Chúc mừng năm mới! =)
... 'Cause it's Vietnamese New Year too!
I love Tết! I miss the festivities. If I were at home, I'd be much closer to all the celebration. Alas! I am at school without a car, so I must settle for celebrating quietly without all the colorful excitement.
My mom mailed my sister and me some bánh chưng, which is a traditional New Year's food and super delicious! The bánh felt like a little slice of home. =) Apparently, my mom wanted to send us bánh tét instead, but she couldn't fit it inside a package. Now, I'll be forever curious because apparently, the only difference between the two is the shape (one is square and the other is round), but my mom sounded a bit disappointed that she couldn't sent us bánh tét. The preparation of the bánh is pretty intense, so my mom must have bought the bánh from someone she trusted to do a skilled job.
Here is a gorgeous picture of how the bánh looks from the outside (credits to bigherok@wordpress):
And I am totally craving Vietnamese food now. Especially bánh bột lọc or bún bò Huế. Massive. Craving. Overload. I need to learn how to cook Vietnamese food, so I don't have these random cravings. I'm very good at forcing myself not to think of how I'm missing out, but every once in a while, I can't help it.
I've got to admit; I am pretty Vietnamese (despite being born and raised in California). On New Year's Eve (as in December 31; how has time flown by so quickly?), I spent some time reconnecting with some friends of my parents whom I knew as a child but lost contact with after we stopped attending the same church. One of them, Cô Thanh (cô is a form of a address that means "aunt"), just looked at me in awe the whole time. She was genuinely shocked that I ate even the Vietnamese food that could be considered less "accessible" to non-Vietnamese people. And she loved that I speak, read, and write Vietnamese as well. (In fact, I read my Bible in Vietnamese sometimes too. I am pretty paranoid; I don't want to lose my facility in the language. I'd feel as though I were losing a huge part of myself.) She kept exclaiming, "You are so Vietnamese!" and I-not going to lie-was beaming. I may or may not take a little too much pride in being Vietnamese.
... I can't really imagine it any other way, though. That's who I am. I am enthusiastic and passionate about every term I use to describe myself-I wouldn't call myself a Christian, a writer, a singer, or any of those other identifiers unless those terms truly informed how I think about myself and how I live my life.
*
Anyway, I have an entry coming up about "doing the right things" that's related to fresh starts! After the craziness of last week, in a sense, this weekend is a fresh start, and it happens to coincide with Valentine's Day, Lunar New Year, and Presidents Day (for us Americans!). I love three-day weekends. And at least two of the three holidays anyway. =P
Happy Lunar New Year, Presidents Day, and Valentine's Day to all!
Hoping to update very soon!
~ Jen ♥
*
P.S. There are two submissions by Vietnamese-American women in the Asian Women Blog Carnival: 1 and 2. Both are gorgeous and poignant, and I feel incredibly spoiled when reading them because I can empathize but I can't understand. I can't understand-and I'd only be pretending if I said I did-because I was born in the United States and grew up in the city with the largest Vietnamese population outside Vietnam. I've attended schools that were 40-50% Asian my entire life, including my current university. My hometown has a higher ethnic Vietnamese population than Chinese population; I even know ethnic Chinese people who were commonly asked, "Are you Vietnamese?" I grew up surrounded by a thriving Vietnamese-American population, and I was spoiled. Spoiled because I'll never know what it's like to be the only Asian person in the class. Spoiled because I'll never know what it's like to live in a place where Asian people are only understood as stereotypes (or Vietnamese people are only thought of as victims in a war). Spoiled because being Asian and having Vietnamese pride never came at a cost for me, never came at the cost of ostracization or being misunderstood.
I can never understand those experiences, but I am starting to understand what being outside my Vietnamese bubble is like. And it's hard, but I can't really complain because my experiences are nothing compared to those of people who've experienced real hardship. Yes, it's hard when as a junior, I have to remind friends I made freshman year that, "Yes, I'm Vietnamese!" (as indicated by my last name) and tell them that I sometimes dream in Vietnamese and think in Vietnamese and do all matters of Vietnamese things. And it's frustrating when people tell me, "You don't look Vietnamese"-even when I insist that I think I look very Vietnamese-as though they were authorities on what Vietnamese people look like, moreso than someone who's actually Vietnamese(!). And it feels lonely when I don't have anyone to speak Vietnamese to and miss the chatter of voices speaking in Vietnamese around me. And it's awkard explaining that none of the other Asian cuisines can replace Vietnamese cuisine and that there is so much more to Vietnamese food than phở.
Those are all just inconveniences, though. Minor quibbles. Because when the academic quarter ends, I'll be back home again. Back where people think I am "obviously" Vietnamese, where Vietnamese restaurants abound, where I overhear people speaking Vietnamese at the mall, and the question of "where are you really from?"-if asked-is phrased with much more tact. And that, really, is a lot more than some people can say.
