I am fighting an uphill battle. I become worn out from writing anything after each part, yet painfully wised up to the reality that the fine print of each semester will fade away the longer I procrastinate. For a journey brimming with joy, I do not want to deprive myself of an opportunity to indulge in the long-gone fantasies of myself in New Haven.
Except, this part is one of the two that transpire beyond Connecticut. A rite of passage for Yale undergrads before COVID hit was to travel abroad in a Yale summer program, most often fully sponsored as an extension of our financial aid package. The catalog of programs consists of a third language immersion, a third cultural exchange, and a third regular-degular lecture hall instruction at a prestigious European counterpart in the names of LSE, Oxbridge, et cetera. Vietnamese international students at Yale have traditionally picked the language immersion program as part of the language requirements we already have had to fulfil on campus during the year.
I had a slightly broader strategy. Yale language courses often span 5 levels from L1 to L5, and students are required to take either three levels of a language or up to L5 if they place out of all lower-level courses. The one exception to this rule is if the student had enrolled in a high school whose primary language of instruction was not English. In this case, they can either take one expository English class or two introductory levels of a third language to satisfy their language requirements. I have discussed a bit about my distaste for writing grading that de-emphasizes the rigor of the content, but I was also aware of how intense most language courses at Yale are. L1-L4 classes meet all days of the week and are worth 1.5 times the regular number of credits for its hefty workload; they are also never scheduled for later than noon. The only way for me to avoid taking language classes during the school year lies in the single summer program that teaches L1 and L2 Italian (and a Humanities class on top). It would make my choices during the school year a lot simpler, my choices for my first summer a lot simpler, and my potential stories to tell family and friends a lot richer.
Journey from the West, to the West
The story is structured roughly by my arrival at and departure from the Italian Peninsula, but in my opinion the preparatory work is the most ludicrous component. I got my acceptance into the program by late February, knowing that I should plan to get my Italian (Schengen) visa ready to go. The original plan was to while away a bit in the States for the two weeks between the end of the semester and the start of the program, fly from JFK to Rome on May 24, and rest adequately for the first day of classes on May 27. I reserved at an appointment with the Italian consulate in New York for April 30, asking my friend Nathan who went to NYU to host me in case I had free time and wanted to have a bit of fun in New York City.
I did not have a whole lot of experience with visa applications, albeit more than any of my relatives. The United States was the fourth country I properly visited: my first experience abroad was crossing the bridge from Lào Cai into the southernmost part of continental China under my mom’s passport, my second going to Malaysia for a MUN conference visa-free, and my third being invited to tour Doha as Georgetown Qatar handled all administrative affairs. My visa experience with the US embassy in Vietnam was precariously trouble-free. They asked me two questions: one about how I got this much financial aid from Yale (my family was poor), and another about why I had forgotten to sign at the bottom of my I-20. Mind you, the people online were telling me to prepare a copy of my birth certificate and my parents’ marriage papers, lest I should be asked about my family background. For Italy, I thought it would be straightforward, as I had no intention of overstaying in Europe and was financially sponsored by a prestigious university.
I showed up to my appointment with a fileholder crammed with miscellaneous papers, most importantly those that proved my studies and those that proved my identity. The consulate was at a street corner on the Upper East Side; the visa processing center on the bottom floor, accessed from the flank of the building, was guarded by a forever disgruntled security officer. I checked off my name, picked a seat that maximized my distance from the nearest visa applicant, as per the unspoken rules of uncomfortable public space etiquette. I observed that of the three booths, the first one seems to be expeditious, and the third one looked like the person had just rejected someone’s application. I felt like the odds were in favor of me going to the first person, because they probably would decide quickly that my papers were sufficient.
There was no way to target my interviewer, but I did get my theoretically preferable first booth. I prepared myself to the best of my abilities: I was a first-year student in a cultural exchange program, Yale was paying for everything I needed, and I would be traveling to Vietnam after I finished the program. After a series of biographical question, I relaxed my pretense, quietly stepping my right foot while the interviewer parsed through my documents. “How are you funding this trip?,” the interviewer asked. Yale was going to, as printed out in my financial aid award letter. No, they insisted that I had funds 15,000 dollars in excess as a form of traveler’s insurance. They said that I could return the next day (each appointment came with three ‘tries’) with supplementary documentation.
