A few years ago, I had a vision that I would never have a full conversation in Vietnamese with my grandparents. This caused me stress to the point of tears.

It was odd, because all my Vietnamese family is English speaking. Since I was born and raised in the United States, they did not expect me to be interested in a language that they had let fade into the background.

It was a new feeling that grasped me suddenly, then slowly with an unfamiliar intensity. I picked up the language study I’d left behind in second grade, and almost feverishly threw myself into everything Vietnamese. The music in my earbuds changed to mostly V-pop, I started calling my grandmother more often, and I joined my school’s VSA to immerse myself in the language as much as I could.

Initially, I wanted to connect with my culture and understand my roots, which I felt familiar with but not fluent in. I knew my family had moved to the US in 1975 as refugees because of war, but they rarely talked about then except to compare how lucky my cousins and I were for not experiencing it.

Unlike my friends, who were children of immigrants who emigrated for economic opportunity – not because they were forced to – my family didn’t try to instill much of their motherland culture in us. They wanted us to value education and occasionally bow to ancestors and the Buddha. They kept some traditions, like Lunar New Year, but to an incredibly lowkey degree. Their attitude was sort of like: we used to live there and now we live here. It was a long time ago.

My curiosity seemed somewhat random in this context, even to me – but this shifted when my maternal grandfather passed away. Suddenly everything changed: the Buddhas were brought out and the monks were consulted as my grandfather’s final days approached. People from all over came over, full of stories of him I had never heard of. I was tasked to write his obituary and was given his CV and diploma to help me tell the story of his life and passing. Through these aged, forgotten documents I learned the story of a man I barely recognized as my grandfather.

I never knew he studied mathematics at a university in Hanoi or that he’d gone to France on scholarship. It explained his skills in both, but I feared there was more I’d never learn unless I one day visited Vietnam. I was grateful to have a glimpse of who he used to be – even if it was for the sake of summarizing his life to funeral guests. But I was disheartened that I didn’t know any of this sooner.

In the past year I felt a similar pang of longing, especially when I was among Vietnamese people and the Vietnamese language. The predictable question upon meeting was always, “Have you been to Vietnam?” With the fifty-year mark of my mother’s immigration around the corner, I asked for her blessing to go for the first time. Vietnam remained a place of trauma that she and my other family didn’t necessarily want to revisit. Because of their memories, they weren’t comfortable with me going alone so I went with a small group. In December I said goodbye to my family in San Francisco and in January arrived in Hanoi.

Hanoi felt like the most familiar place I’d never been – the northern dialect, the multitude of bún restaurants – and yet I couldn’t be more of a foreigner. My family lived in this city for generations, but I don’t look like them or bear their surname. The man who drove me to my hotel had no idea I was Vietnamese. He was also very surprised that I was young and unaccompanied. As he started narrating landmarks in the city and their significance, I quietly nodded and looked out the window, unsure how to most appropriately conduct myself. The identity I felt for this city, I realized, was not substantiated by any direct experience.

The next few days were a tour of cultural heritage sites: visiting the Temple of Literature and inevitably some of the war monuments, since few tours for Americans bypass that. The war narrated by local guides was so different from what I was taught in American schools and by my refugee family. Tourists posed for smiley pictures, which felt disturbing knowing the weight of these places was why I was there alone: what they symbolized was the reason my family did not want to come back at all. At the time I didn’t know how to process my responses so I cried wordlessly—much to the bewilderment and concern of my group.

Days were a blur since I was only in Vietnam for a week. I tried every regional coffee from egg coffee to salt coffee to cà phê sữa đá. Comfortingly, the food and drink tasted the same as home. The people I met felt familiar too, and I was able to chat a little bit with locals. It sometimes felt easier to pretend I didn’t speak as that invited less explanation, though people could often tell I understood even if I didn’t say a word, which was surprising. As perhaps it goes in any country – some people were curious and excited to chatter, while others were slightly alarmed.

It was only when I was in Hanoi and Saigon that my family told me where they used to live; they had never mentioned it before. When I saw in person where they used to live, I began to piece together the unexpected reasoning for why my mom often remarked that she grew up more privileged than my dad even though she was a refugee. They were from some of the wealthiest areas of each city and accustomed to studying in French, signaling that their life in Vietnam was not nearly as modest as they’d portrayed. Once again, I had an unsettled feeling I didn’t quite know how to articulate. I was facing narratives that I wasn’t confident forming a fuller picture from: what my family told me, what the locals said, and what I was perceiving personally.

I was able to meet an international student friend in Saigon at a cafe near my hotel, and she shared some information about the district we were in – the one my mom grew up in, to my discovery that day. This only added to the surreal “maybe I don’t really understand anything” feeling that was escaping articulation in any language. She also shared about her upbringing in Saigon and what life is like for Saigonese now, a far cry from anything I thought I would find.

It was not that I expected to find anything in particular; the main reason I wanted to visit was to form my own perspective of Vietnam built on primary experiences instead of secondary stories. I didn’t naively think anyone would be welcoming me “home” or that a week was enough, but it was something.

It was fascinating to visit places that had once been my family’s stomping ground in the same sense I felt traveling to places my paternal family grew up going to in San Francisco, where I now live. But the San Francisco of my paternal ancestors is as different to my life here as my mother’s memories of Saigon and her mother’s memories of Hanoi, their respective hometowns, were to what I saw. Maybe they won’t quite understand what I’m looking for in “going back,” because I didn’t have more than remnants to return to. The cities from their memories have been gone for some time now, born again as something new.

In visiting my mother’s motherland, I saw monuments that were meaningful, like a museum housing paintings by my grandfather’s uncle and landmarks I heard about in song lyrics. It was a personal pilgrimage to see the landscapes of family lore with my own eyes and how they’d changed.

I am not my ancestors, and they are not me, and yet even in their death and my life I can see an interbeing* in our existences… their professions, my passions, and the similar paths that we’ve been drawn to. Being in Vietnam, however fleetingly, was a small taste of what they knew and what I might want to be.

I hope to bridge my family’s storied past with my present path—and it is this deeper understanding of the former for which I have my first time in Vietnam to thank.

*Interbeing, a concept popularized by Thich Nhat Hanh, refers to the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things. It emphasizes that nothing exists in isolation and that everything is constantly influencing and being influenced by everything else. This understanding extends beyond just physical connections and encompasses the idea that even our thoughts, feelings, and actions impact the world around us.