There's a window at my house in California that had a little ledge in front of it, and my sisters and I all climbed on it at one time or another until we were too big to fit on it. Last week I discovered the same kind of ledge beneath the window in the kitchen of my dorm, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I climbed on it and stood there for a while.
There's something very comforting about home.
I still hate sleeping with the door open even though the light in the hallway is never on here.
I still have the same wakeup routines--get up, wash your face, do your hair, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush your teeth and leave. In that order precisely.
I still yank my sheets so they aren't tucked under my bed and I still tuck them under my legs instead.
1.18 million Vietnamese, whose lives were changed by economic reforms or the "Renovation" moved to urban areas (Anh).
I guess these people, these Vietnamese people in Ho Chi Minh City thought the same way I do. If you did it at home, you do it here too. If you ate something at home you eat it here too. If you normally sit on the window ledge in the country you do it on the twentieth floor too. Old habits die hard. You don't do it because you're homesick, not always. You do it because that's what you do.
It doesn't matter if you just left your home and your family's home. It doesn't matter if you aren't farming anymore, if you don't work in the market anymore. You do what is familiar.
1995 was a year after I was born. These people had habits before I knew what the word meant. So why did they have to break these habits? Why did they move?
Anh, Dang Nguyen. "Migration in Vietnam." N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Mar. 2013.
Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations. New York: Aperture. 388. Print.
Sometimes our routines are our only connectors to home (be it physically, emotionally, mentally, etc.). I do things here and now out of habit without really thinking of it as a longing for my past or my previous home or anything like that. I think, though, that we do it unconsciously, for comfort. These Vietnamese people sit on those window ledges because, like you said, that is what you do: you do what is familiar. Whether homesick or not, it’s just natural. I think those routines, for these people, are the only thing that connects them to the life they used to know. Everything else is so drastically different that they need this, and are probably drawn to that familiarity.
ReplyDelete