Young, Black and Traveling Vietnam
I thought traveling solo was going to help me grow, it did, but not for the reasons I expected.
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As I walked along the river in Ho Chi Minh City, head bobbing up and down from my phone in search of the turn Google insisted existed but didn’t, I gave in and decided to ask for directions.
I noticed a couple up ahead and decided they were my target. From a reasonable distance, I started to greet them with “Xin Xao,” (hello in Vietnamese), in an effort not to startle them seeing as though it was dark and their backs were turned.
They didn’t hear me the first two times I said hello, so I raised my voice a little louder, ensuring they could hear me before they saw me.
The woman turned around with shock and fear in her eyes, and without even a second thought let out a squeal of some sort, took cover behind her partner but not before stumbling over her own two feet.
My internal dialogue:
“WTF is happening right now”?
“Whoa!”
“Seriously..”?
This is one of five times that I frightened someone by merely being.
After spending 2.5 months in beautiful Southeast Asia in early 2017, I knew it’s where I needed to be indefinitely. So at the beginning of this year, I packed my bag with the little money I could save, and here I am, almost nine months into the journey.
During last year’s adventure, I didn’t make it to Vietnam because of the limited amount of time I had left and the vastness of the country, so I put it off knowing that I’d be back to the far east.
After much reflection and journaling, I have to admit Vietnam has been the most challenging country I have visited. It has tested me mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
When I boarded my flight out of JFK, I thought I knew what I was getting myself into this time around.
The psychological warfare I have experienced from Vietnam’s anti-blackness attitudes has more times than not, deflated my spirit if only temporarily. It’s a load and rage I naively believed I could put down briefly when I left New York.
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time”. -James Baldwin
The travel space in Southeast Asia is generally a white space, so I am consciously aware of my blackness. Of always being the first black person someone has seen or the first black person someone has spoken to or being the only black person at a hostel or taking part in a day trip.
The staring can be overwhelming, but I’ve come to expect and accept it from locals, and I am pleasantly surprised when they carry on past me without even a second thought.
Back in New York, I was a preschool teacher for over five years and a nanny for three years.
Children are my everything.
One day, I was in the supermarket with some friends restocking on some goodies and of course, the gawking, pointing, laughing and wanting to touch my rather long braids began.
After a while, I was over it and let my friends know I was going to sit and wait.
As I sat on the bench near the exit, a woman jumped up from her seated position, scooped up her child so fast you’d believe I was Freddy Krueger in the flesh.
She was in so much of a rush to get away from me, she dropped his shoe and ran back to grab it, never taking her eyes off me.
One of my friends came back, and I told her what happened, and she said,
“I’m so sorry if only she knew you would be the last person to want to hurt her child”.
I could have cried at that moment, tears stinging the back of my eyes, but I kept them in.
How could people be scared of me?
I started to think about my womanhood.
How could anyone be scared of me and I’m a..woman?
People may see my womanhood, but they see my blackness, first.
Through the global systems of colonialism, white supremacy and racist ideology, blackness has been criminalized socially and physically to the degree in which we are not viewed as human.
It is why black boys, black teenagers, and black men can be shot down and killed over and over in America, and no one blinks twice.
This summer, I have been tutoring English in a small town here in Vietnam that has no foreigners. I’ve seen two white guys in my three months here so far.
In one of our lessons, I wanted to talk about the obvious — my blackness and their relation to it.
“What did you think/learn about black people before you met me”?
The overall consensus was black people are “scary.”
And when I asked what was scary about us, the answer was our “dark skin.” I quickly let them know that black people are a rainbow of people. We come in varying shades, and it is one of the many things that makes us unique.
One of the students said she learned “black people were people from the past, old times” and a male student said he was scared of black men because “they’re so big and look so strong.”
It is in this moment I realized how deeply woven white supremacy is into the fabric of the world, not only America.
Directly engaging in a speaking exercise with some Vietnamese teenage students, I felt this truth in my bones:
Anti-blackness is a disease and the entire world has been infected.
There is nowhere on this beautiful planet that any person of the African diaspora can step foot without witnessing white supremacy holding reign.
As a traveler, I understand the privilege I hold to be able to leave the comforts of the first world and immerse myself in entirely unfamiliar cultures.
It is not lost on me that as a young black woman traveling I am the exception and not the rule and because I am not the rule, before Vietnam I believed I needed to keep my shit together at all times.
I needed to accept the behaviors and attitudes around me; after all, I put myself here.
I am consciously choosing to travel.
I believed I needed to keep up appearances, speak only of the fun and exciting experiences and never of the humiliating and demoralizing.
Never of the anxiety-ridden days where I’ve stayed in bed not wanting to deal with microaggressions from other travelers and plain ol’ aggressions from seemingly well-meaning locals trying to sell me something.
Vietnam is the country I have spent the most time in, and I am still trying to decipher how I feel about it, but I do know it has lit a spark inside of me.
Having traveled around the country for almost five months now, I am much more rooted in my being.
In my blackness.
In my ability to take care of myself mentally and emotionally.
In my vulnerability, though not always comfortable but always necessary.
And in my mission to deconstruct anti-blackness attitudes with every conversation and every flight I take.
