The Passport That Doesn't Exist
On the Strange Freedom of Belonging Nowhere
I don’t have a word for who I am.
Not in Vietnamese. Not in Dutch.
There is immigrant, but that implies a destination. There is expat, but that implies a return. There is foreigner, but that implies a home you left behind.
I have been all three. I am none of them.
For most of my adult life, when someone asked where I came from, I did the calculation first. How much do I want to explain? How much can I afford to be?
Some days I said Netherlands.
When I was in college, I introduced myself with a different name — a Christian name, easier on Western tongues.
Two seemingly small decisions. I was choosing, before you even asked, how much of myself to make available.
The distance to home doesn’t announce itself. It arrives quietly, slowly in the pauses between phone calls. Friends who used to call every week, then every month, then not at all. I didn’t notice when we stopped talking.
One hot summer, I went back to visit. I called a few people. Most were too busy — girlfriends, boyfriends, weekend shifts, new babies. The few meetings I had, it was hard to talk. My life didn’t translate. No one understood what it was like to feel permanently foreign where you live. From the outside I had a perfect life: prestigious degrees, a nice boyfriend, big corporate names on my CV. My relatives wanted to know if I had gained weight. And when was I having a baby.
Of course you would stay there, everyone said. Why would you come back.
I was standing on one side of a river, trying to shout to the people on the other side. The river kept getting wider. At some point, it stopped making sense to keep shouting.
In the Netherlands, I didn’t feel Dutch either. Even after I was nationalized. When I said I am Dutch about myself, there was an unpleasant taste that lingered. I was born Vietnamese, but I hadn’t been Vietnamese for a long time.
I wished there was a third option. Something like International — a place that was nowhere and everywhere at once. A place with no flag. No accent to perform.
A Vietnamese friend from college told me something I never forgot. My name was given by my parents, he said. I didn’t want to hide it. Let the foreigners learn to pronounce our names.
I almost cried when I heard that. It was the kind of remark that you have nothing to say to — because suddenly you understand what you have been hiding from.
I started using my real name again. The first time, I was stupidly nervous — I had been someone else for so long. It felt as if I was being stripped naked. What if they would stumble, or ask me to repeat it, or quietly decide something about me?
The person didn’t show any surprise. They just continued talking.
That was all. It was almost anticlimactic. And yet something shifted in me — something intimate and only mine.
I had been choosing, for years, how much of myself to make available. It turned out the cost of that was paid entirely by me.
It felt good wearing my own skin again. Most people around me still couldn’t pronounce it right. My introduction now included a chuckle and a self-deprecating joke: “Everyone has trouble saying my name.” It still caught me off guard when someone actually tried.
We want to use a geographical and a racial category when asked where we are from. That tells others immediately something about us. That tells both sides how to act, what to say. It helps us run our social scripts.
What happens when you meet someone without a category — someone who perpetually drifts in the space between? Would that feel threatening, like an unknown danger? Or would that excite you, like an alluring mystery?
It can feel like swimming in the open sea — freeing, and not knowing what’s below.
One sunny afternoon, we drove to Germany to visit our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. The place was spacious and welcoming. On the wall hung tasteful decorations from Vietnam: our traditional cone hats with paintings on top, signs with street names in Hanoi, paper lamps fluttering in the terrace, dark maroon wooden furniture, chopsticks nestled together in aluminum tins. It was like a warm oasis in the middle of the neat but cold German streets: dozens of cars passing by every second, people streaming down the pavement, in perfect rhythm with the street lights.
The young Vietnamese waitress came to greet us. I got us a table next to the window, while she cheerfully asked whether we lived nearby, and chuckled at my son’s curious gaze.
We sat down and busied ourselves checking the menu. My son turned to his dad and asked if he’d understood any of it, to which his dad said no. With the cutest smug face in the world, he said: “Well, why don’t you learn Vietnamese then, like me”. We burst out laughing.
I felt my heart warm, my spirit lift. Like my empty stomach had just been filled. Next time someone asks where I’m from, I’ll say International. Let them figure it out.
If you're new here, the breakdown that unmade all of this is in I didn't burn out. I broke character.
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This was beautifully written. That feeling of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once is something so many people quietly carry 🤍
Sovereignty lives in the betwixt & between! Belonging can be stifling...and, in my experience, leaving a place where those who stay have remained = treason!