“…It’s perhaps a performance much like that in the last scene in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983), where longing in exile manifest itself in the physical flux in constantly traversing back and forth, from West to East, in the basin of a dried up spring, deeply yearning to reach what is unreachable, until the very end of one’s life.”
My westbound journey started in 2017 when I had to leave behind all that I knew my entire life in Vietnam in seeking a blind promise for a better future in the Western hemisphere, here, in America. I set out West again, for I was exactly halfway around the world away from home, and that perhaps, naively, I would be closer to home had I moved in any direction instead of staying still amidst the limbo legal status. Thus, with an appropriate blend of desperation and naïveté, I embarked on my own Westward (tây tiến) journey.
The term tây tiến in the Vietnamese translation is somewhat loaded in its use, where it was borrowed from a poem of the same name. The work, written in 1948, drafted an inherently and overtly romanticized stroke disguising a harsh reality of a military campaign at the time, where the troops ventured west towards Laos into the foreign and the unknown. The poem paints a lush and ethereal reality, where beauty is intrinsic in the minute details in the foreign and alienating landscape. Whereas compared to the historical account, the work is devoid of all conditions that had harshly plagued the campaign.
In its modern context, however, the term speaks to an almost uncritical fetishization of a promise in the values and cultures of the West- of somehow all the answers to all our societal malaises, there in the East, lies in its former colonizing occupier, here in the West. Til this day, even after consecutive years of living in the West, and of going to anywhere but home, I’ve found no such absolute in either the East or the West.
I, too, then packed up my car and set sail with absolutely no idea what the destination entailed and with an unshaken belief that I would find belonging somewhere in this vast country. I sought out the quintessential beauty in the expanse that is still truly so foreign to me - for I truly thought tumbleweeds were something that only existed in cartoons until I spotted one rolling on the side of the road.
From east to west, out the window of my car, all I saw was just a vastness that was truly unbeknownst even to a nomadic wanderer that I was. The all but similar faunas and sceneries quickly and seamlessly transitioned from one to another, coalescing into a single stream, moving much quicker than my sense of place could ever catch up.
I drifted alone across this foreign land, floating indiscriminately in the middle of the ocean, trying to find belonging in the vastness that knows no end - one does not know what lies ahead, and one does not possess any inkling or modicum of sense as to where they were or could have been. It’s perhaps a performance much like that in the last scene in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983), where longing in exile manifest itself in the physical flux in constantly traversing back and forth, from West to East, in the basin of a dried up spring, deeply yearning to reach what is unreachable, until the very end of one’s life.
At the time, amidst the undetermined limbo legal status and not knowing where to go, I headed out West again because it is the only thing I knew how to do, and it was also in a blind hope to end an interminably subliminal dream, where vignettes of a sense of place slowly blend together, from east to west, from one destination seamlessly after another, year after year, interminable, with no beginning or an end; of always ending up in the same place: questioning where is home and why I am here in the first place.