I was completely nonplussed because there was no way for me to come in possession of fifteen grand. This did not even seem to be something I should be liable for, so I promptly consulted my academic-and-international advisor, Ozan, who said I could probably acquire a letter of guaranteed support from Yale. Even that felt inadequate. Maybe my parents could get a bank statement from Vietnam and have it translated into English, but the turnover was not fast enough for me to return the next day. My ex lent me the money I needed to make my account appear like it had 15,000 dollars, and I managed to get the last possible walk-in appointment at Bank of American near Midtown. They empathized with my situation, and gave me a letter, with fresh embossing, confirming my ownership of that much money. Surely this has to work, I thought as I rested anxiously on Nathan’s air mattress.
This next attempt, I gunned for the same interviewer. Perhaps they would remember me, know my profile missing that one key element, and assume that the rest was already checked. “Are you coming back here after you finish your program?,” they asked. No, I am going back to Vietnam, I already prepared this response long before my appointment. The interviewer checked my passport and noted that my US visa were to expire at the end of July. Yes, I will be renewing this in Vietnam, I remarked, adding that no Vietnamese students had longer-than-one-year visas due to some policy from the US government that I was in no power to amend. I only booked my tickets to Italy, and I would book my tickets from Rome to Hanoi. They concluded that my visa could not be processed because my American visa would expire, but I insisted that the expiration date was half a month after my program. I earnestly swore that I had no intention of spending that much more time in Italy, to no avail.
At this point I was just irate. It was an unwinnable situation that was imposed upon me by two First World nations: the US would not give me more than a single-year visa, but Italy needed me to have more than a single-year American visa. My F-1 status, which is the actual document that proved my presence in the US, was for four years and should have been the principal consideration. I wanted to tell my interviewer to take this issue to the US government if they wanted my visa validity so much, but that process would take longer than my summer program itself. What could I do to make my plans clearer? I made a flight reservation to go to Vietnam two days after my program ended; I made an appointment with the US embassy in Hanoi for my visa renewal. I asked my Vietnamese seniors if they ever had the same issue (most went to France or Spain), but somehow I was alone.
For the last of my three tries, I eyed the third booth. Maybe that person had a different approach to visa processing, and the outcome would be different. At this point I was mentally resigned to simply not getting this visa and was basing my decisions on the highest odds of luck. This person was even wilder: my visa had to be valid for three months after my departure from Italy. This just straight up made no sense. My fight-or-flight response was on full gear. I could have started arguing. Instead, I turned on my conspirator mode, took my belongings to an empty Dunkin’ Donuts three blocks away, and mapped out my alternatives. The day was May 2.
With my laptop plugged in, I called my parents. Yale Summer Session administrators responded to my emergency request, saying that though they could not help me with my visa, they also could not allow me to miss any days because of the program’s intensity. I had two choices: I could renew my US visa and come back to the Italy consulate, or I could get my Italian visa in Vietnam. US visas cannot be renewed in the US, so I would have to go to Cuba or something, wait maybe three days to get my passport back, and wait for another ten days for the Italian consulate to ship my visa back to me at Yale (they would not allow pickups). Alternatively, I could go back to Vietnam, apply for visa there, and not worry about my US visa until I would return two months later. The issue was that I had finals. My last one was on May 7 in the afternoon, a Tuesday; I emailed the professor for ECON 121 to see if she could administer my exam at some earlier time. (This is in the same timeline as my Part 2, which means I just recovered from my unknown vomit-inducing sickness to this logistical rollercoaster). The Italy embassy in Hanoi did not conduct interviews on Fridays; there was one single flight that took off from JFK at 9PM of May 7 that would land in HAN at 7AM of May 9, a Thursday. My parents said that they were told European visas took about two weeks, bringing me to May 24, my original date of departure from JFK. I booked that flight from some low-budget airline that luckily operated in Thailand as well. I would leave Hanoi for Bangkok the day of May 25, then enjoy my only the only privilege of the Vietnamese passport of visiting ASEAN countries visa-free, and fly to Copenhagen and then to Rome on May 26. How I would get from Rome to my actual location (Siena of Tuscany) was of secondary concern.
