Foreigners seeing Vietnam as part of their life Foreigners go shopping at a Tet market in Hanoi. Photo: Tuoi Tre Many foreigners have arrived in Vietnam under different circumstances and a number of them have felt that what they have experienced in Vietnam has made the country like their ‘homeland’ or an integral part of their lives. 1. Ramesh’s parents are Indian entrepreneurs who did business in Saigon in the 1950s. Therefore, Ramesh was familiar with streets, alleys and lines of trees in the city. His childhood was a time he had many Vietnamese friends and they rode bicycles together on streets as one of their hobbies. In their eyes the city was relatively peaceful until the US army interfered in Vietnam in the mid 1960s. In 1965, when the war became more violent, Ramesh’s parents took him back to their homeland in Bombay, now Mumbai. The 14-year-old Indian boy felt lonely in a city with a population of 10 million. He felt that everything there was unfamiliar to him. He missed Saigon in such a way in which people are nostalgic or miss their homeland. Ramesh found it hard to integrate himself into society in Bombay and he became depressed. Such a situation lasted during the years of high school and he became skinnier and skinnier until his parents decided to take him back to Saigon for a revisit when he was 17. Arriving in the old place, Ramesh found everything had changed. He could not find his old friends. He walked along the Saigon River, Cho Lon and other old streets but felt lonely as if he were in a strange city. Through the trip, Ramesh’s parents wanted their son to receive a ‘psychological remedy’ that would show him that Saigon was no longer the Saigon of his childhood and that everything is subject to change and nobody can always live in the past. When returning to India, Ramesh was no longer depressed. He followed a diet and other activities that were the same as other people around him. He gradually integrated into the society. Tuoi Tre reporters met Ramesh again when he was middle-aged in a year when a water puppetry show was performed in some large cities in India, and the man enjoyed one of them at the Ashoka Hotel in New Delhi. He was entertained by the interesting show and he said he could overhear one of the artists of the puppetry group who said, “Bà con ơi…” (“Dear everybody”) to the viewers. 2. Wayne Karlin was sent from the US to Vietnam as a soldier only for 18 months in the 1965-1966 period but in this short time he had experienced remarkable moments. Thirty years later, in 1995, when the plane carrying him entered the sky of Hanoi, he remembered that this was the place where American planes dropped bombs causing devastation and death, where some of those planes were shot down and where US pilots were arrested after they escaped from their fallen jets. Karlin met some Vietnamese people who were on the opposite side of him in the Vietnam War. In a meeting with an old Vietnamese volunteer, Karlin was haunted by a thought that he might have shot down such people when he was on a US helicopter before 1975.  Another individual, a woman writer, told Karlin she got lost in an area covered with bomb craters and then passed out. That night Karlin had dreamt that he pulled the woman out of the bomb crater. After 1995, Karlin often came back to Vietnam and had many Vietnamese friends who are writers. He later transferred papers and personal items of a Vietnamese soldier who died in the war to his family in Thai Binh Province. A former American soldier who kept those items from the dead soldier had got Karlin to do the transfer for him. Karlin later arranged for the ex-US soldier to meet the family of the Vietnamese deceased combatant. That former American soldier and Karlin gave incense to the deceased soldier’s altar. While the other American man tried to restrain his feelings, Karlin burst into tears during the meeting. Recently, Karlin showed me a photograph of him being arrested for attending an anti-war demonstration in Vietnam in 1969 in the US. In the photo, he was restrained by the arms of a policeman. 3. Marita has a Vietnamese adopted child she adopted when she arrived in Vietnam a long time ago from a cold country in Northern Europe.  Marita has been aware that people in Eastern Asia lead a life in which they respect sentiments and always give love and care to their families.  During the time the US troops entered Vietnam, Marita’s father often took to streets to object to the Vietnam Wer. He brought Marita along with him in such demonstrations in which he supported Vietnam. It is possible that such activities have built up in Marita a love for Vietnam. Afterwards, when she worked for a library, she wanted to set up a bookcase intended for Vietnamese books only. She placed orders to buy Vietnamese books from Hanoi. She learned the Vietnamese language so that she could learn more about Vietnam’s culture and could teach her adopted daughter to speak and write the language. She and her husband took their daughter to traditional activities of the Vietnamese community to help her to get accustomed to Vietnam’s traditions and customs and not to forget her origin. However, when the daughter was 18, she decided to start an independent life by renting a house to live alone. Marita was very surprised at her daughter’s decision, since she always thought that Eastern Asian young people, unlike Northern Europeans, often lead a life more towards their parents than to themselves.  She took on odd jobs outside her school time to support herself, although she was ready to receive support from her parents.  “My daughter has lived away from us. We feel lonely as we have felt previously…,” Marita wrote in her email to Tuoi Tre.  When meeting Tuoi Tre reporters, she shed tears and said that sometimes people feel happy in love but sometimes people can feel unhappy in love. Tuoitrenews