Santa Cruz has been raining a lot. And when I say a lot, I do not mean the good kind; it is a ceaseless state of precipitation that leaves every ground surface a trip-and-fall hazard. I feel like I should be at the level of gratitude for rain of Drew Barrymore ‘whenever you can go out into the rain, do not miss the opportunity’, given just how the dryness of the local climate renders the community in constant fear of a forest fire. Instead, rain fills me with dread as I move my schedule around to avoid, to the best of my will, being stranded outside in the outpouring trying to pedal my bike home.

I have noticed how I began to perceive rain as an inconvenience more and more. In my first semester living on Old Campus, it would rain every Tuesday and leave the walkway impossible to navigate without jumping in at least one puddle. There was this one area right in front of Vanderbilt Hall where the tiles had sunken just enough to create the world’s smallest lake; if I happened to be in a good mood, leaping across the body of water would invariably ruin the subsequent activities on my calendar. I remember it was always on Tuesday because I had chemistry lab on Wednesdays. I only had two pairs of footwear, and one was a Crocs pair half a size too small. One time the showers carried over to the next day, and the professor had to wrap my only other PPE-compliant shoes in plastic bags for me to be allowed to enter the lab.

The duration of rain has always been a nuissance, though. When it would rain in Hanoi, motorbikers would pull out hooded raincoats hidden in the trunk under their seat and press on against the bloodbath of a 5PM traffic jam. My responsibilities as a kid slouching underneath the raincoat’s extended cape were to extend my arms so the water would not get onto my parents’ or my pants, and occasionally poke fingers to push the water off the hood top (you know, like toying with the hair stuck on the cape at the barbershop). Sometimes the water level gets dangerously high, and I had to be on the lookout for potential splashing from unknowing speedy automobiles.

Vietnam rains a lot. The Red River Delta that contains Hanoi sits comfortably within the tropics, influenced by the seasonality of monsoons and extremity of recent climate change. We hear about ten hurricanes every year, affecting mainly the provinces along the coastline and devastating their livelihoods. Even without such catastrophes, the humidity level can be felt throughout the year. The summer gets sweltering and the winter chills feel subzero; my personal nemesis is the moisture levels of late February that breeds generations of disease vectors and lubricates every floor, mirror, and pair of glasses. The flood that swallowed Hanoi in 2008 singlehandedly changed my perception of climate vulnerability. I could still remember sitting on the second floor of my primary school’s building C, looking out on Halloween day thinking that whoever deity in charge of weather control must be feeling very thematic with the occasion, only to come home eight hours later on foot for a third of the journey as the water had risen by the waist. My very narrow alley was inundated with biohazardous river effluent overflowing into everyone’s house; the pluvial lockdown was escalated by a power outage starting on the second day, rationed ramen supply on the fourth, and public drainage actually doing its duties on its one-week anniversary. The event affected the urban citizenry on a sociocultural level. The deluge of media commentary that spawned off (the parody song that marked Táo Quân’s best year) was the cherry on top of my eight-year-old self’s mandatory vacation.

At some point I grew a commensalist relationship with rain. I had to–it is not like it would never recur in my lifetime, and by the looks of it the frequency was on an upward trend. But rain is not really kind, especially the ones in the summer. They are torrential and unpredictable; they engulf the busy capital city within hours of forceful droplets pelting down onto inox roofs and plastic helmets. They wore away the wooden windows of my house to an extent where our house would always frantic to secure a towel against the creeks of every fenestra the very instance rain was ascertained. My house dry our clothes by hanging them on the top floor in the wind, so at least one person also had to expeditiously bring them all inside before they flew away into oblivion. The most formidable nights were adorned with the company of thunder and hail to create the cacophonic sound effects that kept me awake way past my bedtime.

I ingratiated myself with rain first in the backseat of my parents as they drove me to extra school, with my feet perched onto small sturdy wings that rotated 90 degrees away from the vehicles’ flank. My sandals were the only items of footwear I enjoyed before ninth grade, and carefully I would extend my feet into the showering rain. Sometimes it hurt, and I would retract my feet; every trip I had to attempt the feeling of raindrops plummeting onto my toenails at least once. It was ticklish, probably dirty, and definitely the direct cause of my parents scolding my soaking wet pants when we eventually made it to my lesson, but it felt somehow cathartic to be able to brave the weather with one body part while the rest was so safely sheltered. During summertime, rain felt like it was washing off all the sweat and dirt that had grotesquely accumulated on my skin. Rain would very briefly but powerfully interrupt unending days of harsh equatorial sun and force people to pause with their hectic lives under the embrace of a random house with a second floor protruding onto the streets. It rejuvenated a city that was enervated yet inertial to a break, airing it out with an energy so fresh and vivacious. With the exception of taste, I feel Vietnamese rain with all my senses: with touch as I embraced it, with visual and auditory perception as I moved my study desk within safe distance of my house’s windows now reinforced, and especially with a smell that I later learned is dubbed petrichor.