Two days later while I was already back on campus, my professor told me she could not give me a different test date. Without that, my aforementioned strategy was the only remaining pathway to Italy. My test was scheduled to go until 4:30PM and my flight was at 9PM; the usual cheapest option of MetroNorth-the 6 line-the E line-Airbus would total at least 3.5 hours, which felt uncomfortably late for traveling an international flight with luggage. First-year me did not have a lot of belongings, so I packed everything in three boxes and two suitcases within the next day. I left my boxes in the basement of Ananya’s house (we became really close over the UN trip, and she lived really close to campus). I scheduled an email that instructed Joon and Elliot to bring my two suitcases to Phelps Gate at 4, where I were to pick up my pre-booked taxi to head for JFK. I filled out SafetyNet, Yale’s platform for requesting emergency funds for low-income students, asking for assistance with my flights to Hanoi. Right after we took our last suite photo as first-years, they emailed me back asking me for more details about my situation and my request estimates. It was during the walk from my suite to the Law School auditorium that I unlocked a whole new skill: typing a 1000-word essay that chronicled my desparate tribulation while pacing to a destination I had never visited.
At the same time, my parents absorbed some of the worry I had over the feasibility of this visa acquisition, so they also became creative with their odds maximization. One of my mom’s college friends’ husband just returned from an envoy, and his current workplace was opposite that of the Italy embassy in Hanoi. He put my name down in the appointment list, and befriended some employees at the embassy who told him about the requisitioned documentation they needed: the likes of bank statements, trip itineraries, and accommodation details. Some bribery was attempted to secure my chances, but it did not work as the embassy workers thought my case should be easy. If anything, they might facilitate the visa processing, as I needed it specifically in 14 days and they typically take 15 (this would have resulted in a weekend date). I think this friend ended up buying the embassy workers a round of bún chả for lunch.
My body was on autopilot from 2PM May 7 EST to 12PM May 9 GMT+7. I arrived at JFK five seconds before a throng of thirty-something travelers showed up to check in; I started my first purchase on my first credit card at the McDonalds inside the airport. My flight arrived an hour early, and so did my uncle (at this point my parents did not know how to drive a car). I was somehow still the third in line at the embassy and had to wait an hour for my turn, but my whole appointment took eight minutes as the worker already knew my entire situation. My struggle had not stopped yet. There were two flights from Hanoi to Bangkok that I could choose between, one with a two-hour layover and the other, eight-hour. I originally picked the eight-hour option because that meant they could see me off, but it eventually was critical in my journey to Italy because I magically lost my passport in the BKK airport. The upside was that my steps were simple and traceable: I was filling out a pamphlet in advance of the immigrations checkpoint, got approved to enter Thailand, picked up my one small suitcase, and bypassed the security point of no return. The downside was that all the security agents that could freely re-enter that section did not speak English, and I had to gesture the shape of a notebook-shaped leather-made document holder with a white serif Y letter on the #00356b blue to some personably clueless airport workers. It took a ballpark three hours total for the passport to land in my hand again (it was on the immigrations booth counter), and I dozed off in twenty-minute intervals at a quiet airport corner until my flight.
