J-Term Journal: Revelations in Reintegration

On New Year’s Eve, in yet another attempt to reintegrate me, a wide-eyed “expatriate,” into my Vietnamese motherland, a friend insists on driving me to Dragonfly—an “authentic” Hanoi nightclub.

“Hop onto my bike,” she says, knowing full well that to other Vietnamese citizens my inability to ride a motorcycle puts me squarely in the same category as prepubescent toddlers; even savvy non-natives know how to work the two-wheeled beast. “If the police show up, just pretend you’re foreign,” she adds, referencing my conspicuous, and illegal, lack of a helmet.

I probably should have taken offense at her insinuation that I resemble a fish out of water in my own country. But I can’t blame her. Six years abroad, four countries, and three continents later, I feel almost like a visitor in Vietnam whenever I go back. For one thing, I’m “curvy” in comparison with the dainty Vietnamese ladies despite being a U.S. size two. Throw in a fanny pack, which I never tote, and I would be the vertically-stunted caricature of an American tourist. And as much as I fancy the nomadic lifestyle with its promise of growth and discovery, it’s still mortifying to be snickered at by a 14-year-old busboy at a hip Hanoi diner because my Vietnamese slang is outdated: “Nobody uses that word anymore,” he sneers.

After nearly an hour on my friend’s bike hoping no officer saw my unprotected head, we arrive at Dragonfly. The air is smokey from cigarettes, the music Lady Gaga, and the crowd cosmopolitan. It is Hanoi Old Quarters meets New York underground. At the stroke of midnight, we shimmy onstage in a display of narcissism that would make Lindsay Lohan proud. There, as I stand amid cascading confetti, smiling strangers, and colliding currents of the foreign and native, something dawns on me. Maybe it’s not so much about where I belong—which is in part but not entirely Vietnam—but where I will go from here. And if this grungy club is “authentic” Hanoi circa 2011, perhaps I belong here more than it initially seems.