Soaking Up the Last Days with my Family

It is hard to accurately describe exactly how I am feeling right now. It is Wednesday night, just a few days before our group takes off for the North of Vietnam, and we say goodbye to Ho Chi Minh City for the month.

This past week has found me trying to spend as much time as I can with my homestay family, but also juggling my many essays, proposals, and Vietnamese language test. I am going to miss my family so much when I leave for the North. Luckily, my real family is coming to visit me in Ho Chi Minh City, so I will bring them over to meet my Vietnamese family, and my host mom says she wants to cook us Hot Pot!

I had a very different homestay experience compared to the rest of my family. A typical Vietnamese home consists of many generations, starting with babies, then young kids, teens, young adults, parents, and grand parents. So for many of my friends have a full house. I, on the other hand, have a very small family. I have a mom and two brothers. My host mom, Hoa, is a journalist, and a very successful one at that. Because she works so much, she is not home a lot, so dinners are really the only time we have together. She feels so bad about this, and with time dwindling down, she has told me probably 15 times how bad she feels that she works so much. I, however, respond with how cool I think it is that she is a single Vietnamese mother with an extremely successful job and still manages to take care of two (three) kids. It is honestly a feat in the Vietnamese culture. It’s a different experience, but it’s an incredible one. She epitomizes a strong woman; she is someone I aspire to be like in my life.

My host mom has a brother, who also has a host family. Their host daughter, Sofia, is a good friend of mine. This past weekend, we really wanted to show them how much we appreciated letting us into their family. So, Sofia and I found an American supermarket, and cooked a nice American meal for our family. With that being said, we still had to cook on a hot pan using chop sticks, so it was more of an Asian-American fusion. We cooked them pasta with chicken and broccoli with tomatoes and cheese, all of which are uncommon ingredients in daily meals in Vietnam. It was a nice break from the rice and pork I have every day, and it was so fulfilling to see how happy and grateful they were to have us cook for them.

I feel like I made a really great relationship with my host mom. My host brothers were also so great and so nice to me, but I truly feel like my host mom is something amazing, and someone I am so proud to have become close to and that I will stay close with for years to come. I learned so much about the Vietnamese culture because of my family, and I became so immersed in the culture. I am going to miss my family when I go to the North, but will value them forever.