I had procrastinated planning from the last leg of this trip, and my lack of research definitely left me pressed for time once I arrived. I was ready to start figuring out how to get to Siena by 10PM, only after I had picked up my checked luggage, and learned that there were two main ways to travel long distances from Rome: the Termini, which was a train station, and the Tiburtina, which was more of a bus station. I got to Tiburtina, thinking that I could probably catch the first bus that traveled to the vicinity of Florence there was, but I learned the hard way that the station actually closed at midnight. Okay, but there were still a lot of people there. The security manager pushed me to wait outside the gate. The first bus came by and picked up a handful, which helped me realize that there were probably more busses to come. They looked like they had reserved tickets, so I came up and asked the bus driver. Apparently there was a FlixBus coming that could take me to Siena, but he did not know whether there were tickets left as they were processed through an app. The next FlixBus that arrived was southbound, but I discovered that FlixBus had free Wi-Fi that I could access in its vicinity. For the next hour, I utilized every second of Internet access to download the app, looked for a Siena-bound bus, and secured a 2AM ticket that would get me to right outside of the town at the crack of dawn. I barely slept on my bus there, afraid to miss my stop. I dragged my luggage uphill to my host family’s house, right outside the gate that was plastered in touristy signage, and buzzed the door to my hosts having barely roused from bed. After a warm continental breakfast, I had to meet up with someone I promised to buy my textbook from, and went straight to my first class at 9AM. And there I was in Siena, one discouraging mishap away from never being here.
While in Italy, do what the Yale students do
The goal of this trip is to learn. Or at least that is what I keep reminding myself, as I tried becoming acquainted with a lot of classmates I had never met, in a country I had never been to, using a language I had never proclaimed to speak. Instead of having five courses in a term, we had two, but each class session was between two and three hours. My days were typically getting to language class at 9, going on a lunch break slash town excursion between 12 and 1:30, and sitting the culture class until nearly 5, though there was more of a mix of sitting and standing in churches, exhibitions, or landmarks. At the midway point we switched to a different instructor for the afternoon classes, from Professor Jane Tylus who specialized in art history to Professor Penny Marcus who taught Italian films. The thirty-person cohort was split into two sections for the language component, with each having two instructors for the entire course of the trip. Mine were Sarah and Anna, a fashionable dynamic duo.
The Yale campus is miraculous in its domineering pulchritude. We call residential colleges our abode, whose behemothic Gothic exterior encapsulates visitors into a world of its own. I often say that it feels like professors come to teach you at your home as an excuse to not fancily attire for class, but there is some truth in how close I feel to buildings on campus that are not even my own dorm. I would wear my Crocs everywhere, sometimes taking them off to cross my legs cozily on the sofa in a student lounge, as if I was not in a public space. In Siena, however, the town and everything outside of our classroom is where the main attraction was. Its architectural layout probably predated many of the influences from which the Yale campus drew inspiration. Siena is a small quirky town half an hour away from Florence, designed with a wall besieging the entire town as if the population had not changed since the bubonic plague. Residents are parts of 17 contradas (urban wards) that are roughly geographically distributed, each with an animalistic symbol, a semi-mythological history, and a stake in the biannual palio (horse race). It is so compact that my walk to class traverses a third of the town’s diameter, but that also means that the density of tourist attractions is astronomical. Combined with the town’s deliberate attempt to freeze some of its sections in time (a massive garden farming only produce regionally available in the 14th century–before tomatoes were available in Europe), it felt like a disservice not to explore every nook and cranny of Siena.
But of course, classes. People were more daunted by the language component: it was worth three out of four credits. I became terrified when I realized that a substantial number of classmates were transferring their Spanish knowledge to ease their intake of Italian. Speaking was the nadir of the first quarter of the course; I was confused as to how people could speak so fast, not knowing enough Italian words to understand that the confidence in cadence was masking their similarly subpar Italian. I grasped onto any words I could fathom with a no-English classroom policy, no better than a four-year-old me thrusted into a local English center being taught English phonetics. I was taken back to the very rudimentary steps of rote-memorizing terms for each month of the year, jotting down phrases in a fine-grid handbook, and quizzing myself vocabulary flashcard style before every class. My biggest advantage in the class was probably my 15 years of experience learning a foreign language. Forcing myself to pick up verb tenses and delineating grammatical quirks had evolved into a trained instinct. I have to give it to the Vietnam educational system’s obsession with written language exams–my language courses could not have been more smooth sailing towards the end.
