Ong Tao, Red Envelopes, Fever Dreams: A New Years Not My Own

skoral    Blog     adoption, c-5 galaxy crash, operation babylift, rosemary taylor, tet, vietnamese new year

On the most important of days, in a land I cannot remember, traditions and culture reach a most revered point in the year. Tet – Vietnamese New Year is a time of renewal and refresh. The quintessential aromas of traditional Vietnamese foods fill the narrow streets from street-side vendors and restaurants alike. Homes are cleaned, people wear new clothes and debts from the previous year paid. Ubiquitous red traditional decorations appear, adorning the entryways of houses, a general bustle on the streets reaches an all-time high, the stores are full of shoppers making purchases for the new year, and young children eagerly await the famed “red envelope” containing money for the new year.

Sometime in my life, I want to return to experience Tet for myself –breath the air, eat the foods and reacquaint myself with a past that is tucked away in my infant memory. What does real Pho taste like? What does a bustling Saigon marketplace feel like? What does Saigon smell like? What is it that people who’ve been there fall in love with and makes them want to return? When I do go, will I have some kind of flash-back? Will I remember some lost memory? A place or face perhaps? –clues to a past life that were locked away amidst death, destruction and untold horrors that only resurface in recurring nightmares that still haunt me? Watching children executed. Women taken into huts screaming, never to exit. Faceless ghosts from a past that can only be unlocked with fever dreams and nightmares. Jarring awake, drenched in sweat with that cold piercing fear and sorrow that is unfathomable to those who have not experienced war.

It has been 37 years since my departure. A visit is long overdue for this prodigal son. Not the first and surely not the last to wonder what life had been and what it could have been, however unlike many, it isn’t a “lost parent” searching mission. My parents are here, and for me, they always have been. I want to experience the life, smells, sounds and all that culminates to identify me as “Vietnamese”. A deep search for many of us adoptees. We are living lives between two worlds, belonging to neither — an unsettling and uncomforting feeling to be sure. Around “my people”, I am not one of them. I cannot speak or understand, yet from the outside, I look like them and am identified as one of them.

I am an adoptee.

Vietnamese / Adoption Links of Interest

• Vietnam Online -Tet
• Family Culture – Tet
• Rosemary Taylor – FFAC
• Friends For All Children
• Adopt Vietnam
• Operation Babylift (1975)
• C-5 Galaxy Crash (4/4/1975)
• Mam Non Organization (Ann Arbor, MI)