Written by Trang T. H. Ngo
The statistics of Vietnam’s Ministry of Justice showed that in 2015, 15 people acquired Vietnamese citizenship, 14 were returning to Vietnam to become Vietnamese again. In contrast 4,474 abandoned the Vietnamese nationality.
If you are not a Vietnamese, you may find these numbers ridiculous. But if you are one, you somehow understand these circumstances.
***
I was born in a small city in Central Vietnam and came to Japan in 2006 when I received a scholarship from the Japanese government. The scholarship lasted five years: one year of studying Japanese and four years of university. Before leaving, I told people around me that I would return home right after the scholarship expires. For a 19-year-old girl who had never been away from home for more than three days, five years living abroad was bound to be challenging. It was. I missed my family, friends, and neighbors. Looking back, at that point, this seemed inevitable.
However, as time went by, I proceeded to take a Masters degree in Japan and started working there after graduation. And now, I have been in Japan for more than ten years. Perhaps I'll stay here in the foreseeable future. Each time I return home to visit my family, my childhood best friend always asked me when would I really (and she meant “permanently”) come back to Vietnam. Ironically, that is also the question that I have for myself.
***
I got married. Just like me, my husband is a Vietnamese who came to Japan under a scholarship, is also working for a Japanese company, and is also not sure when or if he’ll be returning home at all.
This year we welcomed a new member to our family, an angel that we love with all our hearts and souls. She was born in Japan and maybe she will grow up here. Though she is not a Japanese, she receives a lot of benefits from the Japanese medical and welfare system. Rather than coming back to Vietnam, I feel safe and grateful to not have given birth and raised my child there, where thorough care and support service for children are only for the wealthy few.
All parents hope for the best for their children. We are no exception. When we consider our future, we now have to take into account what is best for our little daughter and not only ourselves. We have talked to each other several times before about how long we plan to live in Japan and what jobs should we take if we decide to return, or if we should move to another country. But we did not feel the need to make a decision until our daughter was born.
For the near future, we intend to raise her in Japan because we would like to live in Japan for a few more years. But we are not sure whether several years means a couple of years, or perhaps decades. My daughter will probably go to a Japanese school, make friends with Japanese people, speak Japanese as her first language, and naturally, adopt Japanese culture and customs. Yes, growing up in Japan means she'll be more like Japanese than us. In other words, she may be less Vietnamese than my husband and I. We wonder, then, which nationality, Vietnamese or Japanese, will best suit her. Is she Vietnamese? Or will it be better to call her Japanese? Will she feel inferior to her peers because of her ethnicity when she grows up? What will she think when she recognizes that she is neither like her “pure” Japanese friends nor fully Vietnamese?
My husband and I think that nationality is not merely a country’s name on a passport. It is more than an official document. It is something embedded in our marrow, our flesh and blood and cannot only be defined by a place of birth, a name, or a language. And of course, it is not limited to the nationalities of the child’s parents.
***
Our relatives in Vietnam told us to change our nationality to Japanese. Being a citizen of a first world country will give us many benefits as compared to one of a third world, developing nation. No matter what my daughter chooses to do when she grows up, they said, a Japanese citizenship will open up many doors for her and make her life much easier.
My husband and I both graduated from top-ranking universities, speak Japanese fluently, and are employed at prestigious companies. From an outsider’s point of view, we may come from a third world country, but we satisfy all the required conditions to apply for Japanese citizenship. However, we are still skeptical of the idea of changing our nationality, because we know that by acquiring a Japanese citizenship, we will effectively abandon our Vietnamese nationality.
***
“There is no reason to keep a Vietnamese passport when you have the chance to be a citizen of a wealthy country. If anyone has the opportunity to let go of their Vietnamese nationality like you do, the person would do so without much hesitation!”
“But maybe someday,” I looked pointedly at my uncle, “I might come back and live in Vietnam."
“I do not understand why. Many Vietnamese want to get out of this country, and those who already did rarely returned. You should really just stay in Japan.”
Not only my uncle but also many people in my country think this way. I know, and I understand. Their lives are tough in our motherland. Decades of wars, death, destruction, and political problems have significantly slowed down the growth of Vietnam, and the resulting poverty traps most of the population in its merciless claws. Today, Vietnam is called a developing country, but for many of us, it is still an underdeveloped country falling further behind the rest of the world.
My relatives are not wrong thinking that a Vietnamese nationality is disadvantageous; my husband and I have encountered many problems because of our Vietnamese passports. Our job sometimes requires a sudden business trip overseas. Our Japanese colleagues may not even need to think twice about it. But for us, in most cases, we need several weeks in advance to apply for a visa, even for a very short visit abroad.
My husband, for instance, was kept at the airport’s immigration office for more than two hours when he flew from Japan to South Korea. All of his Japanese colleagues went through the gate in less than five minutes. Only he was stopped, just because he brought a Vietnamese passport. At the end of the inspection, the officer told him that they had to check his identifications thoroughly because there were many cases of Vietnamese who illegally overstayed their visa in South Korea to look for work. Upon returning to Japan, my husband told me that when the officer detained him, he was very upset, but not because he was kept at the gate for a long time. Rather, it was because he empathized the South Korean officials’ reason for stopping him, and at the same time, he understood why Vietnamese risked getting in prison just to leave Vietnam forever.
To be honest, sometimes I feel ashamed when telling others that I come from Vietnam. I feel even more embarrassed about my nationality when I heard about crimes committed by Vietnamese people in Japan on the news, when I saw the warnings against shoplifting written only in Vietnamese in front of Japanese clothing stores, or when Vietnamese men gossip loudly on the usually quiet Japanese subway, thinking Japanese cannot understand their language. It came to a point that I sometimes tried to avoid talking with Vietnamese I see on the subway and pretended to not recognize their ethnicity if our eyes accidentally met.