The culture classes were presented as sort of a low-energy commitment to unwind from the intensity of our morning drills. It was also in English, so it basically was a free tour around town with some graded assignments. The integral backbone of the first half was in Purgatorio and Le città invisibili; we visited the whereabouts of Santa Caterina di Siena, analyzed the interior (wooden carvings, pulpit, striped pillars) of Duomo di Siena as it related to the construction of Etruscan religiosity, and pondered what it meant for Siena to be a city that looked unto itself more than forward. Professor Tylus was verbose with her musings on Senese arts, unsurprisingly as she was freshly recruited to chair the Italian department at Yale and accompanied by her husband who was a Yale classical philosopher. (All the students were shocked when she told everyone that she was still recovering from cancer, just because of her sheer fervor with teaching us). I wrote my midterm essay on an imagining of Siena like palimpsests whose prosperity and status had seemingly decayed on the surface, like a stop in Italo Calvino’s fictitious travelogue that contributed to the mosaic creation of a perfect city and inched towards the answer to the question, What is the use, then, of all your traveling. I was really touched by this quote in the essay prompt.
As you have journeyed through this city learning of its people, its traditions, its buildings, its culture - of yesterday, and of today - who have been your best guides: and not only to Siena itself, but to the nature of cities, and indeed, of human communities? To return to the initial observations of Lewis Mumford: “What men cannot imagine as a vague formless society, they can live through and experience as citizens of a city”: “the city that fosters art and is art,” the city as the place where “man’s more purposive activities are focused, and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations.”
The second half of the culture course was built on more contemporary references. Professor Marcus took over at the halfway point, joining us after celebrating the birth of her granddaughter. We watched A Room with a View, Tea with Mussolini, and La Vita è Bella, going to the town of Arezzo where the last movie was filmed that also happened to be the hometown of our Teaching Assistant. The class visited more modern exhibitions that discussed the rise of fascism and the legacy of Gramsci, and also moved our meeting venue to the University of Siena campus. I personally had fun, but many of my classmates enjoyed this latter half less. I think Professor Marcus showed more strictness with grading, and people also did not click with the first two movies selected. It was also rough to sit underneath two ceiling fans in the summer heat, trying to pay attention to the Professor’s frail voice that her speaker occasionally failed to pick up. That was how I became the teacher’s pet, nonetheless. Any Hanoi K-12 student would know the struggle of trying to turn on an overhead projector, pressing arbitrary buttons with a broom stick and navigating PC settings. I had mastered this specific component of IT knowhow that, by the end of the semester, had been thanked by Professor Marcus more than anyone else on that trip. When we were screening our short films at the end of the course, I was literally perching my feet on another chair sitting in the teacher’s seat, managing her laptop while drinking (I presume) beer. Sometimes I think I am just an old people’s person.
The first week was the only week I spent exclusively in Siena. I went to Florence, Bologna, Venice, Rome, Florence again, San Gimignano, Arezzo, Milan, Pisa, Cinque Terre, and then Rome again. I always went with friends, if not squads of friends. My travel buddies were Tasnim, Masfi, Hana, Philena, Ashley, Anya, Giancarlo, Agnes, Erin, Kelly, KG, and Noah, and perhaps more if we had communicated that we were all going to the same places effectively. The cohort was small and similar enough that we would spend lunch breaks together most days. When we had to trek from the CET to the University during lunchtime, we would coordinate buying loaves of bread or discounted pizzas together, one time alerting the group chat to a sighting of John Legend casually eating in the Piazza del Campo. Some key memories were getting wasted before meeting up with another Yale group in Rome, going on a boat as public transport in Venice with Mikki and Kira, finding out that Ashley is a Guyanese criminal, frequenting this one halal kebab place with Hana, trying to get into clubs with Anya in Florence, posing a million styles in front of any remotely ornate structure with Tasnim, Agnes, and Masfi, or learning that Marshall and Yuri got swindled trying to buy drugs with the locals. I was stingy with my time, trying to sightsee as much as I could humanly budget for everywhere I went. This had rendered me immune to the effects of visiting another museum for the next decade at least.
