Jordanian-Vietnamese by blood, French by choice

Her full name is Diana Minh H?ng Deeb Ishhab, even though in her passport, the Vietnamese name (Minh H?ng) is written between parentheses for some unknown reasons. As if Vietnam as a country had to remind her, whenever she uses her passport, that she was only partly Vietnamese. As if the juxtaposition of these different letters and sounds that made up her name didn’t set her apart already.

I grew up calling her only by the name of “Diana” — as most people who knew her did— since as a child, I thought that Diana was much more fitting to her because of the way that she looked. “Minh H?ng” sounded too Vietnamese for her. I thought that if she had darker hair, thinner lips and whiter skin, she could have passed for a Minh H?ng. But it wasn’t the case for this special girl.

She is three years older than me and we’ve known each other since a very young age. For many years now, she had always been the older sister that I never had. Unlike me, she had always been the calm and responsible one. The reasonable and sometimes boring one (when she talks me out of my crazy adventures). The caring and nurturing one. I felt fascination towards her from a very young age and a tinge of jealousy when we were growing up together, exactly because of how cool I thought her to be.

Culturally-speaking.

Diana was born into a very rare household: her father was Jordanian and her mother Vietnamese. Up until the age of eight, she was living in Syria — a grander Syria, unlike the war-torn version of it that we often see on TV today — and was speaking Arabic every day in both school and at home. She knew that her mother was Vietnamese but knew nothing more about the country and its people, not even as a vacation destination where her family would visit during the summer. For Diana at the age of eight, Vietnam was simply a country where people related to her lived but with whom she had never met or knew how to even communicate with, due to the language barrier.

And just like that, when she was about to enter second grade, her whole family moved to Vietnam to live closer to her Mom’s side of the family. Overnight, like many of the other weird culture kids who followed their parents around the world, Diana lost many, many things. She lost both big and small things. And she lost them in different rhythm. She first lost the Mediterranean climate, a relaxed city, a familiar country, since these things are often the most obvious external changes. Then, within days, reality taught her that she’s lost a treasured friend, a favorite slide, a saliva-induced dish. Gradually, she lost almost all the sounds she used to know: both ones she used to hear and ones she used to pronounce. She had to familiarize herself with new sounds that, once filled with meaning and given a bit of time, became words to her ears.

As if to make the relocation even more challenging, upon landing to Vietnam, Diana was immediately enrolled in the French international school where she found other people who were just as culturally weird as she was. So she quickly learned two new languages, French at school and Vietnamese at home, while letting Arabic, her then mother tongue, take a secondary position in her new life (but still a primary one in her memories).

She found a strong sense of home in the Lycée Fran?ais Alexandre Yersin because it was a very multicultural and international place, a place that shielded kids like herself from the homogenous Vietnamese society that awaited her outside the green gates of the school. As an adult, she confessed to used to think of LFAY as the school created in the X-men movie: a place for mutants, like herself, to meet and socialize with other mutants. A place to make these specific people feel less lonely because they now officially have a place to belong and people to relate to.

Or at least that’s what she thought as she was growing up. Because things were always simpler when we were kids. You didn’t really notice differences and when you did, these differences were exactly just that — differences— with no judgment attached to these elements. No side to take or comment to make. But when adolescence hit Diana, things were different. They weren’t as easy as they used to be. And to be fair, adolescence is never easy for anybody, but this time it was particularly hard for Diana because by that time, she had learned a bit more about herself and knew which type of people she wanted to be friends with the most.

In fact, she realized that she was gravitating towards the Vietnamese kids who were educated in the French system from a young age the most.

And no one could blame her for gravitating towards them simply because she was them. Although her father was Jordanian, she was living in Vietnam, raised by a Vietnamese mother and surrounded herself constantly with her Vietnamese family members. Additionally, Diana felt the closest to her Vietnamese-born but Western-educated friends because she knew that they, too, had experienced the differences that she endured. That they, too, felt not completely fitting within the Vietnamese homogenous society because they have been educated in the French system from a very young age.

And we all know how formative those early years were for any human being.

At this point, Diana didn’t see any differences between her halfie-self and her full Vietnamese friends because she had not only grown into her Vietnamese self (or at least into the definition of what the Vietnamese identity meant to her), but also actively chosen it as part of her identity. And that’s what she had gained after losing so much when relocating from Syria to Vietnam. Her sense of family and community grew exponentially since she moved to Vietnam with her nuclear family because she had gained zillions of family members upon landing. Her deep respect towards the elders is now heightened ever since she found herself living in a Vietnamese home in which several generations lived together under one roof. Most — if not everything— she did or said or thought was deeply Vietnamese.

And yet, she knew that her Vietnamese friends didn’t necessarily see her as fully one of them.

You see, Vietnam, like many other Asian countries, is a society where you are either born Vietnamese or you are not. Diana fell into the in-between category because her mother is Vietnamese, but to Vietnamese people — the non-half Vietnamese majority— Diana is considered to be automatically non-Vietnamese. Or, at least, more of the non-Vietnamese part, than the Vietnamese part. And whether or not she felt that way didn’t really matter because the most salient element about her when she first meets someone is the way she looks: foreign. Her tan skin, freckled face and brown hair gave her non-Vietnamese part away immediately, even before she could open her mouth and speak with a perfect Vietnamese accent to defend her sense of belonging.

Growing up, the typical scene in her social life looked and sounded something like this:

We would go to a bar together and she would order a drink at the bar. The bartender’s jaw would drop — keeping in mind that we are in the early 2000s— and he would proceed in telling her how good her Vietnamese sounded. She then either defended her Vietnameseness or, most of the time too tired, just paid for the drink and walked away. I, as her friend, didn’t think much about these moments because just like that fully Vietnamese bartender, I understood him and knew that I probably would have reacted the same way, should I find myself in his position. Not out of meanness, but more out of the unusual situation that he found himself in: taking order from a Jordanian-Vietnamese girl in an expat bar in Hanoi.

That definitely did not happen every day. Not to mention that the average person probably had no idea that Jordan was an actual country.

So life continued and Diana noticed that, on many occasions, although she would feel the most joy whenever she was hanging out with her Vietnamese friends from the French school, she would simultaneously feel less Vietnamese in those moments. She understood the rationale behind it and knew that she would never be allowed to feel as Vietnamese as her peers because she was a halfie. And although it was just a mere fact — the fact that she was a halfie—, it was an alienating one because it pushed her away from the people she felt related to the most.

And in those alienating moments, she was grateful for being in the French international school because it was a perfect playing ground for people like her— thanks to the diverse student body that it represented. In fact, whenever she felt too alienated from her Vietnamese identity, she could always find refuge in the French world— or “other” world— made up of the expat kids who also attended the school. There, too, she found some sense of belonging because Diana knew what it felt like to be an expat growing up in a different country. Except that this was her own country.

And that was where all the problems resided.

Today, as a woman in her thirties, living in Paris, France, she confesses, once again, to feel even more Vietnamese. Even after going through the whole French education system, even after living for more than a decade in Paris, even after acquiring her French nationality for several years now, her Vietnamese side is still the dominant one.

Diana has taught me that external proofs of belonging — a country’s language, mentality, official language — have never been enough. The only element that can validate your own sense of belonging is yourself. And, of course, that of the people you surround yourself with- whether you want that to be true or not.

So choose those people wisely. She knows she has.