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I’m a part of the first generation of Americans in my family. My dad always tries to emphasize to me to importance of staying in touch with my Vietnamese heritage.
Which is cool.
I guess.
I mean, having something that makes you distinctly different from most other people is something worth holding on to, I suppose.
But at what point do you go from just “keeping in touch with your roots” to “being mired in the past”?
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When I was in elementary school, I wondered what white kids ate for dinner. I honestly had no idea. At my house, it was always Vietnamese food. What do most Vietnamese dishes have in common?
Fish sauce.
This, my friends, is what makes me so Vietnamese. Like, I couldn’t possibly imagine my life without it. Not all fish sauces are equal, though–flavors are going to differ based on the country of origin. I learned this when I had to go buy this stuff here in Prince George.
Speaking of which, there’s only one store in all of Prince George that sells oriental goods. You know what its name is? The Chinese Store. That’s right. It’s The Chinese Store. You’d think the guy running it would be a total FOB, too, but he’s not (though it is possible that it’s a family business).
Anyway, when I went to go buy fish sauce here in Prince George, I asked the guy where I could find it. He then proceeded to ask me, “What country of origin?” It had never occurred to me before that very moment that there were different types of fish sauce.
Like, dang.
They didn’t have the usual Vietnamese brands that I’m used to seeing (the two bottles on the right in the picture), so I told the guy what I was making (spaghetti) and he picked one for me. I think the stuff I bought that day was from the Phillipines. Wasn’t the same, but my spaghetti sauce still turned out pretty awesome.
So yeah, fish sauce is awesome. Just sayin’. By the way, I’ll be posing for pictures using the A-OK symbol from now on.
[ image by wanderingchopsticks ]
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My Vietnamese vocabulary has slowly been shrinking, moreso than before since I’ve spent the last few months away from home. It’s partly because I have virtually no Vietnamese friends. In a generation that’s been raised to focus on themselves (that’s including me), it’s hard to find people who are genuinely interested in getting together and finding creative ways of getting back in touch with their roots.
I’ll also admit to being fairly ignorant of my heritage–mostly on purpose as to not burden myself with the knowledge of how bad things were back then (and how bad they are now). My relatives have communicated some of that with me in the past, but it’s always felt like they were trying to guilt trip me for having things handed to me that they’ve had to work their whole lives for. Of course, that’s not to say that I don’t respect them for getting as far as they have.
So that’s the scoop on that. I’m not sure what I’m going to do to tackle it, but I guess the first step is addressing this problem exists in the first place.
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