Twee
My name is actually spelled “Thuy.” I changed it
to a phonetic spelling after college so it would
be easier for people to understand.
My family came to America from Vietnam at
the end of the Vietnam War. I was five. My father
was an Irish-American who worked in Vietnam
for an American company. My mother, who is
Vietnamese, worked in my father’s office. From
what my parents told us, as my mom was col-
lecting the papers for us to leave Vietnam, she
had to run in between buildings while explosions
were happening in the background.
I don’t remember much of Vietnam from my
childhood. Our parents had servants and nannies
there, but here they worked their butts off. My
mom had to learn English. They were both pretty
much in survival mode. My sister once told me
we were on food stamps for a while back then. I
was like, “We were?”
We four siblings took care of each other,
which was fun. But things were definitely not
fine. In fourth grade, three boys would tease
me and call me “chink.” I would have liked to be
blond with blue eyes, the all-American girl.
It wasn’t until I was in my thirties and went
back to Vietnam with my mom that I finally
started to let go of these ideas of who I wasn’t.
I was on the way to a cemetery to visit my
great-uncle’s grave, walking though a beau-
tiful vast green rice field. Suddenly, I did this
360-degree Sound of Music thing where I was
like, “I am Asian! I have slanted eyes, and I love it!
This is who I am!”
Now I see differences between people, dif-
ferences in our skin colors and our beliefs, but I
think, “Who cares? We’re all the same.”
One of my yoga teachers explained it this
way: Imagine a huge wax ball. That’s conscious-
ness. Pull a piece of it and stretch it out. Along
the stretchiness of it, there are animals, plants,
humans, all part of that invisible ball of con-
sciousness.
When he said this, I was like, “Oh—it’s all just
God with different faces.”BOUND TRIANGLE POSE