, streaming movies on Netflix, texting friends, and regular trips to Starbucks. And yet, my other life hovers in the background, springing to the fore when assigned non-fiction writing pieces. In addition, this semester I enrolled in an intensive, two-week writing “field seminar.” In Vietnam. So now I am writing to you, from Vietnam.

Vietnam. Vietnam…

It nearly goes without saying that in the States, we associate the word, the country of Vietnam with what we call “The Vietnam War” while the Vietnamese know it as “The American War.” This association is inescapable, especially during a visit to the country 37 years to the day after the fall of Saigon. But Vietnam, as a country, has been (and will be) so much more than that oft-thought of period of war. Sharing a similar arc of history to Korea and Tibet, Vietnam developed its own culture thousands of years ago, ruled itself, was conquered by the Chinese, kicked the Chinese out, was again conquered by the Chinese, and then, again, kicked the Chinese out. The Vietnamese happily ruled themselves for a few centuries until the middle nineteenth century when along came the French who stuck around for nearly a hundred years, and who left Vietnam war-torn and divided. Not long after came Communism, Americans, another war, victory, the Chinese, another war and victory.

All and all, Vietnam has been invaded. A lot. And perhaps because of these invasions, the country developed and retained a singular culture, which included a spirit of independence that allowed the Vietnamese to incorporate positive aspects of invading foreign cultures into their own. From the Chinese, the Vietnamese obtained vocabulary, Confucian hierarchies, Confucian respect for ancestors, a flavor or two of Buddhism, ying-yang roof curvature, and noodles. From the French, the Vietnamese gained a Latin lettering system, baguettes, flan, and pate. From us Americans, I suppose, the Vietnamese acquired a country in ruins, a diminished population, the image of “Uncle Ho,” and pride at having vanquished the mighty American military.

After middle 1980s and the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, the sole political power of Vietnam, the Communist Party, proved quick to convert Vietnam to a “Socialist government and Capitalist economy.” That remains the case to this day, majority of the Vietnamese population was born after the war, and Vietnam has grown to the thirteenth most populous country in the world. For the last decade, the country’s rate of economic growth has been some of the highest in the world, although the country is rife with overt corruption and there is a high rate of--and rising--income disparity. Whether Vietnamese economic growth is healthy can legitimately be questioned.

For me personally, traveling to Vietnam has opened all sorts of questions that I very much hope to write to during this writing field seminar and after I again revert to convention and regular trips to Starbucks.

More on that... eventually.

With love,

Laura 

The Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).

Countryside graves.