Diaspora in an asian shopping mall

December 20, 2019 8:46 PM

Finding Eden and Myself in a Vietnamese Shopping Center: As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself searching for my reflection in my mother’s aging, heart-shaped face. I’ve tried to figure out what part of me is her, what part of me is Vietnamese. Until I experienced feeling like an outsider at the Eden Center, it didn’t occur to me how isolated my mother must have felt as a new immigrant; how not using her native language could have made her feel like her tongue had been clipped.
posted by Conspire (6 comments total)

Excellent, thank you. My multicultural family does not have such a dramatic backstory, but I wonder how things will be for my kids when they grow up. We don't fly the USSR flag but my wife is from a gone country and when she goes back to "home" she finds Tajikistan strange and provincial. Russian is her native language and her Tajik is not really fluent. The oldest son looks local, but his school is also Russian so he is at native level English and Russian and similarly disdains Tajik. Never gonna fit in there but glad he is getting the chance to live there for a while. And the youngest is very Euro looking, and monolingual English. Wife speaks English to both her sons.

What a planet!
posted by Meatbomb at 10:31 PM on December 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

Nice essay, thank you.
posted by mwhybark at 11:25 PM on December 20, 2019

I grew up in that area, and Eden Center is an institution. Thanks for posting this.
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:46 PM on December 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

Me too, LobsterMitten. Eden Center is so special.

Thank you for sharing, Conspire!
posted by bowtiesarecool at 9:51 AM on December 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

I grew up in Arlington, and when I was a kid, the restaurant selections, beyond pizza, diners, McDonalds and a couple of other chains (and even those were scarce), were two: Shanghai and El Sombrero. Little Saigon was one of the first places that diversified those options, to the eternal gratitude of at least my family!

It was sad to see get it swept away for mostly corporate restaurants and other generics, but Eden Center ended up being everything Little Saigon was on a bigger scale.
posted by tavella at 2:09 PM on December 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

This was a really great read, thank you. I grew up with a ton of second gen Vietnamese children of immigrants (ours was a first-stop city for many) so there’s a lot that rings familiar.

Also I will take any opportunity to mention the works of Viet Thanh Nguyen because he is fucking amazing and very, very clear-eyed and deservedly angry, so there’s my encouragement to read whatever of his is available from your local bookstore or library.
posted by librarylis at 6:20 PM on December 21, 2019 [3 favorites]