True Home
I have arrived
I am home
In the here, in the now
I am solid. I am free.
In the ultimate
I dwell.
There is this one poem (above) by the Zen Buddhist master, Thích Nhất Hạnh, whose teachings have made profound impact on my healing and his compassionate activism has inspired me in my work, just as much as the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I have loved the fact that these two giants had crossed paths with each other in the 1960s, as they both worked relentlessly for peace and freedom during the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War era.
I don’t remember when I first came across this poem, but it’s been hanging around my life and traveling alongside me for the past many years. The word home was the one that first captured my attention. This word has taken on many forms and meanings for me, shapeshifting through the years as I meander and navigate through my journey. In recent days and weeks, it has resurfaced and demanded my attention. As I tended to my responsibilities related to home, it also took me on a trip down memory lane.
This piece is not for the faint of heart. I struggled to write it myself, but it helped me process and gave me a renewed perspective. So if you’re sensitive to topics surrounding race and culture, please know you don’t have to read on.
What is a home?
Is it a house, a piece of land, a country, a continent, an ocean, a planet or a universe? Some say that home is where you hang your hats, display awkward family photos, kick off your shoes, stuff your face and grow your belly with delicious food straight out of grandma’s or mama's kitchen. Others have managed to summarize it in one darling little phrase: home is where the heart is.
What about those who grow up in a so-called broken home? I used to wonder, what makes one’s home broken? I didn’t know what it really means until I began my counseling work with at-risk, gang-impacted and incarcerated youth (mostly young men) in my earlier years. I listened to countless stories of heartbreaks and broken homes, and peeled back layer after layer of their trauma in sessions, long before any trauma-informed clinical training was available out there. The only trauma-informed care available then was solely dedicated to study symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and provide treatment for US veterans of Vietnam War.
Anyhow, these young men allowed me to witness their rage and their cries, and underneath all of that, I saw the depth of their hurts and their pains. As I’ve since learned, broken refers more to their experience of not having felt a sense of safety, security, belonging, nurturance, or any healthy amount of love within the place that they rightfully called home. Broken, because there were so many injustices in their world that they had to endure at such a young age, while our society aims to misunderstand them and tells them that boys don’t cry.
Little did I realize, their stories and our relationship were gifts given to me; they were mirrors that reflected back to me all of my blind spots and dark corners of my life that I previously failed to see.
As a young child, home, for me, was tucked inside the nurturing hands of my grandmother’s. Her love was as vast as the ocean—the kind of love that transcends lifetimes. It often smelled like a mixture of incense, chewed betel leaf and areca nut, and yummy home-grown organic vegan food (long before organic and vegan even became popular words in the West). Home, as I remember, was this perfect abode that I painted in dreamy pastels on my canvas as a child. It later changed its meaning when I transitioned out of my grandmother’s care. Then again, it took on a new definition in my pre-adolescence, right around the time when I left Vietnam to immigrate to the US.
Where is home?
For most of youth and my 20s, home took on various meanings and became more elusive. At one point, home was a roof over my head for the rainy days and other times, it was just a layover. It is safe to say, I found a home within many life transitions—it was nestled in between temporary places. It later moved itself into a small PO box at my local post office as I traded in the confinement of rental space for a sense of freedom in the open road and the changing external landscapes. Conveniently, my personal belongings easily fit into just a few moving boxes and a suitcase that they made my travels a little lighter. Sometimes, those moving boxes and suitcase remained unpacked because I would need to pick up and leave again. But after a while, it became exhausting being on the road all the time. Then, I began to ask myself out loud one day: Where is home?
Having lived in two opposing cultures, traveled from East to West and back around a few times, I have sat with questions about my cultural identity as an immigrant woman of color in this embodied life, and what home means to me. There is no denying that the US has given me and individuals like myself certain rights and opportunities that my birth country did not. But is this nation, with its violent background and oppressive nature, really my home for the remaining years of my life here on earth? If it’s not here, then where? Although Vietnam is my birthplace, I have had to make peace with the fact that I cannot go back to the country that I once called home, due to my family’s history, legacy, and my father’s past political involvement in the Vietnam War.
But what is home without love, peace and freedom?
