'Weird Culture Kids'
We’re so excited to feature an exclusive excerpt from Ngoc Nguyen’s upcoming TCK memoir, ‘Weird Culture Kids’! Discover Ngoc’s journey here first, dotted with conversations and interviews with other TCKS. To purchase this book, visit https://weirdculturekids.com/. Sales go live TODAY on Amazon and Apple Books.
I was very young when I realized that my upbringing was different from the majority of the kids in Vietnam. Growing up in a wealthier-than-average Vietnamese family, I was given a very privileged and international upbringing—one that was not at all common in Vietnam in the early 90s.
Unlike me, my parents were Cold War kids who took pride in their Soviet heritage, an important element of their identity since many of their years were spent in Moscow for their higher education and professional careers. They, too, were very privileged, since they managed to escape the war in Vietnam while receiving the best education that was offered to them in the USSR, Vietnam’s then strongest ally. But because they didn’t grow up in a globalized world or learn how to properly adapt to it, both of them became very ill-equipped to raise “weird culture kids” like my big brother, Phan, and I.
Phan and I were both born in Moscow and raised by parents who were Vietnamese, but believed themselves to be somewhat Soviets—a country that no longer existed by the time we both started to understand the notion of nation-states and the inherited identity that came with it.
They brought us up in a nostalgic world they created at home where they spoke often about their time in the USSR, listened over and over again to the Soviet hit songs of the 1980s, and where they spoke about the atrocities caused by the French and the American people in Vietnam for more than a century. Yet, the French and the American education systems were the ones that my parents had chosen to put me through.
After we moved to Hanoi, in fact, we were both enrolled in an International French school. I was three and Phan, five. I knew how to write in French before I learned to do so in my mother tongue.
Mom and Dad could never help us with our homework because they didn’t speak a word of French. Instead, they spent their days and nights making sure that my brother and I were also fluent in both spoken and written Vietnamese. According to them, the contrary would be like a second wave of French colonization. My parents carried their allegiance to the Eastern bloc proudly and, as a consequence, they couldn’t communicate with our friends and their parents, who automatically belonged to the Western one.
This was the daily context in which I grew up: Vietnamese with a splash of Soviet culture at home, coupled with a very French environment at school. I was always in the middle, not entirely Vietnamese but also not fully French. My whole family still lived there, and it was my passport country, but personally, I have never fully felt Vietnamese. In fact, most Vietnamese kids told me that I was very “Tây” — a Vietnamese expression that literally translated to “the West” in English.
Although it was sometimes confusing and conflicting to grow up among these different cultures, it was the norm for my brother and I too.
The bubble burst when I left Vietnam at the age of fifteen to attend an American boarding school in Connecticut.
Ever since, one of the most recurring questions that people asked me when we first met was “Where are you from?” This had always been one of the hardest questions for me to answer because I had never believed that we should—could?—be “from” one place. I was never sure what type of information the speaker was trying to get from my answer. Were they trying to figure out where I was living before arriving here? Or did they want to know where I was born? Or, going beyond the geographical dimensions, which cultures shaped my personality, and which sets of beliefs dictated my behavior?
Dodging this question was never an option. It was very normal and acceptable for people to ask strangers and newcomers this question, socially speaking. With time and experience, I learned that the answer was supposed to give me a strong sense of identity, and also give those around me a strong sense of who they were dealing with.
Despite this common practice, nothing accurate ever came out of my answer.
I was not from anywhere but at the same time I was from everywhere. Answering “I am Vietnamese” was never enough for me. I was ten times more eloquent in French than in my mother tongue. I was ‘from Vietnam’ because of the way that I looked, but openly American in the way that I experienced the world—loudly and passionately. I was the mosaic of every culture that I have encountered, loved and, sometimes, even hated. For me, one’s identity, was not necessarily where you lived, but how you’ve lived.
That, ultimately, is my superpower as a ‘Weird Culture Kid’.
“Weird Culture Kids” is a memoir of my growing up between different cultures from as early as I can remember until the end of high school. In this book, I explore the different confusing and oftentimes conflicting identities that I’ve had growing up in order to understand how I’ve come to be the person I am today: culturally ‘weird’ and eternally complex.
As part of my research, I have carried out more than a hundred interviews around the question “where are you from?” with WCKs around the world, ranging from complete strangers to dearest of friends and family members. For this reason, several interviews with people whom I grew up with are weaved into the narrative of my book in order to give the readers different perspectives of Weird Culture Kids, along with a wider range of stories to relate to.
This book is a tribute to the Weird Culture Kids that we once were and continue to be. It is a celebration of all of those lonely moments in which we didn’t fit in and of all of those awkward conversations that were difficult to enter. I invite you to not only acknowledge them but also embrace them, for these instances will sooner or later guide you through sleepless nights of your own identity-quest.
This book is also a tribute to the parents, teachers and everyone else in a Weird Culture Kids support system. Thank you for your unconditional love and unreserved forgiveness for the countless times we blamed you for our identity crisis and our rootlessness. We, too, forgive you for not fully understanding our cultural complexities and our multifaceted identities.
Thirdly, this book is also a teaser for all of you expats-to-be.
I hope that you’ll love and hate your experience abroad as much as I did and still do. I hope you engage in ‘weird’ conversations, adopt ‘odd’ local rituals and clash violently with the newness that surrounds you. Soon, these elements will be your norms. Soon, these will be the things that you grieve if you move again. Soon, these will be details that you carry forever.
I hope each and every one of you will find shelter in these written words and a sense of community in these shared chapters. And eventually “home” in this unusual book.
Ngoc’s official virtual launch for Weird Culture Kids will take place Saturday 19th of December at 3PM (GMT +1). Register and get your tickets here!
- Edited by Sarah Lobrot.
- Edited for TCK TOWN by Ava Senaratne.