Day 3 - Thủ Đức

It's hard to believe that I've only been here three days because it feels like I've been learning so much. Connecting to the internet has been a bit difficult because Vietnam isn't as laxed about access as North America. Facebook is banned so I haven't been able to post any updates - I thought about using my Blackberry but I am getting nervous about what my phone bill is going to look like at the end of the month!

Yesterday (Monday), everyone went back to work and so my mother and I decided to use the morning to visit the place where my parents grew up, Thủ Đức. My mother warned me and said that it's not like Saigon at all...and I wasn't quite prepared to find out that my parents grew up in a very small town. The way that they talked about the place, it always felt so big and I almost romanticised the idea of what it looked like in my mind.

Of course, after so many years, my mother couldn't recognize where the town started because she said it had grown so much. We realized when we were in Thu Duc when we started to see the store signs. As soon as we reached the market, Chợ Thủ Đức, my mother started to yell with excitement. "I recognize it - your father's house is just around the corner!" As soon as I saw it, I knew that this was the building I'd seen in so many pictures growing up. Although there have been other buildings constructed around it, I could tell that this building once stood out tall from the rest.

This home has a very special place in my grandfather's heart - it is the place where he built his family, after coming to Vietnam with nothing in his early teens. During the Vietnam War, the government used the building as a headquarters and unfortunately, took over a portion of it after the war ended. It is divided into three sections, each with four floors and a top veranda. The third floor used to be used as a roller skating rink almost four decades ago! I went inside and took pictures of each floor, made videos too so I could show my family back home.

I climbed to the very top to see the amazing view, where you could see the entire town of Thu Duc. I saw the many rooms that my grandfather once divided among his children and their spouses and the back kitchen where they once had a handful of staff members cooking family meals. I know that the building looks derelict now, but any one can see that it was once an amazing sight - being the first building in town to have multi-levels.

While my mother sat and talked to the lady that tends to the house now, I frantically ran around trying to see as much as I could. Almost shamelessly, I took pictures and tried to ask as many questions as I could. At one point, I even asked to go into one of the bedrooms so I could see and then immediately felt embarrassed when my relative hesitated. I just couldn't overcome my own excitement - I did live here at some point, after all! He showed me one of the rooms that they use as a study room and pointed out a beautiful sideboard that my grandfather bought over 80 years ago (on the right). I immediately thought to myself, "How can I get this to Canada?!" LOL

After visiting my grandfather's house, we had our driver (who is also my mother's cousin) take us to see my mother's house. I laughed as my mother tried to remember how to get there but found it endearing as I watched her sitting at the edge of her seat. She was nervous that people would not know who she was and that the place she left so many years ago had forgotten her too. We parked on the narrow street because the van we took could not fit through the alleyway that lead to her house. I watched as she nervously walked past the place she had walked past for over twenty years as a schoolgirl.

She turned left and then right and as soon as we walked through the gates, someone yelled out her name. This happened several times while we walked through the neighbourhood and she showed me where she grew up, her grandparents houses and cousins who lived nearby. She didn't go into her old house because she was shy about asking but of course, I went in. It was so neat to see my mother's former home. The new tenant, who is a man who used to live across the street, told me that the area still floods and every year, the water comes up to about a meter. He showed me his new floors and insisted that tiling the floors made it easier to maintain and less damage would show through after the floods.

My mother felt like a superstar walking through her neighbourhood as people kept coming out to greet her and saying things like, "Wow, we cannot believe we're seeing you again after all of these years! Of course we recognize you - you have a face we cannot forget." I laughed at her again and again as she pretended to know who everyone was and then turned around to give me a confused look every time no one was looking.

When we left my mother's neighbourhood and exited out of the narrow street, she yelled out, "That's where you were born!" I looked over and what used to be the local hospital is now a pharmacy. How neat is that to know that I was born in this place...my mother having to walk over by herself to give birth to me! If I ever become full of myself - just show me this picture and I'll remember where I came from.

Leaving Thu Duc, I felt a little uneasy because we didn't get to stay as long as I wanted. I wanted to walk around, to go to the local market and see if anybody else recognizes my mother. We will be coming back after the tour through Vietnam...there are still more people to see and take out for dinner. :)