I Went to Vietnam to Learn the Heart's Tongue

In early 2017, I had just flown to Vietnam. After two layovers and 26 hours of flight time, I stepped off the airplane and walked through an old jet bridge into Tan Son Nhat airport. The air was warm and humid, wrapping me like a blanket. I was in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Old-timers and generational locals still called the city Saigon, and so did I. As if by imitating them, I would be become one of them.

I walked through the terminal, following a herd of tourists until I reached passport control. As they examined my passport, I said nothing, just as my father had recommended. I reached the other side without distress. Passed through customs. Then walked out of the terminal.

Stepping outside was a marvel. Nothing was recognizable. The smells, the touch, the air, the sights, the sounds. I breathed in the city's dirty jungle steam. Admired the 10:00-at-night skyline, the urban glow and the damaged high-rise horizon.

And then I thought, oh shit.

I have no plan. No food. Nowhere to stay. No one I know.

I am so fucked.

Why Vietnam?

The reason I'd gone to Vietnam was pretty simple. I had wanted to learn Vietnamese. I'd just graduated from university, where I'd learned Russian to a high level of proficiency. In 2015 I had traveled to Russia, and in 2016 I traveled to Kyiv, Ukraine to stay with a friend I had met online, who had helped me learn Russian and rudimentary Ukrainian.

During my time in Russia and Ukraine, what had struck me most about the difficulty of learning languages was the frustration at not being able to express myself with the same precision I enjoyed in English. My impression of American culture is that we Rugged Individualists™ largely consider self-obfuscation a virtue. Part of that, I think, comes from our Calvinist cultural heritage: "Gawd meant for us to be humble." Still part of it from a social sophistication that values irony more than authenticity: a half-Zen, half Holden-Caulfieldesque attitude that takes for granted nobody will ever truly understand our inner worlds, and so why bother trying to express them?

I was one of those Americans. I was sarcastic. And yet if American insincerity had branded me with the belief no one could ever understand my hidden heart, then learning Russian had offered me a different revelation: No one will ever understand any part of you unless you make the effort to show it. In my experience, so much human conflict is rooted not in our inability to be understood by others — but in our inability to make ourselves understood, and to understand others ourselves.

This lesson, then, is the true value offered by the study of foreign languages and an appreciation of them for what they are. You learn how hard it is (and in some ways, how easy) to truly understand another human being's heart, and to make your own heart understood. You gain telepathy: the power to transmit your own thoughts and feelings into another, and to receive theirs as well.

The difficulties I had experienced in Russia and Ukraine felt meaningful, to such a degree I'd eventually write a novel about them (it's still sitting in my trunk).

More than that, they always reminded me of my dad.

Daddy's Boy

If you couldn't tell from my name, I'm half-Vietnamese. Van comes from Văn, which simply means "cultured, learned." It was once a common middle name — arguably the only middle name — for Vietnamese men.

As for Nguyen, there is a whole history there. A history of war between the Nguyen lords of the south and the Trinh lords of the north during the decaying glory of the Le Dynasty. A history of revolt led by three peasant brothers, who oustered the lords and emperors who would exploit them. A history of desperate flight to Siam for the last scion of the Nguyen Lords, Nguyen Anh. A history of Nguyen Anh's glorious return and reconquest and the foundation of a new dynasty that would not fall until 1945.

This history and the name it brought with it came from my dad. He was the youngest son of a wealthy Vietnamese rice planter in Quang Binh, in central Vietnam. He used to tell me stories of how workers on his father's land would load rice on barges from dawn to dusk. As he spoke, you could hear the old pride simmering in his tone. If I recall correctly, my father's mother would take him outside and boast of how all the land they could see — beneath the sky, between the mountains and the river — belonged to them, too. And its wealth.

I was a child when I first heard these stories. You can likely imagine how my eyes had sparkled, laying in bed, entranced by the grandeur of my father's stories. I wanted more than anything to see that grandeur myself. Still do, even if my sympathies have since fallen squarely with the moiling proletariat and rural-agricultural peasantry rather than my own bourgeois roots.

The fortunes of my father's family quickly changed when the communists attacked. After victorious battle at Dien Bien Phu, the communists expelled the French and seized power in the North. My father's parents argued over what must be done. Supposedly, my grandmother had wanted to leave; my grandfather had assumed they wouldn't need to. Previous schisms between North and South had resulted in a border far north of their estates. They needn't worry, he'd said.

