by Long Tran

When I was eleven my parents transplanted me from Hanoi to Tokyo. Two years in, during eighth grade, I was already crying in protest at the notion introduced by them that I may have to go back.

I did not end up repatriating, for it was always my destiny to be abroad. They had always told me that I had to escape Viet Nam one day. Being in Tokyo was just an acceleration of that. But what they never foresaw in that dream of social mobility tinged with colonial elitism was their child rejecting a part of himself most intertwined with them. Was it inevitable that I should drift apart from my family once I got to that international school? The answer should have been no. As chance would have it, my parents were as starry-eyed by the foreign and modern as I was. Alas, the mark of an alien had then begun to be tattooed on this familiar body.

How could a kid that was losing roots ever become secure again? While they had their community of fellow nationals, I had to find my own amongst peers. The only way to prove myself, I thought, was to excel in those common denominators between the two places. Good grades were expected. I read a lot of manga, absorbing mass cultural symbols and narratives. I signed up for sports teams and found myself perspiring after each recess on the football field. Whatever could get me on the same ground as these new people, even though I was no lesser than any of them. At the same time, I forgot all these habits that kept me grounded to the culture back home. I let myself be drawn towards a new life, a new society composed of that eclectic mix distinctive to international schools. There were all kinds of emotions I was processing in two new languages while encountering puppy crushes and friendship-cliques. Little time was made for the old tongue.

‘But what they never foresaw in that dream of social mobility tinged with colonial elitism was their child rejecting a part of himself most intertwined with them.’

Thus, going back home was not an attractive option compared to the new world at school. People slowly began to accept me as part of their environment and their friend groups. I was hanging back after school to play sports. Spending time in that old empty gymnasium with a few friends shooting hoops around. The dying sunlight cut in from the window above. The sound of basketballs on the beaten wood floor reverberated between the dribble beat. It was either that or running outside on the artificial grass under the bluest sky. The trees were real though, and they brought us seasons. Springs would carpet the asphalt driveway with cherry blossoms. Children would chase after the twirling momizi leaf. I pinched my nose at the horrendous smell of crushed fruits of the otherwise magnificent yellow ginkgo road. Rain and tiny frogs arrived with the summer sun. We were there, so young and burrowed in ourselves, barely sensing these ordinary scenes beside the mild amusement in the moment. Yet, there were those droplets in time where one just remained silent and saw the world outside not as things but lights, shapes, and colours. Within these phenomenal films, traffic lights flash and count down, humanoid figures move across the zebra at disparate tempos. Those moments when the world moved around you at the same time as you knew you were within it.

Sure, I lived (and loved) through them, but are those times ingrained in my body? I can certainly walk the road to school again and let all these episodes return in thoughts. But they do not make me feel any type of way. Not anymore. I am seeing someone else, a kid, curious about the human world, just wanting to bloom and fit in at the same damn time.

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