I sensed, though, that I developed a liking for the element of water (in its liquid form). This manifested first with how I wished the feng shui of my birth year was water (it is gold, for mệnh Kim, and it is impossible to intuit) or how I picked the water village to start in Pocket Naruto, but seeped into my intellectual journey as I tried to interpret the world around me. I realized that Vietnamese history is very proudly concerned with water, in commonalities with other early civilizations like how they construct around rivers, but in particularities like how deepwater rice has remained a staple in Vietnamese society for all of its existence. Water in Vietnam is in abundance, sometimes cataclysmically, yet access to clean potable water is not universal as many still have in-house rainwater harvesting units. The word Hanoi means within river, as the central districts are enclosed by the Red River, yet the highest quality of water resources management still could not handle many instances of rain. There are many floating markets and aquaculture farms in the Mekong Delta of which communities are interconnected by a complex water system, and threats of salinity intrusion are challenging the communal sustainability. Water tells a story of Vietnamese development, and I feel the importance in its ubiquity.

I was most actively probing into the economics and politics of water in high school. For the first Model UN conference that I was its leader, I had a vision for this inter-committee sequence of events related to different water crises: from oil explorations in the Arctic Ocean by UNSC directives affecting the ocean water levels of half of UNEP representative countries present, to UNDP investigating waterborne illnesses that propagated through refugee camps set in UNHCR countries. If these conceptions were rather naive and romanticized, then I also tried out interning for a non-profit working on civil engineering projects for village-scale irrigation in remote areas of Central Vietnam. I learned some ArcGIS and legalese parsing, and brewed some interest in the geopolitics of water management both for community resilience and multinational diplomacy as scandals of Hà Tĩnh fisheries decimated by a Taiwanese manufacturing plant’s toxic discharge stirred controversies across all levels of governance.

In college, my interests were tweaked, away from water to energy, and away from political manoeuvring to scientific boundary-pushing. To be more nuanced, the basis of my interests has remained consistent; it is the details with which I felt most appropriate to accomplish, as an international student pursuing higher education in the United States, that had evolved with remarkable difference. In being told to opt for STEM majors I discovered my love with the Chemical and Environmental Engineering department, and in thinking about future development I found energy-related infrastructural technologies to be especially empowering. Nonetheless, most of what I eventually was drawn to in college was related to water (i.e., water treatment, water use, and water economy), from my first term paper, the first publication I co-authored, to the first paid internship I partook in.

A part of me blames the aforementioned context of my tertiary education for this transition. Water is treated mainly as a liability and not a commodity; there is not much momentum behind the rally for good water usage practices anywhere in the US, much as environmentalists would prefer. I am also removed from directly feeling the urgency of water management to the same levels as I was in Vietnam, not that the problems have since stopped existing. The discursive status quo that I am now positioned in places protecting extractable common goods (like water) in a dimmer limelight compared to more monetizable priorities (like automation or even energy). Even the EPA has not officially regulated the filtration of microplastics in domestic water. In the hierarchy of power I am acutely aware of my incapacity to enact change without participating in the system.

At the end of the day I do not think there is any agony to feel remorse over. There is growing literature on the energy-water nexus, both components being integral to the objectives I hope to achieve in ways inseparable. I look forward to the electrification of many underdeveloped regions over the world, electrification also being a technological innovation I studied in wastewater treatment. I also do not think I need to rationalize my own maturation like an ode to an old flame, especially when learning about water quality control, fluid dynamics, and digital water filtration proved to be the most formative intellectual experiences I have had. Just ask Joon about what my favorite state of matter is–it is a bit embarassing that we have discussed this more than once.

But perhaps I should regret my dwindling enjoyment of rain. It used to signal an occasion for a breather; now it coerces an exasperate mentality of feeling shunted from going outside and doing more. I say that I miss the torrential summer Vietnamese rains that would come, clean up, and go, and there is truth to that. Rain would take me by surprise and reward me soon after with the overwhelming sensations of a city awakening anew, while the Santa Cruz variant lingers past its welcome and concludes my night on a low note. I do not know if I would have enjoyed rain differently if I had grown up in the Bay Area. There are plentiful confounding factors, such as the fact that I now have a more complicated schedule, sense of self, and knowledge of how my past shaped me. Maybe it takes time; maybe I will never know.

Today Santa Cruz has rained a lot, and of the bad kind. I have put on my new playlist named Floating and looped it twice to set the tone for this exposition. There is always so much to do and not enough time to live: a growing stack of books on my desk, a boiling kettle of water for my tea, and even a nighttime routine to get myself in the mood for a good sleep, to wake up in time for work. It is hard to feel always in complete control when treading the fine balance between doing too much and not doing enough. I remind myself of why I started liking the element of water in the first place: for its fluidity, the power in its gentility, and its all-encompassing continuity as it traverses and transmutes. I need to find ways to take breathers of my own volition. Seeking joy in everything in life is strenuous, but whenever I have the patience I should not deprive myself of a chance to have fun. Hopefully the new day will be a different day.