Bittersweet

I’ve just thrown away a batch of freshly baked cookies. My first failure after a year of baking. The cookies were disgusting; bitter to be exact. I knew I was stupid to use old baking soda.

In an alternate reality, the cookies would be packaged into transparent flowery plastic bags and tied with a red ribbon. I would be the creative auntie this Vietnamese Lunar New Year (Tet), gifting youngsters bags of homemade treats instead of red cash envelopes. Wouldn’t it be fun and interesting to see their reactions? After all, many families this year are abandoning traditional pre-holiday sweets shopping because a third Covid-19 wave has reached Vietnam just two weeks before the holiday while adults’ pockets are half-empty.

My little project is of course not yet over. I still have a week to undo my wrongs and become auntie of the year. But this failure has reminded me of my own bitter relationship with Tet—perhaps because my Tets never feel how they’re supposed to feel.

I grew up unsure as to what Tet was and meant for I spent my childhood years in Catholic Poland, speaking little Vietnamese. Tet for me was simply an annual event that took place around February when my father gave me money that I would later hide carefully in my closet as per my mother’s tip. By the late 1990s, when my family visited Vietnam for Tet, I concluded that it was like a Vietnamese Christmas.

It wasn’t until we moved back permanently in 2000 and I started to go to a Vietnamese middle school that I finally understood Tet was a celebration of a new lunar calendar year. But by then, Tet for me would never be complete in the traditional sense because my father’s passing meant that the house was not and would never be full again.

I don’t hate Tet per se. I do like banh chung, the earthy square glutinous rice cake with fatty pork and mung beans inside that symbolises the harmony of life on this planet. And who doesn’t like blooming flowers amid the typically humid, slightly chilly Tet weather of Hanoi? Yet this happiness that radiates through laughing kids and elders dressed in their best ao dai is my annual reminder of a life in exile.

A month before Tet, a friend of mine stuck in Australia sent me a link to a song by popular rapper Den and the equally famous producer JustaTee. It’s called ‘Di Vi Nha’ (‘Going Home’). Just as it has brought her to tears, countless others physically in Vietnam are crying too because they have decided not to endanger their loved ones by travelling home for Tet.

The song’s lyrics followed me as I was travelling on assignment in central Vietnam right at the time the third Covid-19 outbreak hit the country. The rap lines, as if urging me to go home, were irritating during moments of rest. So when the time to go back to Hanoi finally came, I half joked ‘let’s go back to the virus’s epicentre’.

The pandemic in a sense has put us all in a collective state of exile, even if you’re stuck in your physical home, because what are four walls for but to house your loved ones and memories? The questions of what a home is and what it means to belong tore me through my twenties. As I reached thirties, I thought I had it figured out, I accepted I had no home per the popular definition as fragments of my identity, my past and my loved ones are scattered around the world like ashes carried away by the wind.

Yet the pandemic has changed something in me. In the midst of a year where everything seemed out of control, I started to learn to take some control over my life because it was the only sensible way to survive. Instead of letting myself drown in the never-ending demands that a journalist produces something new faster and more frequently, I let myself pause. Exercising and baking literally saved me in 2020.

So with less than a week left till Tet, I’m going to pull up my sleeves and make another batch of cookies. Den quickly adapted his lyrics to ‘don’t go home just yet’. This Tet might be different and at times painful for us all, but the resilience I’ve witnessed the people of this country put up through 2020 makes me confident the kids are going be alright.

For 2021, I’m going to make my own new version of Tet, and it’s going to be sweet.