First draft: May 18, 2022. This draft: November 17, 2024.
There is a narrowing of perspective that’s too often mistaken for wisdom as we age.
Adulthood comes with the pressure to become a fixed point in space, to be knowable and known. I fear acquiring what’s called “my tastes,” “my preferences,” “my certainties.” I fear embracing too completely those philosophies that preach “know thyself, know thy body.” I fear the day I might proclaim with conviction: I know perfectly well what I want, what I hate, what I can and cannot do. This is what I want. This is who I am. This is my truth. I’ll then grow into my ‘authentic self’ like settling into a well-worn chair, and become a judge of other styles, other tastes, other ways of being. It will all be too clear what is the other.
My dad used to tell me all the time, “Vietnam has the best food in the world,” and I would ask, “How many countries have you been?” He had never been outside Vietnam. And to make such a claim, I considered that arrogance, typical of a factory worker who has been in a village practically forever and whose life looking back is mostly a void. I fear that my father successfully passed that down to me, as an early inheritance.
I fear I’ll build a shelter of identities and call that growth. I fear I’ll roll myself into a particular corner of the world and mistake it for the whole world and, worst, declare it “my world.” I fear believing I’ve found a home, a safe harbor where I can anchor my self-knowledge in the vast sea of uncertainty, knowing all too well no anchor can hold in waters infinitely deep.
At twenty-two, I should be too young for nostalgia. Yet to my family back home, I am one version of myself; to my friends in America, another. There’s a constant yearning for my past and a perpetual fear of it not accepting my full self. I understand now when people say homosexuality is a ghost, but nostalgia is what really haunts me. It managed to anchor and betray me in an endless cycle. I fear my optimism that I'm not anything, that I'm free-form, that I celebrate possibilities, is also a grammar of loss—a fear of being fully known. Even this resistance to certainty becomes its own kind of certainty, this celebration of freedom its own kind of anchor. Hurt in a trench coat of hope. Perhaps the deepest paradox of adulthood is how our attempts to remain unlimited reveal our limitations, how our fear of being fixed in place becomes the very thing that fixes us. Hence the state of being suspended, between selves, between being known and staying unknown.
It appears to me that my father has the last laugh. In retrospect, he could have safely declared that no matter where I go, I will always find Vietnamese food the best. He wasn’t talking about food; he was telling me who I am. But then, for good measure, I’d ask what do I know, what does he know.