Nguyễn Duy Liêm - Connecting Vietnam

Hi Hi,

My name is Liem Nguyen. I am from a small and peaceful town of Bảo Lộc up on the mountains in Vietnam. I just proudly finished my bachelor in Anthropology from University of Washington in Seattle as a first-generation college student. I will be pursuing a Master of Divinity at Harvard University in the fall to study Buddhism.

My journey starts 12 years ago when I left Vietnam for America. I was able to do so because my dad is an American citizen. He fought for the Southern Vietnamese government back in the war. Post-1975, he was sent to a re-education camp but eventually, was able to escape. After several failed attempts to leave Vietnam through crossing the ocean, he resorted to walking across Cambodia to Thailand with his family to attain the refugee status. Then he was able to resettle in California and became a United States citizen. Though going away from Vietnam to the U.S is a dream many around me carried, I was confused and angry at having to leave Vietnam as I loved my simple life, friends, and cousins very much. I did not really understand the deeper reasons other than “life is hard in Vietnam, so we need new opportunities.”

I was the more confused when I began to hear things like “we need to overthrow the Vietnamese government” and “Ho Chi Minh is a dog” from the Vietnamese community in the U.S. I remember thinking to myself “how on earth can these people willing to give up their lives for causes like retaking Vietnam from the Communist government?” I was satisfied with a materially comfort life and baffled at the thought giving up my life like so many were willing to do for me to be here. Looking back at that moment, I did not know what I stand for, enough to believe I can give up my life for something bigger than myself.

Always feeling like a tree with no root, wavered in moments of hardships without a source to rejuvenate myself, It was in 2015 that I felt a strong urge to go back to Vietnam after 8 years of being away to reconnect with my home, my root somehow. I said somehow because I didn’t really know how that journey will unravel. I just knew that I needed to go. It was this journey that led me to answer my most pressing questions: Who am I? Who are my people? Who were they before they became my family? What do I stand for? How can I be stronger?

Upon embarking on this journey, I met Trinh through several service projects with a simple aspiration of serving others. But the deeper I dive into these service projects, the more I realize that I am the one in need of healing. I felt disconnected, fractured and groundless. I’ve come to understand that what I needed was no longer going outside, but dwelling deep within to understand myself and the roots of my sufferings before I could serve others.

On that fateful day when we visited the genocide museum in Phnom Pehn alongside each other, I felt, as John Lewis would describe, “touched by the spirit of history.” It was moving, scary, empowering and terrifying all at the same time to see and feel how once upon a time, humanity had come to a point of killing one’s own. Then, in our reflection circle, someone commented:

“We should forget about the past and move forward.”

Something in me reacted strongly to this idea, but I was not clear why. Later on, it was more clarifying when I felt how this spirit of history still linger in the present—in poverty across Cambodia, the chills of the air, in the smell and color of the earth and in my Cambodian friends’ heart. At that moment, I’ve realized that history is not a thing of the past. It might be forgotten, but never lost, because it is carried within its people. History is the present.

Then a thought washed upon me: Vietnam’s history is also a history of us fighting and killing our own kind. In that moment, I’ve realized Cambodia’s history also mirrors my own history. A topic that I thought was trivial suddenly became important to my healing path. I felt that somehow, this terrible history is the source of my fractured soul and that I am a manifestation of its unresolved conflicts. I know deep in my heart that we cannot just ignore the past and move forward. In order to move forward, we need to know our history.

Thus, it is my intention to go on this pilgrimage to close the distance between the present and the past within myself, to look with my own eyes and see with my own heart the spirit of my own history. I want to look at this world through my ancestors’ eyes and hearts too, so I can understand them better and perhaps, myself better. Lastly, I want to claim this history as my own—both its vices and the virtues. War is where humanity’s worst instincts come alive, but also where we draw upon the best within ourselves and our traditions to response to unspeakable violence. So, I want to go and learn and listen from the future of what could be for our country, our community. And hopefully I can come back knowing how to live and breath better, with more responsibility, so that I don’t contribute to this terrible history repeating itself, but instead, to stand on the right side of history and be a force for compassion and peace like many of my ancestors were able to do.

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