the text and images below are posted from beijing, berlin, buenos aires, hong kong, los angeles, new york, sado island, shanghai, tokyo and zürich. there are a few of us, and this is the space in between.

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a little of switzerland or something in Vietnam

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I met my grandfather on my father’s side, who turns 96 this year, for the third time. In 1996, I went ‘back’ to Vietnam for the first time to attend my grandmother’s funeral. My mother’s parents passed away when she was still little. Simone and me visited ‘Gong’ (grandfather in Teo Chew, our Chinese Dialect from Shantou, 汕头 in Guangdong) in Ho-Chi Minh City for 5 days. I consider myself as an ‘Overseas Chinese’, because Chinese Culture/Tradition was passed on to us. However ‘Home’ for my parents has always been Vietnam, because they were born and grew up as ‘Overseas Chinese’ in Bac Lieu, South-Vietnam. We stayed with my uncle’s family who look after ‘Gong’ and everybody in ‘our’ neighborhood knew that the two of us were the relatives abroad from Switzerland. We went every day down to his room and were talking to him in Teo Chew. I was happy to see ‘Gong’, but in some ways he was a stranger to me, but I did notice similarities to my father. ‘Gong’ knew all the facts (school, profession, salary…) about his grandchildren and kept on asking us if it’s true that Binh, my second oldest sister, has become a lawyer. He also kept on asking if we really got the grant from Pro Helvetia and if we are really working on our project in Beijing. He said proudly that he is amazed how many languages his grandchildren speak. Somehow he thought Linh, my oldest sister, speaks Italian, what is NOT true…Pictures of us grandchildren and my parents were hanging on the wall. I recognize our old apartment in Solothurn, my Swiss hometown. I see family picture of us when we were little. All those pictures are part of my memories from Switzerland and are hanging on the wall in my grandfather’s room on the second floor at Binh Toi No133/5/3 in the 11th district of Ho-Chi Minh City – Saigon, how my parents still call the city! In the morning on our last day before we left for the airport we went down to ‘Gong’ to say goodbye. Both us took a picture with him to capture this moment. He wished us a save journey to Beijing and asked me: Is Beijing nice? I think he has never been to Beijing and has never returned to China since he moved to Vietnam.

This entry was posted by mon on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 2:47 pm and is filed under archive, everything, home, identity, kitchen, moving, obachan, together. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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