When the communists eventually seized my family's lands, my grandfather was imprisoned, and my grandmother bribed guards to deliver him food and medicine. My grandfather lived the rest of his life dying a long death. He caught tuberculosis in prison; alcoholism devoured his liver when he was released.

Gradually, the embers of conflict reignited, until the American War began. My father became a refugee in his homeland. He made toys with trash. He was lonely, bouncing between Da Nang, Nha Trang, Hue, and Saigon to cobble together an education. As his peers were conscripted into the southern republic's ground forces, my father realized he had to make something of himself to survive. He began taking his studies seriously, eventually becoming a fighter pilot. He would train for three years in Texas before returning to his home at the end of the war — and then ultimately fleeing when the republic fell.

My father has never directly discussed the impacts of war on his life, but speak to him and you'll feel it drenching his words. War shaped him, bruised him, scarred him. War changed him and stunted him and made him brilliant and hungry.

By the time he became my father, he was a monster.

The Heart's Tongue

Here, I want to be really clear. Here, I want to emphasize. My relationship with my father was excellent. And before time and hurt poisoned it, he was my best friend. He had a poor relationship with my sisters and mother, though — and believe me when I tell you that's an understatement.

My parents divorced when I was 13. Shortly after, my father dropped out of our lives. By the time I was finishing university, we had been strangers a long time. I had visited him occasionally, talked to him occasionally, repaired our relationship in the most superficial of ways. But beneath the politeness, we were hollow.

Then, during a damp downtown walk in 2016, I was reflecting on my time in Russia and Ukraine and how difficult it had been to communicate. It had been because Russian and Ukrainian were not my native tongues, I figured. That much seemed obvious. A native tongue is the heart's tongue. And no matter what languages we learn in our heads, we'll never really be able to express ourselves until we learn a language in our hearts.

A thought had struck me, and I'd stopped in my tracks. What if that had been difficult for my father, too? He spoke English expertly — in his head. Had been a fighter pilot, after all — had practiced English religiously for years before, during, and after the war, for most of his life now. And yet English was never his heart's tongue. Although my siblings and I were half-Vietnamese, we had never learned Vietnamese. Our young souls were red, white, and blue. Had we ever heard my father's heart?

During our childhood, my dad had had to filter his words through another language, and his thoughts, and his feelings. His love, his bitter kindness, his jaded wisdom. His sadness, his anger, his screams. He had had to shove his heart's content through that ugly grate, extrude it through another people's grammar, another nation's vocabulary, another kingdom's syntax.

When we had spoken to each other, what real meaning had made it through that filter? What, besides empty shells of sound and an underlying frustration at not being heard — truly heard?

All of this is to say nothing of the different cultural expectations, standards, and values between Vietnam and America. For two and a half decades, my father had been living in another universe. We took things for granted that he did not, like the value of an individual. He took things for granted that we did not, like the meaning of a family.

In Russia and Ukraine, I had struggled to express myself. And even when I had succeeded, I had felt like people still didn't truly see my heart. I knew that feeling, for your words to feel like a shell — for people to understand what you're saying, even if they don't hear you.

Maybe it had been the same for my father, I thought. And maybe if I learned his heart's tongue, he would seem kinder.

A Quest for Empathy

I called my dad that night. We had visited occasionally over the last ten years, but this was the first time I really felt like trying, you know? I told him I wanted to learn Vietnamese. I don't think he believed me. If he did, he was cautious.

But I'd done this before, goddamn it! I'd learned Russian, learned it well. I could do it again. Learn another language. I had already proven I could do it. Different in the details, surely, but the core effort would be the same.

Winter, 2016: my last semester in university. Each morning, I'd wake up and study on Duolingo for thirty minutes. I took care to repeat every utterance, to listen until I could catch each word and its meaning, and the divides between the words. I noted the vocabulary, studied it, narrated my day to myself as I walked across campus and back.

I bought a textbook. Taught myself the International Phonetic Alphabet so I could understand the pronunciation guides. The tones were interesting — made the language like a song, and perhaps for that the Vietnamese are a people so in love with singing.

I spoke to my dad, as often as I could manage. He began to take my efforts seriously. He would tell me important words, phrases, and most precious of all, cultural values. He recommended a website and free language course material meant for children of Vietnamese immigrants. He diligently recorded himself pronouncing Vietnamese syllables from those texts so I could study them, distinguish the tones. I incorporated them into my routine, studying minimal pairs — two words in a language that are distinguished by a single, meaningful sound — until I had learned them by heart.

For three months, I did this. For three months, I did well. The material began to feel easy. I began planning travel to Vietnam, just for a few months. To solidify what I had, to plant a foundation I could build upon for the rest of my life.

