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Where We’ve Been And Where We’re Going (Again)

I just booked our plane tickets back to the United States. Yikes.

We fly from Amsterdam to Chicago on August 19th. After a few days visiting my mom in Chicago, we’re going to drive, bus, or fly to Ohio.

And then, we plan to stay mostly in place for a while in Ohio – for at least a year, but almost certainly longer – so that Theo can go to school, make long-term friends, and develop a deeper relationship with his grandparents than facilitated by our weekly Skype sessions.

I admit that I feel melancholy. But I also feel silly about the melancholy, both because the end of the trip isn’t particularly close and because, even if it were, I can look forward to a very good life even when remaining relatively stationary.

So, tonight I’ll just let myself feel a little melancholy. Tomorrow I’ll remind myself of all the goods things to come.

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Books I Read About Vietnam While In Vietnam

  

Saigon: An Epic Novel of Vietnam – a novel that weaves together the stories of American, Vietnamese, and French families from 1925 to 1975. For someone like me, who was born after the end of the American/Vietnam war and knew even less about the French colonization of Indochina, it was a good introduction to the complex history of Vietnam in the 1900s. 

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam – a beautiful memoir and my favorite read of the month. The author was born in Vietnam but fled with his family first to Indonesia and then to the United States after his father was released from Vietcong prison. Almost 20 years later, the author returns to Vietnam to bike the length of the country, visiting family and chasing memories along the way. The memoir weaves together the author’s experiences, past and more recent, with his questions about belonging and identity. I very much recommend this book, whether you plan to visit Vietnam or not. 

Vietnam: Rising Dragon –  a nonfiction exploration of the economic, political, and cultural realities of more recent-day Vietnam. At times, I was thrown by Vietnam, particularly by juxtapositions of communism and shops like Prada. This book helped me better understand (or at least helped me focus my questions about) how the country has been changing over the past decades (and has in other ways remained very much the same.) I read this book towards the end of my stay in Vietnam and at the times found myself skimming because the depth just felt like too much information for my last week – but that was me, not the book. If you’re seriously interested in (almost) present-day Vietnam, this would be a great read.

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Dancing

Theo and I walked to a nearby mall to pick up a few supplies requested by his new preschool. Of course, he couldn’t resist dancing on the large bird mosaic outside. (Really, who could?)

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This is the Core Pacific City mall in Taipei, which was a pretty big deal when it opened and was even included as a landmark in SimCity 4.

As far as malls go*, it seemed nice enough, but it was almost surreally empty. Theo and I found ourselves walking hallways and riding escalators mostly alone. Perhaps Monday afternoons aren’t the best time for  malls. Or, perhaps all of the people have flocked to the newer, shinier malls opened more recently. At least they left the bird.

* I’m not a mall person.

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And Now We’re Traveling With A Four-Year-Old

For Theo’s first birthday, there were no festivities. He was still a baby. He didn’t care. (I even checked to verify that there were indeed no photos of some celebratory measure that I had forgotten. There weren’t. It didn’t happen. However, I found photos of Theo dated four days after he turned one, at a children’s museum. So, we must not have been too horrible of parents.)

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Making Space for Helping

Theo really seems to enjoy helping with certain cooking and cleaning tasks. Here, he is washing bok choy and vacuuming the kitchen in our Taipei apartment. For me, the mental battle is remembering to that there is long-term value in incorporating him into our daily household chores, even when it takes more time and energy than just doing it myself.

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