I arrived back in the U.S. at the end of January, after three weeks spent reconnecting with the homeland that I have not seen for three and a half years. It is hard to say if I ever settled back into the modalities of living that are redolent of my childhood: my bedroom emptied out to the unmoveable necessities, my friends dispersed all over the world, my daily concerns much more forgiving of a post-graduate adult on paid time off. In fact, I would have felt less incongruous with my perceptions of home had my family been entirely separated from me, and I from their lives. But I have grown into the banality of regularizing my daily updates through video calls, replacing afterschool rambles astride my parents’ motorbikes with virtual interfaces that are never stably connected on both sides. My parents have accepted a physical distance from me that does not subtract from our familial connection. I have not.

There is an existential disharmony that befell me my first step inside my home and nagged me for the remainder of the first weekend. I had expected many sweeping changes. My first time home after four months abroad, four new commercial complexes popped up on my three-kilometer ride to school. I was certain that, this time around, things would look unrecognizable, that the comings and goings of people in this vertically dense city would wear away my precise recollection of where I had lived my formative years. But I was scared of how things looked the same, structurally. I was unsure why I could tell where the wooden chopsticks were hidden in my kitchen, even though my parents bought them around the start of the pandemic. I was uncomfortable with the idea that I could operate a motorized vehicle, or lie down on my sister’s bed for a siesta as she looked unfazed. I did not know how to behave my ownership, a naturally implied authority, over items I never actually called my possessions.

Three days in, I gave up intellectualizing my trip. I decided it would take me forever to provide a coherent theorem of my self-inquiries, so I proceeded to just let loose first and reflect later. I think this might have been the second time I roamed around Hanoi with no ongoing business (the first being the summer before college), and I was glad to rediscover the art of being perpetually tardy. It mostly had to do with traffic and overbooking my dates, but my adrenaline first kicked in when I was almost late for my visa interview: the one thing I extensively pre-planned before even buying my flight tickets. With a 10:40AM appointment I decided, the night before, to meet up with someone for a morning phở date, then still decided there was enough time to go eat chè, glossing over the fact that I then had to go print out extra 5cm-by-5cm copies of my portrait, go home, change to more decent clothing, arrive at the embassy, (pay the guard to keep my backpack–that was more of a chicanery), and do the interview before 11AM. Everything still went according to plan; I became rather revved up to find out just how many reunion meetings I can ‘check off’ in the least amount of time given.

I acquired more tameness to myself, nonetheless. In high school I would never take into consideration going home early for dinner or not going out at all. At some point I acquiesced to the reality that I do not need to meet everyone everytime I am in Vietnam. In fact, the primary purpose of my trip was to visit my grandfather at his altar, for I was absent when he passed away. There was a palpable sense of sorrow, of an impetus to recognize the terminality and ephemerality of life and happiness, that agitated insecurities of any recently bereft adolescent: an expression of risk-aversion to the futures of regretting lost times that fly in the face of a child abroad upon reunion with surviving relatives. I was more tuned into their storge, how much they had hoped to be engaged in my life, despite how much I had pushed them away. I engaged in as many family events as I could, more proactively than I would have before college. To my parents, I am wiser; to me, I am ever more cognizant of my existential anxieties, transfixed on the off-chance sorrows that never really happened in real life. I chalk it up to the indie women of my life, especially Lana Del Rey and Mitski.

If I have struggled to call any land in the US home for the past three years (except Yale and a bit of Boston), I was determined to induce any evocations of home I could feel while literally at home. I visited the places I used to frequent (of course, the infamous Hanoi-Amsterdam High School for the Gifted), dropped by my many relatives’ houses unannounced, and haphazardly picked long-winded paths to attempt surpassing vehicular gridlock–things I consider to be both rituals I personally partook in and emblems of what it felt like to be in a home-like system of support. I was pleasantly surprised by the ways with which people’s approach to their daily lives differed from what I am professionally used to. There is so much more emphasis on informal networks of referral, recommendation, and review that no way anyone could have figured out. I still remember visiting this traditional medicinal spa whose front was a non-operational clothing shop and staff, 20-something women doubly masked up. They knew my name before I arrived, and at some point rolled boiling hot eggs on my face as part of the high-end skin rejuvenation treatment. On my first day I could not discard my disturbed curiosity at the number of clients who were there and the fact that I could not find any information about the place online. The spa was actually extremely protective of their own customer base and would limit how many active clients they treated. I still do not know if it was any good, but the hermeneutics of this two-week therapy was a phenomenon worthy of anthropological investigation.

My friends are starting out with their first jobs, as am I. Some are continuing their medical, diplomatic, and creative aspirations that I have been familiar with since high school; most (out of the fifty-or-so that I managed to meet up with) are climbing the corporate ladder or still exploring how to merge personal passions with dependable income sources. I think I am one of the few people in my middle and high school cohort that press on with deeply specialized interests and have yet to feel shattered from rigidities of post-college concerns (i.e., have a quarter-life crisis). I inevitably defaulted to memories of our high school dramatics that in hindsight are laughably trivial. I have always had a soft spot for something genuine, even if they are more embarassing. I particularly loved when we would string together fragments or perspectives of storied events that at the time no one knew better.

But now we are onto our own paths, and for many of my friends in Vietnam those paths are less ambitious than what I am provided with, given my college education. I have learned to be more individualistic, drawing my own epistemologies and ontologies that escape the boundaries of Vietnam, the philosophies to which I also subscribed. I learned a new process to have my own dreams, to a point where I forgot what used to inspired me. With my homebound pilgrimage, I picked up as much about my own defamiliarization and refamiliarization with my bearings, as I did about a realist reading of the growth opportunities in dominant Vietnamese ecosystems. Its nurture will still benefit me, but in a way that I find unfulfilling. I have no coherent thought about how the trip changed my mind, but I gain more confidence in being a nomadic universalist agent with a personal perspective than a contributor to the de facto Vietnamese institutions. I am living for me, for my kins, and for a chance to weather great storms I have been preparing myself to brace. On this quixotic pursuit, I hope one day I am poised to find myself back at the place called home.