I had a above average experience with my host family, which consisted of an older couple and a son who visited sometimes. My first continental breakfast made me assume that they were just really proper with their presentations; I later learned that their house was a bed and breakfast that they managed from their live-in apartment on the fourth floor (where I also stayed). My room was spacious for one but impossible for two–I was supposed to get a roommate, who could not make it for visa reasons as well but he was less on top of it. The wife made amazing risotto and spaghetti, who introduced me to the age-old tradition of drinking sparkling water with every meal. The husband would always watch TV and attempt to tell me the news in the simplest terms possible. I tried not to stay in my room too much; my only memories in there was watching Season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race free of charge on DailyMotion, leading up to Sasha Velour’s iconic wig reveal around the peak of the ambient torridity. I gave them some Vietnamese coffee and snacks as parting gifts, with a thank-you note proofread by both of my language instructors.
The last distinct memory was the Palio. The idea of this horse race seemed quirky enough (held in honor of the Virgin Mary), like intramural sports that I also appreciated but did not care. For the longest time I thought that as my house was outside of the walls, I did not feel compelled to root for any team. I picked Aquila, just because our class went to their pre-race ceremony and because that was somehow the theme of our high school’s talent show that my class organized. The energy on the day of the event, though, was electrifying. Every TV screen in town was featuring the Palio; my entire class tried to stick together within the Piazza but struggled to settle on the best angle. The race occured in three laps. For the first two, there was a clear lead for Chioccola and a close follow-up from Giraffa. It was within the last ten seconds of the last lap that Giraffa took the lead, and the place erupted with people unable to really decipher who actually emerged victorious. We were jostled around until a teacher signalled us to head towards the winning contrada, where the streets were flooded with chants awaiting the equestrian to gallop the horse to their base. The ruckus was not dying down until past sundown, and by the time I had gotten home I could still see people gossipping watching replays on a cafe monitor screen.
Towards the Sun
With one remaining month for summer break, I managed to get an internship position with an NGO in Hanoi. More specifically, chị Nguỵ Thị Khanh had agreed to host me at GreenID where I could directly assist her with the next steps of solar rooftop coverage among Vietnamese urbanites. The Yale brand helped me for sure, but I also realized that we had a mutual connection, someone even younger than me who was working as a climate journalist in her gap year before Harvard. I did not really have any pre-defined objectives other than being generally helpful.
A lot of the lessons I drew from my first working experience was personal. It was my first time regularly commuting on a moped, my first time pitching ‘research’ to working professionals in Vietnam, my first time ordering boba cashfree. Chị Khanh was too busy to micromanage me, so I endedup picking two main tasks. The first responsibility was out of the way quite fast, as I had to translate materials about solar aggregators and the applicability to Vietnamese demographics to the internal working groups of the NGO. The second project was more long-haul, writing a policy memo about the geopolitics of energy transition to the government. I had picked up my interests in geopolitics for a while, an itch that the Global Affairs at Yale could not scratch, so I was very eager to study online reports at my own pace. Chị Khanh brought me to a convention of stakeholders in renewable energy in Vietnam, which leaned more towards local governance than nonprofit involvements. I remember her having to leave on the second day, only for them to actually call on GreenID when she was absent. I made a speech, hopefully not too embarassingly, in the true tradition of making the most inoffensive statements that stood no chance of negatively representing my workplace. Chị Khanh found my speech satisfactory.
In 2022, news broke out that chị Khanh was found guilty of tax evasion for her prize money from the Goldman foundation and had to serve a two-year sentence. This felt particularly pointed, as another climate activist had just been likewise arrested and Vietnam was making bold progressive statements at the COP. Our mutual friend and I were both appalled, fearing the implication that even the environmental frontier that we had found easy to navigate still suffered the intricacies of penal politicking. If my experience with the Italian Consulate in New York City had emboldened me with an insatiable rage to abolish the colonial institution of visas, this news left me scrambling for any lingering faith in nonprofit work that was already weakened from the corporatist pressures of a modern Yale education. The last time I talked to chị Khanh, she was still executing different sustainability projects as altered by COVID-19. There is only hoping that she would still be able to keep up the momentum that spirited her before this travesty. (She was freed one day after this page was first posted!)