1.
The world is divided into twelve if you go by power sockets. The Brits spread their ____ socket to all the colonies, and then
The world is divided into three if you go by hot beverages. I am not joking––if you mark up the world according to coffee versus tea-consuming countries, you’ll get a map reminiscent of the Cold War. The first world consumes coffee, the second world consumes tea, and the third world, well, the third world consumes neither, though its members produce some of the tea and a whole lot of the coffee. The top coffee exporters worldwide are Brazil, Vietnam, Columbia, Indonesia and Ethiopia. Except for Brazil, these countries all regard coffee as a cash crop, to be valued as a commodity for export, a luxury for the wealthy, rather than an item of everyday life.
My country is in league with Brexit Europe plus America if you go by power sockets and third world non-consumers if you go by hot beverages. The former tells the tale of our skirmishes with imperialism, while the later, our present economic and political classification. I would go by hot beverages. The Consulate of Poland declares on its website that I am a foreign alien in need of Schengen visa for my travels to this state, and so do most other countries, except ____ . My passport is the kind that got questioned at Boston Logan International my first time at United States customs.
In short–– 
            I come from a shithole country. The President of the US, as he strokes his blonde overblown locks, would point to my country’s GDP of 2000 dollars relegates it firmly into the category of “developing nations.” He would remind me that people like me descend from an eerie race of writhing ochre limbs on blue waters - the boat people, desperate in their chase for an American passport. He would defend his withdrawal from the TPP, how he thinks that we produce nothing of value. We have nothing.
The worst part is, he would not be entirely wrong. People of my country display an uncommon level of matter-of-fact, get-used-to-it self-deprecation that seeps into our everyday lives; we shrug when another teenager breaks his legs in a motorbike crash, shrug when patients from rural areas come to central hospitals and lie unattended with three other people on the same bed. So many things have been normalized – mediocrity, bribery, corruption – that many do not perceive them as wrong.
How can a country learn to rule itself after four thousand years spent cowering to foreign powers?
It doesn’t.
“Now that we are the powerful, we don't need the French or the Americans to fuck us over. We can fuck ourselves just fine” –– Viet Thanh Nguyen in The Sympathizer, reflecting on our nation’s independence.
 (Pulitzer-prize-winning-pride-of-the-entire-race-Viet-Thanh-Nguyen)
 
2.
Monologue to self on twenty-hour-flights. I am a broken record indeed.
Lan, look.
            Let’s start with the language. Remember when you were four and your parents sent you to your first English class with that white expat? This is the language of success, daughter. It will open doors, daughter. You will not get anywhere in the world without speaking this language, daughter. By the time you were nine, you were on the lookout for tourists, the white couple standing at crossroads looking lost with maps in their hand, eager to surprise them with your perfect accent. You were wide-eyed and eager. You laughed when they stared at you–– little girl in your school uniform and red Communist scarf, wow, girl, you speak like an American, how did you learn English here? Their praise elated you, filled you up like an air balloon. In your public middle school you spoke English with the only four classmates who could, acutely aware of how the others shot you looks of envy and contempt. You gobbled up British classics; if presented with Jane Eyre and Truyện Kiều you know which book you would reach for, which literary canon you found beautiful and interesting enough to be worthy of your time.
            By the way, do you think your language is yours? Very funny, but, girl, you know your language was invented by white men. Is your name Lan? Is your name L-a-n? The Portuguese brought you civilization, Alexandre de Rhodes created your script. His compatriots enforced its use. Your French teacher himself reminded you of this, after you painstakingly wrote that line with chalk on blackboard in your best cursive––the o a flourishing flower, the s an intricacy of loops and darts––
            Oh là là, qui écrit comme un Français?
Who writes like a Frenchman?
Though your fingers nervously darted to chapped lips, you were used to it by then. A week before, you just learnt that a word you used in your language, xơ-cua, was actually the pidgin version of the French secours. Nervous laughter. Why of course. You shuddered––what else have you not realized?
Before they all came, your people were primitive. You had no written language, which is to say you did but it was too complicated for them to decipher and now too complicated for you too—good God.
            What God do you worship? The Communists say you are a traitor—you worship a white God, a French God. And you say no Jesus has no color; God has no color; God is love; God loves everyone; but really, Lan, really? Look at the statues in your church, look at the advent calendar at your grandmother’s house. Look at it. Look at the angels.
You did not grow up around diversity. The first time you met a white person your age you thought he looked like an angel: white skin, red lips, blonde hair, curly, the cherubims—you caught yourself in time. Lan, what are you thinking, this is so messed up, that pang in your stomach, stop, Lan, stop, but it comes back each time. For a split second, it comes back: you look like angels, you look like angels, you look like angels.
            Now that you have started you cannot stop. You question everything—your grandparents are Catholic and their grandparents before them but that’s the furthest you can trace. How can you know? How can you be sure? What if your great-great grandparents were forced into it? What if they converted to please the French colonist, to escape murder? After all, that’s the common narrative. You want to know the answer, but then you don’t, because what if? Can you still be Catholic? Can you still look at your religion the same way?
            Sometimes, you pretend it all doesn’t matter. Sometimes, you glide in and out between cultures, which is to say, you think of yourself as existing in a vacuum. Wear an áo dài to class on Lunar New Year’s day. Play Debussy on the piano. Eat bánh dày by yourself in the dormitory basement. Read C.K.Williams on the plane home during break. After all, history has already passed; you question the reality of inequalities, wonder: if you had not thought about them in your head so much, would they still exist?
Can an individual have the freedom to create their own culture, pick out elements of different communities that they identify with and live with them in peace?
You live here nine out of the twelve months, but you’re not American and you don’t want to be. Slowly, you come to terms with it, accept what you have to do—separate the inventions from their inventors, admire the culture, the bold spirit of possibility, learn how things are done, and make the most out of the experience that is granted to you because you worked hard for it.
But you will come back, again and again. You cannot tolerate the images of children in your country: scrawny, bare-boned, without water, without shelter, mega-sized on the United Nation’s multi-million dollar screen as a symbol of poverty and destitution while the magnanimous delegations of the first world dry their eyes with a handkerchief.
Journey’s end: your ears buzz as the plane––giant metal vestibule of transplantation––rapidly looses altitude. The wing outside your window changes from ____ to ___ . As the sun rises, you further sink beneath the clouds. You begin to discern green patches and brown elevations wrapped tightly with blue ribbons, the paddy fields, mountains and rivers that form the landscape of the land you love.
History has happened. You come from a “shithole country” with four thousand years of “shithole history” and you are proud of it.
The plane continues its descent. Tiny houses begin to appear like ant’s dwellings, walled in by the endless streams of motorbikes and cars.
After all, it is here, in the unloved, mosquito-crammed museum and crumbling colonial library that you feel most whole.
A bump marking the contact point between tires and runway.
You are back.
 
3.