Originally published at http://looseleafmagazine.ca/taking-back-tet/.
Last Christmas, I was lying on a deck chair beside the pool in Cuba when a man came up and asked me if I was Chinese.
“I’m not,” I answered.
“What are you then?” he said.
The question was certainly nothing new, posed in the same assertive tone that expected an enthusiastic response from my part. He spoke with an accent, his voice jovial, and I was not up for ruining my morning with hostility. I answered.
“I’m Vietnamese.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed. “Well, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean… all basically the same.”
He laughed, and before I could recover enough to retort, he walked away.
The insistence that I must be, in some part, Chinese, has plagued me as often as I’ve insisted on being Vietnamese – from my white tour guide in New York City explaining to me how all East Asians have the same ancestry, to the kebab vendor in Brno refusing to believe my Chinese friend and I could only communicate with each other in English. This trend of amalgamating a dozen diverse cultures into one has persisted as long as I’ve lived in North America, and at no time of the year does it surface more than during our time of celebration: Lunar New Year.
Tết is the most important occasion of the year. For one week, the streets in Vietnam come to life with the buzz of preparations. Hours are spent soaking bamboo, rolling nem and wrapping bánh chưng. On the morning of the first, a hush falls over the country as a hundred million people welcome in the New Year, making sure their first visitor will bring wisdom and wealth. It is a time for red envelopes, dried fruit, burning gold leaves, and the embrace of loved ones.
I have little idea what the Chinese celebration is like – an image of lion and dragon dancers come to mind – but when I search up my holiday, I find all mentions of Vietnamese Tết painted over by “Chinese New Year,” as if the two were equivalent.
The history, and indeed the present, of Chinese-Vietnamese relations have always been strained. Centuries of territorial disputes, border wars, and attempts by the Chinese to colonize Vietnam have left much of my people resentful and suspicious of anything to do with our northern neighbours. To have what we cherish about our culture conflated with China’s strikes deeply.
This erasure of Asian differences, again, is nothing new. Asia is the largest, most populous continent in the world, but until recently, the word “oriental” was acceptable, was enough, to encompass the diversity of our cultures. Certainly, many similarities do exist – traditions and stories that belong to multiple cultures equally – but even as we’re moving away from this particular overarching term, still so little attention is paid to the ways we group together neighbouring countries and cultures without acknowledging their individuality.