INK ARIA

LIFE BUILDING

Renee Gehman

People ask me what was different in Vietnam, and I’ve found the most accurate and succinct answer to be . . . everything. But I recently got excited over the discovery of a similarity, when I woke up to the sound of machinery tearing up the road in front of my house at home here. Because in Vietnam, one of the many things that woke me up in the morning—along with a rooster, my host brother’s cell phone alarm clock, and more—was also the sound of building.

A group of about 12 people lived under tarps set up on the lot next door to where I lived in Vietnam. They spent the whole year building a house down the alley. As the days went by, and I passed the house on my bicycle enroute to work, I observed the brick, the cement, the metal, the wood, and in the end, the drywall, the glass, and the paint—all becoming part of the house’s structure.

Our lives go through structural changes too. Like a house, our lives are comprised of various materials one might also call "sub-lives." I’m talking about personal life. Family life. Social life. Work life. Love life. Spiritual life. On any given day or week or decade, certain of these sub-lives are more prominent than others, are affecting us more than others, are changing more than others.

But coming to Vietnam felt like the entirety of what I’d built out of these sub-lives had been demolished. Suddenly it felt like all I had built in those first 22 years of life had been flattened down into a foundation, more tightly even than my belongings had been compacted into two 50-pound suitcases. There I was, left to build something anew.

Early on it became clear that this was going to be a very different house. At home, personal life had been huge. And academic life. Those were the dominants in the college years. Social life was more for summer, but that was there too, and spiritual life kind of melded in with everything, since I was at a Christian school and all my friends were also Christians.

In Vietnam I had to build in a work aspect—my 9:00-to-5:00 position at World Publishers. This part of building was mostly pretty easy. Every day I showed up, read articles and book manuscripts on Vietnamese culture or history or economics, and repaired the English. Sometimes the articles were difficult to understand:

In the recent years, inspite of there were many companies which produce computer program have taken many necessary measures to protect their products by themselves, along with the strengthening of inspection, detection, fine activities of competent authorities but the results were still not sufficiently.

But this kept the work challenging. Other times the word choices were just very bizarre:

Onion with peanut oil is also used in another ‘on the brink of extinct’ specialty of Quang Nam—bloating fern-shaped cake. The cake peel is rather thick, dust with peanut and onion, the stuffing of the cake is make of mince shrimp. Then put the cake into dry stream.

But this kept the work fun.

As work was built into my life’s structure I learned where I needed to be flexible with the material. Naturally there was some awkwardness. This could include anything from learning to take naps on the office table during lunch break to adjusting to editing without deadlines. (In Vietnam, maintaining harmonious relationships is vital; to give me a deadline might hurt the boss-employee relationship by implying that I wouldn’t finish my work in a timely manner if left on my own.)

But the construction in the work arena was minor; by far the most significant, most time-consuming, most beautiful and ugly and strong and shaky part of the life I built in Vietnam was my family life.

Building relationships with family members in Vietnam was a struggle, because even though I loved them and even though they were so good to me, cultural differences made it hard for me to believe they really cared. In hindsight, I would say that the love between the Nguyen family and me was real, but differences in expression or limits in communication blurred it with doubt.

It was love with a measure of hurt and sadness. The language barrier was a daily source of much laughter and joking, but it also prevented me from ever expressing myself fully to these people I loved. Vast differences in accepted styles of communication were so strong that I know many things I said or did must have hurt them. And every day, never knowing it, they did or said things that hurt me.

Vietnamese people emphasize what Americans would call flattery, making seemingly false observations that can make Americans uncomfortable. We tend to prefer "being real"—whatever offense this may cause—and are offended by people we may experience as bending the truth right to our face.

Because I found it hard not to see the Vietnamese style as building people up with flattery and white lies, I found it hard to trust them. If the flattery felt like lying to my American self, then it was hard not to feel the love too must be a lie.

I cherished the couple of times, toward the end of the year, when I caught my host mother with tears in her eyes. When I asked why she was sad, she said, "I was thinking about you going back to America, and how much I’ll miss you." In those brief moments I felt this heavy weight of skepticism lifted and could believe the love was real.

Into the complexity of this structure I also tried to fit a spiritual life. In the very beginning, it felt strong, perhaps even stronger than ever. When I came to Vietnam, suddenly everyone I had gone to in times of distress was gone. For the first time I had absolutely no one to turn to, at least not anyone who knew me. The only One who knew me, who would be there no matter what, was God. And in my lack of anywhere else to turn, in my helplessness and fear of this new place, I felt a desperate and genuine need for God which carried the refreshment of something new I had never quite experienced.

But as I began to grow closer to my host family and felt more and more at home in Vietnam, the building started to slow down. I started to find that my spiritual life just didn’t fit in there like it did at home. I wasn’t surrounded by Christians, but by people who practiced a mixed religion of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and ancestor worship. I didn’t have friends my age I could talk to about faith issues whenever I needed to, or young adult meetings to go to like I do here.

Pretty soon, every moment at home was spent with the family, and I had no alone time. This meant no time to read the Bible or to just sit and pray. Usually if I tried to be alone, my family seemed to think I didn’t want to spend time with them. Then I felt guilty for not being with them.

So a lot of the time I felt something was missing in this area, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. I still have trouble assessing the concept of a "spiritual life" and how I built that or should have built that into my life in Vietnam.

At home now, what was missing is gradually coming back, particularly the personal life and social life. I’m still waiting on the work life, but hopefully that too will come soon. It feels good to come back to this old house, this old life. Of course, having been away for a year, there is repair and renovation to consider, but I am eager to carry this out with the new material I now have to work with.

I can’t tell you how the house turned out—is a house ever really finished? Here at home, it’s hard to get a clear look at what I built back there. I know I built something, because at the least I made a life for myself.

But how much of the building did I leave standing there, or what of it is standing in me? Do I have to give up the Vietnam house now that I’m back in my Souderton one? Is there some way I can still occupy a bit of both?

Where are the remains of this thing I built, and what was the quality of construction, I wonder? What about the material I chose to use? Was I mostly using straw or hay? Something that wouldn’t last? Or was there enough stone and quality workmanship to help it stand the test of time, even where I can’t be to live in and maintain it? I wonder.

—Renee Gehman, Souderton, Pennsylvania, is assistant editor for DreamSeeker Magazine. This article is an adaptation of a sermon she gave at Salford Mennonite Church upon her recent return to the USA. Her life, once again, is currently undergoing heavy reconstruction.