My parents moved to Hanoi at most a decade before I was born, but both have racked up a boastful list of people that they knew one way or another. During Tết (Lunar New Year), when our family would back to Hanoi from our grandparents’ provinces, we would always do a tour around acquaintances that we would otherwise never meet up with. One of these people is bác Tam, whose abode lies next to two other residences (that my family also somehow knows). Our families kept close contact. Bác Tam stayed on top of my family’s life updates, with my first impression being when he asked me about our newly rebuilt house when I was five. At some point during elementary school, during one of these visits, he discussed with my dad how he reconstructed the house to raise the ceiling of the first floor, and I have never completely had an answer for how that is accomplished without demolishing the structure.

I do remember his house being one of the first weirdly nice houses that I visited. It had three floors: as you stepped into the first floor, there was a five-meter-squared area for your shoes and to keep the dog at bay from the interior. The second floor had a long hallway with two bathrooms and two bedrooms; I was told to go to the “play room” on the third floor before, but I never did. At this time I was already quite badly myopic for a fourth/fifth-grader, and my parents shamed me repeatedly for always asking for their phones to play silly byte-sized video games. Exploring every crevice of someone’s house was also considered an unbecoming behavior. The reason why I went up to the second floor was to take a look at their one-month-old second child, and to wash my hands while the downstairs bathroom was occupied.

What puzzled me at that point was the presence of two bathrooms on the same floor. At this point their older child was only two, so they must not be using this second bathroom. Also bathroom placements feel like a function of necessity. If the third (uncharted) floor had a similar layout, then there would be a total of five bathrooms in a household of four. If this floor had zero or one bathroom, then is the second bathroom on the second floor really necessary? My house was built on very constrained land, so its verticality implied more bathrooms for convenience (we had two and a half bathrooms in total). What could one possibly store in these different bathrooms? At some point I suspected that bác Tam was brewing his own alcohol, just like my dad in our first floor bathroom. That bathroom was so tiny that my six-year-old self had to put my legs atop those vases to fit into the toilet.

During the COVID semesters, I had a lot of time to spend on myself. I had shopping sprees, treated working out like newfound joy, and started independent research. I loved envisaging how mosaic pieces of my future could come together at mundane intersections of life, like how I could be cranking out a banger essay on this folding couch we bought for twenty dollars. With the transience of off-campus housing, however, I was always aware of how I should not invest too much in things that I will be forced to throw away. My permanent residence is not in the United States anyway.

But that line of thinking also nipped several other ideas in the bud. I wanted to have a pet, but I felt compelled to adopt one only when I feel “permanent” enough. I felt so much peer pressure in seeing friends posting pictures with their own children on social media, because a child is easily one of the most evident signs of permanence. I, too, want a child, but I want to commit to my child the best, most nurturing, and most prepared environment they can have. None of that was looking like they were happening in the next ten years, considering the likelihood with which I would be in a doctoral program.

I kept my wildest dreams to myself and to the group of friends I hung out with in college. Sometimes I would just blurt out saying how much I want a dog, and other times I would vocalize my thesis on engineering a curriculum tailored to homeschooling. Recently, however, I asked Elliot if he had ever wanted to build his own house. The housing market in the United States has been dismal, especially for renters and new owners, to the extent that I internalized a visceral reaction to being in a 30-year financial contract for my own tổ ấm. My ideas, both architectural and functional, for my house become more specific by the day, that it would only make sense for me to build it. I want books sparsed throughout the house like a library café, so that my children grow to love reading and spatial navigation. I fear being controlling over my children’s lives, so I wanted to construct a space that can accommodate any interest they might have, whatever way lives lead us, with or without my attention.

It recently clicked for me why it would be logical for me to have my children use their own bathroom. Bathrooms taught myself a variety of things. I learned the craving of hygiene and the responsibilities associated with its upkeep. I learned alchemy, as if washing myself with products in a specific order or amount would change how clean I get. I learned organization, seeing that toothbrushes should be in one cup and toothpaste et al. in another. I learned to be patient, to be mindful of shared spaces, and to be protective of them as if they are mine and mine only, even in a house where at least nine people use it everyday. In a house with no one having any personal space, I afforded myself personal time to read in the bathroom, keeping a stack of comics on the shampoo shelf. I think the politics of bedrooms can become complicated, but the bathroom is an easy first-in-life exercise in care of the self and the creative liberty that comes with it.

Being to people’s houses is an honor I do not take lightly. To be welcomed into someone’s personal space, to be in attendance as someone shrugs off any social pretense, and to feel comfort with them, is a privilege I take pride in when it happens. Bác Tam’s was not the house with the most grandeur I have visited, even in Hanoi. Some of the amenities of these mind-blowingly gorgeous places, however, feel a bit extraneous, especially given the income level I feel I would be living great life in. But what I assume to be his and his wife’s decision to give their children a separate bathroom, regardless of their rationale, is respectable for Vietnamese parents of that generation, stereotyped as old-school, frugal, and oblivious to privacy. Some of that feels understandable: I used the communal (as in, belonging to the entire commune of houses) bathroom for the first three years of my life, so having your own bathroom was a luxury. But I do not wish my children to experience what I went through, as long as I can afford its price tag. I beat my odds so they could go beat bigger odds, like making Stephen Wolfram’s level of achievement at roughly the same age while well-versed in Virginia Woolf’s literature. I want to build my own house, of possibilities of knowledge, so that my children can feel secure in being themselves before going into the real world. If they could do their own septum piercing in our bathrooms (my sister did this behind my parents’ back), that would be applaudable.

If my aspirations turn out a bit costly, perhaps I would negotiate on the bathroom.