What the Motherland taught me travelling as a tourist & the lesson on ‘dialectics’

After fifteen years, I went back to Vietnam with my family. Three generations. And the taste of chilli salt reminded me of the psychology of Dialetics.

I used to hate going back to Vietnam especially as a child. I know that's a difficult thing to say out loud. Returning to the motherland is supposed to be sacred and spoken with respect.. A homecoming even for many. And maybe for some people it is. But for me, growing up those trips felt like something else entirely.

Let me paint the picture for you: we would arrive exhausted after the long-haul flight and almost immediately the visits would begin. Relatives and cousins I had never met and houses I didn't recognise. Faces that looked at me like they were owed something. Some proof of who I was. Some evidence of how I'd turned out.

They would touch my face. Prod me. Comment on my skin, my weight, my Vietnamese, my posture.

"You're darker than I expected."
"Do you even know how to speak Vietnamese."
"You're very chubby for a Vietnamese girl."
"Raised overseas, you can tell."

And we would smile. Nod. Say nothing.

You might know this ritual. The way your difference is catalogued out loud, in front of you, as though you're not quite in the room and you still sit there politely and sometimes awkwardly smile, And we do not make a scene because this is family. Because this is culture. But it was also about autonomy, for me at least. Or the lack of it. My body wasn't mine in those rooms. My time wasn't mine. My preferences didn't matter. And so I didn’t return for over 15 years, though this was not consciously either.

I understand now why they looked at us the way they did. It took me years to get here, but I understand. My parents escaped the war and left on boats, not knowing if they would survive, not knowing where they would land. They spent time in refugee camps and eventually made it to Australia where they built a life from almost nothing. Where they raised us, where they learned a new way of being.

The relatives who stayed behind lived a different story. They stayed through the aftermath of the war, through “reunification”, through the years of hardship that followed. They built their lives in the Vietnam that remained and watched some family members leave and never come back. They heard stories about the ones who made it overseas, the ones who supposedly had easier lives now, the ones who could afford plane tickets and gifts.

When they looked at us, the descendants, they saw more than just children and perhaps saw the product of a choice they didn't make or a road not taken. The family that left. So, of course they scrutinised and assessed.

The dialectics were always in the rooms…They stayed and my parents fled. Both truths were in the room every time we visited. The scrutiny made sense once I could see it. They were trying to understand what we had become…

The dialectic was always there, in every visit, in every comment about our accents and our skin colour or weight. Those who stayed and those who left. The Vietnam they lived in and the Vietnam my parents carried with them. Two versions of the same country, the same family, the same history.

And we, the children, were caught in the middle. Belonging fully to neither.

This Time Was Different

Last month, I went back to Vietnam. I came back with my husband, my daughter, my siblings and my parents. Three generations returning together. We made a deliberate choice this time though: I didn't visit extended family. We didn't have enough time to do it properly and I wanted to position this trip differently. I wanted to experience the country without the weight of obligation, without the familiar choreography of family visits. I wanted to see Vietnam through my own eyes, as the adult I had become.

It felt strange at first as I kept waiting for the guilt to catch up with me. But what I found instead was space to walk through streets without being claimed. Space to notice things I'd never had the chance to notice before. The rhythm of the traffic. The humidity that wraps around you like a second skin. The smell of food from every direction.

I watched my daughter take it all in. I watched my parents move through spaces that held memories I'll never fully know. I watched my siblings and I exchange glances that said, without words: this is different.

For Those Who Haven't Gone Back Yet

What I brought back from Vietnam this time is the dual understanding that I can hold all of it now. The painful childhood visits and the freedom of this one. The family who left and the family who stayed. The scrutiny I experienced as a child and the knowing I have now about why it happened. Both are true. Both shaped me. And the balance between them tastes like something I can finally call mine.

If you've been avoiding the motherland, I understand. If the thought of returning brings up dread instead of longing, you're not ungrateful. You're not a bad Vietnamese, or whatever you are. Sometimes the places that made us are also the places that struggled to hold us. Sometimes family love comes wrapped in commentary that lands like criticism. Sometimes belonging feels conditional and the price of that belonging is too high to pay when you're young and don't yet have the tools to hold the complexity.

You're allowed to go back differently, if you go back at all.

The memory is yours to hold however you need to.