Between languages

1/ I have just finished reading another book of my uncle’s, a kind of memoir. Makes me sad about Vietnam, about writers in exile, about a myriad other things. 

My uncle’s a (retired) literary critic and professor of Vietnamese Studies in Australia. And a dissident. Denied entry twice into Vietnam, at the airport. 

(You see, I’m from a family of “difficult people”). 

2/ The book also makes me feel the acute pain that I have lost my roots. I still write in Vietnamese, I still speak it, my tongue is not robbed from breathing its native breath, and yet I have lost my roots. I immerse myself in English-language literature; I aim, like A. C. Bradley or Henry Fielding, to absorb Shakespeare into my bloodstream. Shakespeare rather than Nguyễn Du. Rather than any of our writers. 

3/ And yet English will never fully be my language. I can read Shakespeare, I can read Melville, some day I may read Joyce, but it will forever be a foreign tongue. 

I still sound like an outsider, still stumble over multi-syllabic words, still lose grammar together with my temper. 

4/ Past Lives is not a good film—most of the dialogue is banal—but there is one great scene. In it, the main character, a South Korean woman who in childhood migrated to Canada and then to the US, is in bed talking with her American husband and he says she dreams in Korean—“You dream in a language that I can’t understand. It’s like there’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.” 

5/ Studies have shown for years that multilinguals have different personalities in different languages, but it was only during my time visiting a Vietnamese writer and her family in Berlin a few months ago that I realised I was different and felt different as I switched between languages in conversation with her. In English, the hierarchy ceased to exist, the sense of intimidation disappeared. I was free.