I love Tết! I miss the festivities. If I were at home, I'd be much closer to all the celebration. Alas! I am at school without a car, so I must settle for celebrating quietly without all the colorful excitement.
My mom mailed my sister and me some bánh chưng, which is a traditional New Year's food and super delicious! The bánh felt like a little slice of home. =) Apparently, my mom wanted to send us bánh tét instead, but she couldn't fit it inside a package. Now, I'll be forever curious because apparently, the only difference between the two is the shape (one is square and the other is round), but my mom sounded a bit disappointed that she couldn't sent us bánh tét. The preparation of the bánh is pretty intense, so my mom must have bought the bánh from someone she trusted to do a skilled job.
Here is a gorgeous picture of how the bánh looks from the outside (credits to bigherok@wordpress):
And I am totally craving Vietnamese food now. Especially bánh bột lọc or bún bò Huế. Massive. Craving. Overload. I need to learn how to cook Vietnamese food, so I don't have these random cravings. I'm very good at forcing myself not to think of how I'm missing out, but every once in a while, I can't help it.
I've got to admit; I am pretty Vietnamese (despite being born and raised in California). On New Year's Eve (as in December 31; how has time flown by so quickly?), I spent some time reconnecting with some friends of my parents whom I knew as a child but lost contact with after we stopped attending the same church. One of them, Cô Thanh (cô is a form of a address that means "aunt"), just looked at me in awe the whole time. She was genuinely shocked that I ate even the Vietnamese food that could be considered less "accessible" to non-Vietnamese people. And she loved that I speak, read, and write Vietnamese as well. (In fact, I read my Bible in Vietnamese sometimes too. I am pretty paranoid; I don't want to lose my facility in the language. I'd feel as though I were losing a huge part of myself.) She kept exclaiming, "You are so Vietnamese!" and I-not going to lie-was beaming. I may or may not take a little too much pride in being Vietnamese.
... I can't really imagine it any other way, though. That's who I am. I am enthusiastic and passionate about every term I use to describe myself-I wouldn't call myself a Christian, a writer, a singer, or any of those other identifiers unless those terms truly informed how I think about myself and how I live my life.
*
Anyway, I have an entry coming up about "doing the right things" that's related to fresh starts! After the craziness of last week, in a sense, this weekend is a fresh start, and it happens to coincide with Valentine's Day, Lunar New Year, and Presidents Day (for us Americans!). I love three-day weekends. And at least two of the three holidays anyway. =P
Happy Lunar New Year, Presidents Day, and Valentine's Day to all!
Hoping to update very soon!
~ Jen ♥
*
P.S. There are two submissions by Vietnamese-American women in the Asian Women Blog Carnival: 1 and 2. Both are gorgeous and poignant, and I feel incredibly spoiled when reading them because I can empathize but I can't understand. I can't understand-and I'd only be pretending if I said I did-because I was born in the United States and grew up in the city with the largest Vietnamese population outside Vietnam. I've attended schools that were 40-50% Asian my entire life, including my current university. My hometown has a higher ethnic Vietnamese population than Chinese population; I even know ethnic Chinese people who were commonly asked, "Are you Vietnamese?" I grew up surrounded by a thriving Vietnamese-American population, and I was spoiled. Spoiled because I'll never know what it's like to be the only Asian person in the class. Spoiled because I'll never know what it's like to live in a place where Asian people are only understood as stereotypes (or Vietnamese people are only thought of as victims in a war). Spoiled because being Asian and having Vietnamese pride never came at a cost for me, never came at the cost of ostracization or being misunderstood.
I can never understand those experiences, but I am starting to understand what being outside my Vietnamese bubble is like. And it's hard, but I can't really complain because my experiences are nothing compared to those of people who've experienced real hardship. Yes, it's hard when as a junior, I have to remind friends I made freshman year that, "Yes, I'm Vietnamese!" (as indicated by my last name) and tell them that I sometimes dream in Vietnamese and think in Vietnamese and do all matters of Vietnamese things. And it's frustrating when people tell me, "You don't look Vietnamese"-even when I insist that I think I look very Vietnamese-as though they were authorities on what Vietnamese people look like, moreso than someone who's actually Vietnamese(!). And it feels lonely when I don't have anyone to speak Vietnamese to and miss the chatter of voices speaking in Vietnamese around me. And it's awkard explaining that none of the other Asian cuisines can replace Vietnamese cuisine and that there is so much more to Vietnamese food than phở.
Those are all just inconveniences, though. Minor quibbles. Because when the academic quarter ends, I'll be back home again. Back where people think I am "obviously" Vietnamese, where Vietnamese restaurants abound, where I overhear people speaking Vietnamese at the mall, and the question of "where are you really from?"-if asked-is phrased with much more tact. And that, really, is a lot more than some people can say.