Through the early struggles and life experience of my youth and young adulthood, I have had to learn to accept this one hard truth—that the same values and qualities that are well celebrated and held in high regard in my culture of origin of days past, are also the ones that are considered weak and often exploited in American culture. I had recognized early on, that what helped me thrive in the Eastern part of the world is the very thing that also threatens my survival in the West.
Sure, I have had to shed certain habits, let go of certain behaviors, changed my attitude and shifted my perspective over the years as part of the growth process. However, I have refused to abandon any of those core parts that make me the whole human that I am. And the hardest hurdles, yet often the quiet battles, I have had to overcome are the ones that required me to firmly stand my ground in the face of others’ rejection, disapproval and threats, learning to embrace, embody and hold space for those parts within me—the yin and the yang, the light and the dark, the strong and the soft, the East and the West—the beautiful paradoxes, all the while staying true to the path that is uniquely mine in a world that is often trying to make me somebody else.
As I’ve seen too often, through the immigration and acculturation process, many individuals like myself and those of later generations, have let go of their true identity and their unique way of being, to adopt the mainstream culture, to blend in with the new way of living in the US, in order to survive on American soil. But if I’m being honest, I am going to offend quite a few folks when I say this—too many people of my own culture/race, especially those who have well acculturated to the US, have chosen to abandon their own roots, hide their own truths, discard their own standards of beauty and disregard their high-value qualities—all that which make them beautiful and authentic cultural beings. Many have succumbed to the ideologies, belief systems, and colonial mentality that have been indoctrinated to hate, harm, oppress, and shame them and those of their own kind.
Unfortunately, that is the dark side of the society we’re living in. The unfolding events in our present days are merely the symptoms of deeply unhealed wounds that have been festering beneath the band-aids, that which are the grounds where this nation has built upon. They are the devastating impacts of colonialism that have gone on unacknowledged for far too long. They have, consciously and unconsciously, infiltrated our lives, systems and communities for decades and generations, seeping through our streets and our coffee shops, from our schools to our justice system, from our economics to our healthcare and mental health treatment, from our workplace to our politics and policies.
It has also made me question, how much of our disconnection from our ancestral culture and the disowning of our cultural roots, have contributed to the declining of our physical, mental, emotional, social, relational, and spiritual health, especially for those of us who are of ethnic minorities and immigrant backgrounds in the US?
If we have to abandon parts of ourselves and trade in our pure authentic nature to fit neatly in this societal checkbox, to accommodate a superficially curated version of ourselves for others’ validation, or to sell our image/brand that has to meet someone else’s standards of beauty and success, are we really free? Are we truly at peace? Are we loving ourselves?
I have arrived. I am Home.
Though it has taken many years with many detours and roadblocks, I have found my way home, to my safe haven that I have built within this body of mine, the one true home on earth that I get to take with me wherever I go. I have been home for a while now. I have emptied those moving boxes, unpacked my suitcase and hung up my hats. I have decorated it with vibrant colors of love, added extra layers of warmth, mixed it with hints of gold, embellished it with a great sense of freedom, fragranced it with various herbs and spices, dialed up the music, watered my plants, welcomed the daily meow’s as my alarm clock, listened to the soft purrs of my furry bundle of joy, and indulged in the soul food made from my small kitchen along with many great cups of tea.
This sacred space of mine doesn’t have to meet anyone else’s standards and doesn’t care for their approval. But home these days looks more like the small abode painted in dreamy pastels on my canvas some years ago. For this, I am thankful, as I am savoring all the present moments and the calm waters in my life, until the next wind of change comes by.
For your reflection:
What is your definition of home?
Where is home for you these days?
When are you coming home?
How safe is home for you?
If it is not safe and loving, why do you stay?
If you already have a loving home, how are you planning to protect it, nurture it, strengthen it, and keep it safe?
Recommendation: Now is a good time to put down deeper roots and ground yourself to the home inside of you and within your relationships. Bring out all the safe coping tools that you have already gathered and practice them daily. The best ones are usually the ones you can access within yourself. If you have little ones, teach them to do the same by being a great role model. Please do whatever it takes to stay safe, secured and centered within your own home so that no outside turmoil can rock you or knock you down. Stable foundation and deep strong roots will help your home and your trees weather storms that may come our way in 2021.