Homeland

On the old days when I was so young, I started thinking of the concept of homeland upon hearing the song “Homeland” by Giap Van Thach and Do Trung Quan in which it said:

“What is homeland, mom?

Which everyone misses so much on going away.”

On those days, homeland in my mind was as beautiful and simple as the song itself and I thought that nobody would want to stay away from their homeland where they had been born and raised.

Then came a day when I grew up, a conflict arose in my mind in which loving homeland didn’t mean the same thing as loving its regime. Due to the conflict, the concept of homeland had redefined itself: homeland was not only a place where we were born and grew up, it should also have been a place where we could exist and live in its true meaning. And in order to exist and to live, I left my original homeland ,as plenty of other people did, for some strange and distant land on the other side of the earth.

Only when we are not in the heart of homeland any more did we realize how much we miss it. On those first days staying away from my homeland with the thinking that I would never be able to come back, I felt a big loss in my life which nothing could fill up. Every late afternoon, I walked to the beach of the asylum island looking back to the place I just left behind and felt a severe pain hitting my heart. I heard a big loud cry in my heart asking for memories of my childhood, of my youthful days and of my buddies. Everything around me seemed cold and soulless since I had no homeland any more. For the first time of my life, I realized how to be a “homelandless”.

As having healed everything else in the world, time gradually healed my pain of lost homeland. I lived on starting to think of a new life on the refugee island, of how to go on and survive in a totally new environment without anything to start off. Struggles to survive then occupied my mind but deep down in my heart, longing for homeland was still there painfully contracting my heart upon thinking back. Every time New Year came back, the longing grew deeper and more tormenting than ever. Sometimes I desperately wished that I could be back there just for a few hours for a visit and that wish came with me into my nightly sleep causing some terrible nightmares. The nightmare was that I traveled back to my homeland paying it a visit and then for some reason I could not come back to the refugee camp any more ,no matter how hard I tried. I woke up in the middle of the nightmare happily realizing that I was still in the refugee camp. Such nightmares had haunted me for a long time reminding me of the fact that homeland was only a place for me to think of, not to live.

Although I never thought of returning to where I had left, one day I knew that I had no choice but repatriating. And so I was finally present in the homeland I had many times dreamt of paying a visit. The musician Hoang Thi Tho once wrote in one of his songs that: Life is not like dream, so life usually kills dream. What he said proved to be so true for my following days after returning. Reality gave me so hard and bitter a hit that it killed the dreamy and romantic concept of homeland in me. It also heartlessly killed all my beautiful thinking of friendship and human love. I lived on the next two years of my life right on my “homeland” emotionlessly, “friendless” and “familyless” with just one thought on my mind: finding a way to leave my “homeland” again as soon as possible. Then another miracle came to my life as a magic: a visa granted for me to enter USA. The day I left my “homeland” for America, on the plane looking down the city down there, I said to myself : I have no homeland. 

With that thought on my mind, I have lived here like a native resident accepting the new land my true homeland, speaking a new language, having a new name and creating new pages for my life. For a long while on this new land, I never thought of the place I was born and raised, I refused the memories of the old naïve days until one day I came back to Vietnam for some business and found so many poor and homeless folks on streets. Returning to USA, I blamed myself for having spent lavishly which I should have spared and helped those folks instead. Since then, those poor and unfortunate destinies have haunted me provoking in me some unexplainably painful feelings which I now realize: it is the feeling of homeland, the homeland I denied.

Despite ups and downs of life, I now recall of my original homeland like an innocent child. Every time I think of it, the sound of the old song “Homeland” seems to be ringing around me:

“Everyone has only one homeland,

Like having only one mother,

Homeland- don’t you remember,

You wouldn’t grow up as a human.”

Homeland has such a powerful strength!

10/10/2010

Jeffrey Thai