There is a painting that hangs in the dining room in my parents’ old restaurant, in a village you’ve never heard of but might associate with wheat fields and unsolved homicide cases. The painting likely came with the building when they bought it in 1986, and has not left its spot even today, long after they have retired and moved away. It is from a genre of paintings you would find in a waiting room, where there is no eating, or above a fish tank at a dim sum restaurant. It is painted by no one of note but someone who was told one is supposed to sign paintings. It is a painting of nowhere.

Sixteen years ago, my parents sold the restaurant. Uncannily, to another Vietnamese family of four, a young couple with a firstborn son and a younger daughter. The hourglass turned over, swapping us for them. On a visit to the restaurant with my family this summer, my first since my parents left, I was in disbelief. Y chang, I gasped. Everything was as I remembered it, albeit smaller, from the placement of my mother’s tall, weathered stool by the ice cream freezer to the burnished tray for french fries. The food, translated from my mother’s mind into these new hands, was served on the same durable white plates from the same restaurant supply store. They work harder than we did, my father said, a sentiment I could not imagine for my parents but believed was true for myself. Time carried on, only this version seemed faster, happier, even gutsier.

We sat briefly with our former neighbor, grown more offensive in her old age but no less a gossip, and did an abbreviated drive through the town to confirm what I already knew to be true. Everyone is dead, my mother remarked. They named all the people who had transitioned, one by one, as we drove past the homes they left behind. Seeing the building façades with peeling paint and shadows of former signage, I was haunted by the weight of disappearance. Theirs and ours.  

There is nothing more for me to tell you about the economics of a place such as this, or the generational movements that transform its composition and its rhythm, or the demographics that shape its behaviors, or the public perception of it. Perhaps you, too, come from this place. Then you, too, know it is impossible to entertain this exercise without dangerously dabbling in self-superiority or a type of infantilization around progress, culture, and development. You, too, know how coded it is for those who stay in this place and those who will never be from there. When you choose to leave you surrender a right to engage in conversations around who we are or who we should be. You accept you will always remain who they once knew.

When anyone asks what it was like to grow up there, I know what they want me to say, and I cannot give it to them. It is what you imagine and it is worse than that, it is as I remember and it is something else. It is bright red and yellow and all the hues of brown. It reflects the most beautiful golden light, it is always mid-summer, the sun forever setting. There is no better place to ride a bicycle on a rubble road, to stare at the sky atop a hill. And in the next breath, it is colder than the moon. A tundra that turns a small sphere of orange when the clouds cover the night sky and the lights reflect onto the snow. It is where lakes exhale fog alongside highways long and desolate, covered in garter snakes in the spring and wisps of snow or dirt or both every other season. It is a place where there is satisfaction in being ordinary and disciplined. Where you learn the conditions of kindness and the value of privacy. Where criminality and isolation meet. Where everyone knows everyone and you know no one. It is unbearable and slow. And it is where I stood on a chair in a restaurant, tracing my fingers across the curvatures of the hardened oil paint of that painting of nowhere, over & over.

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The entire visit was so sensorial, nostalgic, melancholic — each encounter met with both familiarity and estrangement. A different strain of foreign, mirroring my own return to the middle after being on the coast for sixteen years. I cannot envision who I would be without that place, and yet I no longer recognize what part of me came from it. It is of my body, the one that wants to lie down on the grass and breathe into the soft blue air — and absolutely outside of it, the one that remains restless and despairs over the lives started elsewhere, left unfinished. I have lived away from there far longer than I ever lived there, and everywhere I have lived since is still less than how long I lived there. It is not what I think of when I say I am going home, a crown given to no place I have ever resided. My immigrant inheritance is that I affiliate home with who and not where, and that this life is destined to be a bifurcated one — neither, not of, both and. Nowhere. Each move is not in search of reconciliation, but rather an acceptance that it is unattainable. The loop never closes.

How does a segment of your own life become unknowable to you? I mourn the part of me that is capable of this, having had to change course out of necessity again & again. Some days, it feels like resilience. Other times, it feels callous, neglectful, absent. It is exposing to divulge this, as this is an admission of what it takes to breach a new life. The detachment and the delusion ward off a grief that would swallow you otherwise. There is a perpetual distance that means no one truly knows who you are, and it makes you heartsick. With every reinvention, you are defining who you want to be, divorcing the parts of you that you are not. I wonder, I worry, having begun again so many times, that I can no longer discern what parts of me are dormant out of convenience and what parts are on the verge of extinguishment.

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These days, I live near the American equivalent of the city where I spent my undergrad years. It’s a segregated city in economic and population decline, with a surplus of abandoned warehouses not on any gentrifying path to becoming generic upscale restaurants. There is nowhere to shop, only a handful of places to eat, and the best ethnic groceries are miles and miles away. I have lived in this place before — somewhere between tired of no longer living your life and living where nothing changes. Where is the place that will make me softer, quieter, more tender?

I am reminded that I do not dream of places, as I am not from one.

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