Living in Japan had made me a little more ‘Japanese’. I became quieter. Sometimes I despise Vietnamese people living here because they are worsening my country’s image in Japanese’s minds with their actions, but I also feel extremely guilty of having a preference for Japan over my home country.
***
I said living in Japan had made me a little Japanese. I really meant just a little, for I know that no matter how hard I try to deny my nationality, the fact that I am not Japanese could never be changed. More precisely, I realized that I cannot be a Japanese no matter how hard I try to be.
When I was a student, I envied my Japanese friends because they could listen to lectures in their native language. I was jealous of my Japanese friends when they got better grades than I did, even when I spent more time than they did to study for the exams. An ugly seed of bitterness sprouted inside me because I had to comprehend very difficult materials in a completely foreign language. No matter how much time and hard work I spent on studying, I could never reach the level that my fellow Japanese friends so easily attained.
I used to feel a bit humiliated when people around me knew that I am not Japanese. It might not have been the case if I was born in a Western country. Though Japanese people are very fond of foreigners and immigrants, they tend to like Western people more than Asians. However, because I cannot change the pigment of my skin, the lack of a bridge for my nose, or the slant of my eyes so that I could be less Asian in order for Japanese to like me better, I opted to become a Japanese instead by dressing like Japanese girls and mimicking the way young Japanese talk.
One day, my boyfriend, who is now my husband, told me to stop what I was doing. "Honey, you can’t become a Japanese. The more you try to act like that, the more stupid you seem. You are born Vietnamese. Try to be a perfect Vietnamese, instead of being a defective Japanese.”
His words were eye-opening.
My outfit may perfectly resemble that of a Japanese and my voice may sound exactly like a native speaker, but those things do not change the fact that I am Vietnamese to the bones. My favorite food will always be Pho (Vietnamese noodle); my favorite dress will always be Ao Dai. They will never be sushi and Kimono, even if I choose to spend the rest of my life in Japan. That was the day I realized no matter how hard I tried to deny my identity, I am still Vietnamese.
***
Once, I showed some of my childhood pictures to my Japanese friends. They said that Vietnam in my pictures (in the 1990s) looked like Japan after World War II. They were right. I had to admit that our country had a lot of similarities to Japan in the 1940s. Once again, jealousy and inferiority engulfed me. How could they not? I come from a backward country that is half of a century behind Japan in terms of politics, social justice, and economic power.
Now, I think differently.
I grew up in a nation that has the same problems as Japan 40 years ago, and it may take a few decades for Vietnam to catch up to the current status of Japan. Now I am living in one of the few countries with leading technology in the world.
If a person’s life is not defined by the number of years they have been on the Earth, but by how the experience they have gathered in their whole life then I think I have lived very long life. For the Japanese, my existence symbolizes their country 40 years ago. And for the Vietnamese, I have traveled into the future. I am living in the past, present and future, and this precious experience is rarely attainable if people are only born and raised in only one country.
***
Several years ago, I met a professor. He was born in Vietnam, then came to Japan when he was 20 on the same scholarship as mine, and later moved to France to develop his career. At the time, he was invited to return to Japan for a talk at a Japanese university. He spoke English, French, and Japanese fluently, but for some reason, we chose to talk to each other in Vietnamese instead. I wondered which nationality a well-travelled and talented man like him chose to adopt. He could go anywhere, and any country would be pleased to have him as a citizen.
Feeling too shy to ask directly, I tested the waters first. “You’ve lived in so many countries. Which is the one you like to live in the most?”
"I had lived in Vietnam for 20 years and it was all of my youth, then I lived in Japan for another 20 years and I built the first steps of my career here. I have been living in France for two decades, where I got married and witnessed my children growing up. It's hard to say which country I like the most. Each of them is a piece of me. But it was the first 20 years of my life in Vietnam that shaped the foundation for my personality and my identity today. Wherever I go, that fact can never be changed and neither are my personality nor my identity.”
After hearing his answer, I gave up finding out which passport he owns altogether. Whatever nationality he had, it clearly did not matter to him for his identity will always be one of a Vietnamese, and it certainly did not matter to me anymore.
***
Our family in Vietnam will continue to persuade us to change our nationality to Japanese, but my husband and I will keep being Vietnamese, at least in the near future. Even if one day we decide to change our nationality, our love for and loyalty to Vietnam as well as the Vietnamese part in our identities remain unchanged. Indeed, the first 20 years of one's life will shape one’s personality forever. My husband's and mine had already been formed. Any other environmental influences would only be able to chip away or blend in with our core, but never be able to remove it entirely.
But our girl is different.
When our little daughter was born, we racked our brains to think of a name for her. Should she have a Japanese name to get on with her friends quickly when she goes to school? Or perhaps a Western name is better for her in an increasingly integrated and globalized world? A lot of Japanese and English names have been chosen. But in the end, we came up with a purely Vietnamese one. Perhaps someday, she will ask us why. When the time comes, if she feels that she prefers being Japanese, we will encourage her to change her nationality, or even her name if she wishes. We want her to decide for herself which nationality best suits her identity and personality.
Until then, we have decided to let her live true to her intrinsically Vietnamese identity, and we hope that she will love the Vietnamese name we gave her, and treat it like a beautiful gift with all of her heart.
Written by Trang T. H. Ngo
Japan, September 2016.
