Do I’ve any regrets from living in Asia for three years? Anything I left behind, anything I should have done more of, any opportunities I passed up, any more places I should have gone, any interests I should have explored further, any way I would have spent my time differently? Anything I shouldn’t have done?
I probably worked too much. Or maybe just worked at the wrong things.
But apart from that, not really.
I wish I could have learned to speak Japanese. I wish I could have worked in a sleepy town somewhere in the Japanese countryside. Become a regular at a small pub, even if I couldn’t talk to anyone at first.
I’d wander down little alleys of Kyoto and wonder what it might be like to live there, what routines you’d go through if you’d grown up there. See armies of schoolkids marching in formation in their little uniforms with their scarves and caps, wondering what it’d be like to grow up there, to go to school there, to be from there.
It’s possible to take your regrets too far back in space and time, and out of the realms of your reality. Nostalgia for a place and time you’re not even from.
I wish I’d gone on more motorbike trips around Vietnam. It would have been nice to see Ha Long Bay (never made it). I wish I could have explored more of the south. I wish I’d gone on more bike trips. I wish I’d met more people who’d lived through the war, I wish I could’ve heard their stories. I wish I’d learned more Vietnamese and made more Vietnamese friends.
Maybe I should have seen more of Thailand, maybe I should have gone to Laos.
More more more.
I’m reading Crossing the Line by William Finnegan – a compelling and vivid account of a year he spent teaching English in a secondary school in a ‘non-white’ part of Cape Town during the apartheid era (he had to ‘cross the line’ every day to get there). At turns he paints wonderful portraits of each of his students and their classes. He writes about many of his students by name, with particular attention paid to their personal quirks and their background stories and in-school personalities – at showing at turns how even the most incredible of circumstances is framed by mundane existences, and vice-versa.
I wish I’d done more of that.
If I could go back would I have done things differently?
Everything I needed to do and learn came to me at the right time, and for the right reasons, including maybe that when I landed I wasn’t as open and cultured as I’d thought, that I did just want to go on the beer in backpacker hostels and meet ‘interesting’ people ‘doing’ Vietnam from north to south, or south to north. Initially I wasn’t as interested in my host country’s culture and people as I’d thought. I didn’t know how humbling the experience of living in Vietnam would be. I was in denial that at times I was more focused on myself and indulging my deep-rooted hedonism or idleness or fear of doing things for fear that someone would observe that I didn’t know what I was doing.
I thought the food would be like Thai food.
The less you know the more you think you know.
The less you know about yourself the more aware you think you are.
Maybe I could have just dived straight in when I landed, abandoned all familiarity and friendly faces and gone rogue in the Vietnamese countryside. It didn’t really occur to me to do that though. There’s no point looking back and wishing you were a different person.
You can’t just jump in at the deep end. You have to play the team you’re up against and all that.
That’s how you learn.
I’ve no regrets that I did what I wanted to do at a given time. When you move on, you become a different person. There’s no point looking back and worrying that you could have made the most of a situation. The important thing is to learn and move on. If it bothers you about what you could have done differently, know that you should apply what you think now to the next opportunity that comes around.
The longer I lived there, the more I got into the local culture. The more I worked, the more people I met, the more students I taught, the more I learned.
I got Vietnamese lessons. Tried more food. Travelled to more places.
The more I left Hanoi and came back, the more I appreciated it. After a while I started referring to it as ‘home’.
The more I left Vietnam and came back, the more I appreciated it too.
And the more I wanted to learn.
The more I fell in love with the place.
More more more.
I’ve seen it all now: AK47 assembly class for Grade 8s at my school (all schools in Vietnam do it).
And with the passing of time since I left a little over a year ago, my love for the place keeps growing. Rose tinted glasses, yes. But that’s missing the point. I’m still learning about the place.
The more you see the more you want to see.
The more you tick off the more your list grows.
I’ve no plans now to move back to Vietnam or even visit there (for now). I thought I would have loved to live in Japan for a bit, but when I got there I realised I just wanted to move home.
Life moves on, and although I mightn’t get to put some of the lessons I learned in Vietnam into practice back there, the key is to move on with life and put them into practice now and wherever else I go. Starting with home. Lessons about myself and lessons about the world around me.
I still think about driving around the Vietnamese mountains these days, the regularity of such thoughts arising has increased with the passing of time. Often it’s the first thing on my mind when I wake up in the morning. And sometimes I do wish, briefly, that I could go back and do it all again. But it’s not a real wish, not one backed up by intention or plan. And instead of feeling pain or longing or regret I just accept that it’s an intense feeling of love that I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.
Whatever I learned along the way there I’ll try to pay forward now and wherever I go in the future.
Learning comes when you’re ready for it. I spent plenty of time learning and speaking Vietnamese, travelling around the country, meeting people, writing and working. And plenty of time just getting on with my life; plenty of time hanging out doing nothing; plenty of time with the nagging feeling that I wasn’t ‘making the most’ of it; plenty of time making mistakes; plenty of time actually making the most of it.
So what did I learn from there that I’ve carried with me since I left?
How to live.
Imperfectly.