 As
many college students find, they learn more about themselves
the farther from home
they go. For Vietnamese-born Doan Quach '96, she needed a round-trip
experience to understand more completely her own identity.
The first leg of her journey began when she was in second grade. Her parents,
seeking better economic opportunities, left Ho Chi Minh City (also known as
Saigon) and moved her family to the Worcester area. For most of her growing-up
years, Vietnam was a faraway country with traditions and "cultural stuff"discussed
by her parents. As a senior at Holy Cross, however, Doan Quach (pronounced
Dwan Quock) discovered another form of opportunity - the chance to return
to Vietnam for her honors thesis research. And learn about her homeland for
herself.
"I wanted to go, but it was a far-offish idea," she says. She remembers her advisor
Karen Turner telling her that she would be there during the spring semester.
When Turner asked, "Why don't you come?" Quach says, "I jumped at the possibility." From
February to June 1996, she lived and studied in Hanoi, some 700 miles north
of Ho Chi Minh City, where an uncle and other relatives still lived.
As the daughter of a former South Vietnamese army sergeant,
Quach had some hesitations about traveling to Hanoi. "My parents had a lot of reservations," she
says. They had left North Vietnam - "the ominous North," says Quach - in
1954, relocating to Saigon. By 1981, they knew they wanted to emigrate
to America.
To help allay the fears of Quach's parents, Turner and her husband,
fellow faculty member Tom Gottschang, visited her family at their home
in Worcester.
When her parents made some comment about their visitors in Vietnamese,
Gottschang responded in Vietnamese. Surprised (and a little embarrassed,
Turner said),
they warmed to the couple immediately and gave their daughter their
blessings for the journey.
Before arriving in Vietnam, Quach's primary concern was that people would see
her as an outsider and "look at me with suspicion." She admits she was an outsider,
having moved from Vietnam 15 years before. "I grew up in Worcester. That's
where my thinking was molded."
While she saw the pervasive poverty her parents had told her about, she also
felt Hanoi was vibrant economically. She need not have worried about sticking
out. "People were curious. They wanted to know more about people in other
places, what their lives were like. They were starving for knowledge of the
other side."
The curiosity was mutual. "I wanted to explore the idea of work and what it
meant to women in Vietnam," says Quach. Her honors thesis examined whether
women distinguished between "outside" work, in a profession or market stall,
and "inside work," running a household. Using women's unions as a focus,
she interviewed some 35 women about their daily lives.
"I would go to the market and just talk to people," she said. Some conversations
she tape-recorded "when my Vietnamese was not so fluent," she says. As she relied
less and less on the tape recorder, she found herself shifting identities. "I
didn't look like a research person," she says. "I was a student from Ho Chi Minh
City." In many ways, she was.
Her conversations were not always about work. When she
asked about Vietnamese history, the war with America often entered the
discussion. But regional differences
became clear. In Ho Chi Minh City, people quickly changed the subject.
The people of Hanoi were "proud to have fought the war and won it," she says.
By contrast, Ho Chi Minh City residents "were glad the war was over and didn't
want to talk about it."
Quach's travel dates meant she missed her own graduation from Holy Cross. But,
by then, she wasn't sure she wanted to be back in the United States
anyway.
"It was hard to come back," she says. "I blended in so well. I was Vietnamese." When
she returned to Worcester, she went through culture shock. She had to
readjust her cultural assumptions.
"It took a while to leave the culture behind," she says. "Home, though
it is a Vietnamese home, is mixed now. I couldn't think the way I did there. Inside
I was constantly making changes, saying to myself, 'If I were in Vietnam, I wouldn't
do it that way,' or 'People in Vietnam wouldn't say that or think that way.' I
was stuck in an unhappy state."
According to Quach, it took nearly two years for her to return to what she
considered to be her old self. Now engaged to a Vietnamese man whose family
is also from Ho Chi Minh City, she has enrolled in a master's of public
administration program at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Interested in environmental
studies, she would like to be a policy analyst on environmental issues.
She hopes to return to Vietnam someday.
"It was a beautiful experience," she says. "I was very fortunate to be able to
do it."
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Travel and Parallel World" Feature >
- A.C.
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