Oh
boy! What a month it has been! A quick trip back to the USA, lost luggage, the
world’s best banana bread and a great week of teaching followed by grading the
worst exam I have ever seen…welcome back to life in Nam.
When
I left this blog last I was gearing up for my trans-pacific 4 state, 4
interview crisscross contiguous lower-48 whirlwind and that it was. Between all
the planes, TSA checkpoints, and airports I was ready to just collapse by the
time I touched back down in HCMC, luggage-less but more on that later.
To
be honest I wasn’t ready for this trip back home. I distinctly remember sitting
on my bed at the Rising Dragon Grand in Hanoi during orientation – in my
underwear sweating and filling out secondary applications thinking, “February
is eons away”. To be honest it was. In all that heat and all that newness, and
with the unknown prospect of 9 months in the provinces stretching out before me
I couldn’t even fathom making it to Christmastime. But I did and just when I felt
like I could live and really enjoy living here I was off to America and my
future had come a callin’.
For
me the interviews are the fun part of the application process. Being a stack of
paper is an unpleasant and impersonal existence so being able to sit down and
explain why medicine, why those institutions and explain my crazy non-linear
path was the opportunity I was waiting for. What made my trip back to the USA
very special was the amount of family time I got to spend. When I was in
Arizona I stayed with my father’s cousins once removed and we had family style
dinners and they were a hoot and a half. I met them when I was little (and have
no recollection of it) so meeting them and getting to know them was fantastic.
Then in Philadelphia my wonderful parents drove 6 hours in winter from
Rochester to spend Saturday with me. Getting to see them, eating some homemade
Coon family bear claws (Thanks Mom!), and playing cards really made it special.
I also got to visit some dear professors and I spent Sunday with my research
advisor banging out the final edits to our manuscript and had dinner with his
family. I am proud to say that the textbook chapter (we – my advisor and I –
were invited to write one on the thirdhand smoke polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbon (PAHs) toxicology contamination research that I have been doing for
2ish years at PhilaU) is off to peer review and barring any major catastrophe
should in print in the fall. All the opportunities I had to connect with people
really broke up the airport/interview/airport/interview/airport cadence, took
some of the pressure off, and were fantastic.
Being
back in the US also showed me how provincial I have become. When I landed in
the San Francisco airport the view of the elevated highways, concrete bridges
and airport train stunned me. I stood there god smacked and spent the rest of
the trip feeling like I was on another alien planet mouth agog like I was in a
zoo with rare animals. The amount of development, the lights, the drivers
staying in their lanes, sidewalks actually being reserved for people, drivers
yielding to pedestrians not aiming for them like it was hunting season and so
much more left me feeling like I wasn’t at home.
And
perhaps that was the theme – I wasn’t home or in a place (beyond PhilaU, and
even that to some extent) that I recognized. The USA is where I was born, it’s
my culture, it’s my people, it’s is where my future is…but I felt so out of
place – cold, really cold (especially in Philly) and totally out of place.
America may be in my blood, but Vietnam has thinned that blood and tanned my
skin to a shade of bronze I have never reached. I found myself in the morning
missing cà phé sũa da, craving pho and as odd as it sounds, resentful of
everything being in English. Here in Nam I rarely know what is happening around
me as it’s all in Vietnamese. The blessing of that is that I have learned to
tune out all the chatter and just be introspective me, or me and my music and
book and let Vietnam soak in. In America I understood all this background
chatter and I couldn’t tune it out. The entire trip was sensory and auditory
overload. Things to look forward to in 3 months when the curtain falls on my
time here in Nam.
When
I landed back in HCMC I felt like I was back in my rhythm. The cabbie spoke no
English, my bag was lost somewhere between NYC and HCMC and I was hot and
glistening. Ah! It was nice to be back.
A
quick tangential side note about the bag. It was never put on the plane from
JFK to Beijing even though I made it all the way to HCMC. So it sat in JFK for
about 3 days, and then sat in Beijing for about 3 more. Finally on day 7 it had
to be driven to Cao Lãnh. It was difficult to have no clothes, or a razor. But
in the end I had my father, my host and me working on it from both sides of
Pacific, in 3 countries and 3 languages. What’s important is that the two
loaves of my mother’s homemade banana bread with walnuts, cinnamon and nutmeg
made it safe and sound. And last night was a sad night because I finished the
last loaf. Yep 1 week and 2 loaves gone… don’t judge. God how I miss my
mother’s kitchen… and my mother too, of course!
So
to wrap this up – I had an excellent teaching week. I have finally learned how
to design handouts with enough review/grammar points and successfully combined
multi-media for a streamlined and easily grasped lesson! SCORE! Being back in
Cao Lãnh, getting coffee at my favorite café (where I spend my mornings either
reading, working or like I am now typing my blog over eggs and coffee for $1.50)
and running around the park really settled me. In addition the interviews are
over and it feels like a huge weight has been lifted. I am energized and ready
to tackle these last 3 months and knock this grant out of the park. My time
back in the US made me realize (just a little) how much I have changed, how
much Vietnam has been imbued within me and how much I love this place, my
students, teaching and that I am not ready to go home. It also was a quick
preview of how intense reverse culture shock is going to be.
Goodbye
for now readers!
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