Travel arrangements: flights, visa, so on—

Emergency plans: the US consulate's address, hospital addresses, places I could seek help—

Packing: two light bags, so I could move quickly—

Funding: I had $7,000 in savings — I was golden.

Notably, I didn't book a hotel. I had wanted the flexibility to make those decisions on the ground. Didn't want to be chained to a plan, you see. Didn't want to feel imprisoned.

When I graduated from university, I returned to my mother's house for a month in 2017. She deserves her own story, my mother, so I won't try and shoehorn her in here. But I find it striking that after everything that had passed between my father and me, it was my mother I turned to for this help. She came through. She always did.

 And when I was ready, she took me to the airport, and I flew.

Meltdown in Tan Son Nhat

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

I was loitering in the pick-up/drop-off area before the terminal, still drowning in that jungle air. Tried to look like I was supposed to be there. You wouldn't have known how freaked out I was. I seemed cool, composed, waiting for someone. I knew how to be a hard target, or so I thought.

Inside, I was melting down. I am so fucked — so fucked! No plan, no hotel. Shit — where now?

Heart pounding, I walked inside. Moseyed up an escalator, sat down by a window, near some locals who were sleeping. I used a bag as a pillow, laying down like the others. I would sit here, figure something out. Wait — no, it was too late. I couldn't figure out something out this late. No — better to wait out the night, leave in the morning. As a former Marine infantryman, I had learned to sleep anywhere. These others were doing it. So could I.

And so I did. I lay down and I slept, stirring occasionally to browse my phone. You're probably wondering why I didn't just get a cab and go to a hotel. Why I didn't just search for a short-term rental on my home, or go to the tourist area, where people would have wanted to help me.

I wasn't afraid of being ripped off. (Well, I probably was, paranoiac that I am, but that wasn't the core barrier.) Instead, I was afraid the Vietnamese people I spoke to wouldn't understand me.

You see, I had come to learn Vietnamese. I didn't want to speak in English, didn't want to use it as a crutch. If I spoke to locals, I wanted to interact in Vietnamese and only Vietnamese. If I reverted to English once, I thought, it would always be there, lurking under the hardest conversations when things got difficult.

I was so afraid of failing, even in my first conversation. But I couldn't fail — not as far as I had come. I had done this before, with Russian. Discipline was important. Shit — I held myself to a high goddamn standard! How hard could this be with Vietnamese? How hard?

Silly, this chain of reasoning, I know. But that, Reader, is what stopped me. The sickness, the infection: Perfectionism.

Breakthrough

I wish I could say I had overcome my fear. I wish I could say I had dug deep into some hidden well of courage and self-awareness and recognized my own frailty. I wish I hadn't waited in the airport until 5:00am, when I was just too hungry and tired to linger anymore. By that time, dawn was on the approach. Wake up early as often as we early birds do, you learn to sense the nautical sunrise beneath the horizon. The city had slept; now it was stirring.

The time had come. I breathed deep and went outside. Approached two taxi drivers sitting in the waiting area, burning cigarettes. I recognized a kindred spirit in them — the smoking and joking, like two Marine grunts. I had them dialed in, figured out, I thought. Knew the swagger, the poise.

I approached. In studied Vietnamese and careful syllables, I asked where they could take me, and if one of them knew a hotel I could stay at. My study routine must have been effective, because they understood and answered me. I was ecstatic.

There was only one problem: I didn't understand a goddamn word of what they said.

That's right, Reader. In all my gorgeous efforts to learn Vietnamese and organize this trip, I had neglected one precious detail: I had only seriously studied the Northern dialect. But I was in the Pearl of the Orient, Saigon, where Vietnamese spoke with a twang and a drawl and a lot of yuhs instead of zuhs, a lot of ongs instead of ons. It sounded like a completely different language. As different as Russian and Ukrainian; as different as Texan and Scots.

One of the drivers offered to help. The other tried to help him explain himself to me. I asked them to repeat themselves — that's a treasure of a phrase to learn when studying any foreign language. They did just so, waving their hands with cigarrettes tucked between their fingers like coffee-buzzed conspiracy theorists, trying to help me understand.

I understood, mostly. The hand-waving really helped. I suppose it speaks much to human empathy how little we need to do to find common ground, when we want to.

But to be perfectly frank, I didn't really catch a goddamn mote of what they said.

And then I thought, oh shit.

I need to learn Vietnamese from scratch. Nothing I've learned over the past months will help me here.

I am so fucked.