Fight and Claw
Naomi is a 22-year-old Vietnamese American whose life in rural Wisconsin during the pandemic unearthed trauma spanning generations of cultural oppression.
Naomi's Story
Trump flags lined the streets of this rural Wisconsin town that my mom moved to in April. I had just moved out of my freshman year dorm and went to live with her for the summer. Despite a population of 5,000, I felt like I was the only person in this god forsaken town. Everyone I had met in college was back in Minnesota, and all my high school friends were back in my hometown, 50 miles away. In the summer of 2020, it was just me and my mom. And I was alone. If anything were to happen to me here, no one would know about it.
I decided to take the fall semester off from college. School was going to be online, and things were getting too weird. George Floyd had just been murdered by the police. My newly found home in Minneapolis was on fire and I was stuck across the border, feeling guilty for not being able to be on the streets protesting with my friends. I couldn’t be on the streets in rural Wisconsin. It was too dangerous.
Instead, I just went to work every day at my mom’s nail salon. After that, I came home, smoked weed in my car, ate food, watched a movie, and went to bed. The days dragged on—working, filing, cutting, trimming, massaging the hands of middle-aged white ladies day in, day out. Work. Make money. Smoke. Sleep. Repeat.
Smoking helped. It numbed everything around me, making my hazy life just barely bearable for three long months of summer.
One day at the salon, my mom and I got into a huge argument. The TV in the corner read the headlines loudly: BUSINESSES LOOTED IN SOUTH MINNEAPOLIS.
“I can’t believe it about the protests,” my mom started saying. “They’re hurting small businesses, going out there and doing damage, and for what? What good does that do?”
Heat immediately swelled up in my face, my whole body trying to find the words to speak. I knew she didn’t like to get involved in politics. I knew I was more progressive than her. I knew she was just saying it out of ignorance, but my whole body shook. My voice forceful yet shaky tried to explain. Tears welled up in my eyes as I spat the words out, my voice louder now, starting to break.
In that moment, everything bubbled up. The war. My childhood. My pain. My mom’s pain. Moving. Moving again. Working. Fighting. Clawing. Fighting. Clawing. Fighting. Clawing… Every pulse flashing through my brain, rushing through my veins like a fully loaded train flying through the Saigon countryside. It wasn’t about the protests. It wasn’t about George Floyd. Between my mom and me, it was about much more than that. I stormed out of the nail salon, furious. Did she even realize how much hurt she’d put me through? How much I’ve had to endure because of her pain?
My mom and I never came back to that conversation. As a young, single mother and an immigrant, her pain rippled into me. The pain of her past, the emotional toll, no help, working so hard every day. I know it was hard. I know because so was being her daughter. Her hard times were born into me. The scars and emotional unrest ran in my blood. And yet, her strength—the strength of our country—was also born into me. Like Vietnam, we had to fight and claw at having a chance to survive. Fight and claw in a society that wasn’t made for us. Fight and claw until we could—at last—live life.
About Naomi
Naomi is a fourth-year design student who carries herself with confidence, strength, and a laidback attitude. Inquisitive and sociable, Naomi holds the complexity of her life with the assurance that everything will be fine. She doesn’t fear consequences but learns from her actions and is committed to a firmly held sense of right and wrong.
She grew up alongside her older sister and single mom. She spent a lot of her childhood years alone at home with her sister, often not seeing their mom until the late hours of the night when she returned from work. At 12 years old, Naomi moved from Minnesota to an extremely white and wealthy part of Florida. She lived there for two years before moving to Wisconsin to finish high school. Naomi always found community with other people of color knowing that she would be understood by those who knew what it was like to be a minority in America. She found comfort in other second-generation immigrants who straddled different cultures, but still felt lost when it came to being Vietnamese American.
Since her mom was working all the time, there wasn’t much focus on keeping the family culture, traditions, or language alive. Naomi assimilated into the schools she attended in Florida and learned endless amounts about American history. She lost the ability to speak Vietnamese at a young age and struggled to understand her two identities of being American and being Vietnamese. A disconnect grew between Naomi and her culture, like a long-distance relative somewhere across the ocean.
In college, it was important for Naomi to learn about her culture. As she gained distance from her family and began to come into her own, she wanted to create a relationship with her culture and get to know it better. What was the history? What was the food? Why were Vietnamese people in America and not Vietnam? She had so many unanswered questions.
In her third year of school, Naomi did a project on the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese perspective. Her research blew her mind. It was grounding and enlightening. The long-distance relative felt closer now as she connected with perspectives of the past. In U.S. schooling, she was taught that Vietnamese people were victims of the Vietnam War, that they weren’t real people deciding the fate of their own country. Unlike the narratives she was fed throughout school, the books she read showed Vietnamese people as strong and human. It made her feel more human.
In coming into connection with her history and culture, Naomi has come into connection with herself. Cooking Vietnamese dishes, relearning the Vietnamese language, and making sense of history helped bridge the gap between her Vietnamese and American identities that she had felt for so long. Ultimately, Naomi seeks connections that make her feel untethered and free, whether that is at a sorority event with her multicultural sisters or out on the town with her QTBIPOC [1] friends. Living a life of strength and freedom required work, but coming into her own has been so worth it.
[1] Queer and trans Black, Indigenous, People of Color
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