Autobiography

I was born on the 20th of November 1988 in Fountain Valley Hospital. Mom had to have a C-section because my head was faced up during delivery. I was brought home to our new home on Beechwood Circle in the city of Westminster.
My earliest memories was waking up every day at around 5 a.m. and going to the tennis courts with my dad. Sometimes, my dad would teach me how to play tennis, but most of the time I would just watch him play tennis.
There was a time during my young age before I started school when my parents wanted to split up. My mother stayed at the apartments near Family Fun Center in Fountain Valley. I thought my mom and I were on vacation. I loved watching T.V. there because my brother didn’t hog it.
Then there was also a time when my dad, brother, and I stayed at our old house, while my mother stayed at the new house. Everyday my dad would come home from work, all three of would each dinner and play monopoly. Across the street of the old house was a middle school, and so every weekend I would play on the jungle gym, fly my kite, my brother had his own kite, and play Frisbee with my dad. I don’t remember seeing much of my mother during that time.
There were times when my parents argued a lot. My mom would be lying in bed crying and my father would be standing at the doorway with a stern look on his face. I would always ask what was going on and then plead that they stop fighting.
I started elementary school in September of 1992. There I met my best friend to this day, named Renee. She liked sports as much as I did. We loved playing on the swings and the supposed submarine jungle gym in our kindergarten schoolyard.
On one December night during the weekend, my father, mother, brother and I went to my father’s Khong Quan (Vietnamese Air Force) friend’s daughter’s birthday party. There were a lot of people there. It seemed like there was barely any place to stand and there were no kids around either. My brother disappeared the moment we got passed the door. Way in the back of the house was a sliding patio door and in the yard was a dog. It was a big dog, but to me it was very cute. I wanted to pet it. I asked an adult if the dog was nice. He said he didn’t know, but the dog looked friendly enough. I unlocked the patio door and slid it open. The dog jumped at me and bit me right across the face. I laid on the floor covering my face with my right hand. An adult gave me a napkin to put on my face. My father grabbed me, picked me up, my mother followed right behind him. I knew they went straight for the car, but I don’t ever remember heading there; I just remember being in the car. My mother was crying, she thought I had lost my lip; she was crying a lot. She kept saying, “Mat sinh cua con gai cua Me. (My daughter’s face, my beautiful daughter’s face)” I remember reassuring her replying, “Khong sao dau Me, Con khong co sao dau. Me dung buon; Me dung khoc (It’s okay Mom, I’m okay. Mom, don’t be sad; don’t cry.” By the time I knew it, I was at the Fountain Valley hospital. A sat down on a chair while the owner of the house, my father’s friend and my father helped check me in. He looked at me, and then asked if he could see what was under the napkin. I showed him, he couldn’t bear to look long. He just glanced at it and then turned away and said thank you and I’m sorry. The Emergency Medical surgeon looked at my face and refused to operate on me. He said that he did not have the skills to operate on my face. I’m a girl and he could ruin my future. So they called in a better, more experienced plastic surgeon to come in, but during that time he was at a Christmas party and so it would take a while for him to get to the hospital. While waiting, I remember going in the bathroom with my mother, she lifted me up onto a stool to face the mirror. All I saw was the underside of the lacerated muscles and skin on the right side of my face. Right then, the surgeon came and so I went straight into the operating room, and was put to sleep. When I woke up again, I had a bandage over the right side of my upper lip. A few weeks later, when I went to cut my stitches, I found out that there were eighteen and a piece of muscle that looked like a big pimple on my upper lip. I had a scar running from the bottom of my nose down to my upper lip, on my lip and the lower part of my bottom lip.
During the summer of 1994, I travelled with my family to Washington State where another one of my father’s Khong Quan friend lives. We stayed at their house in Seattle. I don’t remember much of the trip except that we went on a fairy and the captain let me drive it. I had to step on a step stool, of course, to see. We also went across the border to Canada to travel and to buy fruit. My mom loves fruit. She could eat fruit all day and never eat a decent meal if she wanted to.
In the fall of ’95, my grandmother passed away. She, at first, lived at my house then, because of a dispute with my father, went to live with my middle and youngest uncle on my mother’s side. One day when she was trying to use a hose to clean the garage floor, she slipped and fell. No one was home; she had to call the ambulance by herself. She laid in the hospital bed for about a week before she passed away at the age of 63. During her funeral, I did not cry. I guess it was because when you are young, you don’t really understand what death is. I kept thinking about the times that I spent with her though. When she lived with me, her room was the only one downstairs. I slept with her almost every night when I was young, along with my 6-month younger cousin. I remembered getting mad at her at the age of 18 months because she gave me a baby bottle thinking that my mom forbid me to drink it, but earlier my mother said the kids at school didn’t drink from baby bottles and thus I decided to give up on baby bottles. So when my grandmother gave me the baby bottle I got mad at her because I thought she didn’t want me to go to school and make friends. My mother found me in the dark at the stairs looking all grumpy, and she asked, “What happened? Why do you look mad, sitting here in the dark, and not sleeping with grandma?” I replied, “Grandma gave me a baby bottle.” My mom laughed. That was the most memorable moment that I have of my grandmother. I love and miss her a lot.
During 4th grade I started playing the violin at school and joined the choir. I liked to sing more than I like to play the violin. The only reason I chose the violin was because my brother had just switched over from the violin to the viola and we had a violin that wasn’t going to be used at home. It was fun learning how to play the violin, but I didn’t like practicing it. All we kept on doing was plucking the strings, and we are not allowed to use the bow for the first semester of playing. I practiced more when we could use and play with our bows. I liked playing, “Ode to Joy” by Beethoven.
I flew to Florida with my father, mother, and brother, my sister had to work, in 1997. Another one of my father’s Khong Quan friend lives there. We stayed at their house for a while and attended parties during the weekend. After hanging out with my dad’s friend’s family for a week, we rented a car and stayed at the Walt Disney World Hotel for about 4 days. The first day we got settle in and my brother and I swam in the pools. The Walt Disney World Hotel Resort pool was really elaborate; the pools were dug into the shape of instruments. My brother and I swam in the pool shaped like a guitar and a saxophone. I loved swimming. Then next two days we walked around Walt Disney World, going to on the rides and attending their shows. That was the summer of 1997.
In the winter of 1999, my father received a call for his older sister saying, “Father is really sick, he might not make it.” At the time my father was working in San Jose and called home told my mom to book a flight to Vietnam and ask permission from the schools of my brother and I, if he and I could leave to Vietnam for a month. I could only go with my mom. My father was going to leave from San Francisco and meet up with my mother, and I the day after. But before my mother and I left, my father on speakerphone instructed my mom and I how to act if anything bad were to happen to him when my mom and I came to pick him up from the airport. He told us, “Neu cong an ma bat Bo, Em (referring to my mom) va con dung co lam cai gi het. Dung co nang ni ho tha Bo. Dung co di nhan Bo. Dung co mua chuoc ho. Coi nhu la khong thay Bo; quay mat di va ve nha Em cua em. Di choi cho vui ve va di tham Bo cua Bo va noi cho Bo biet la Bo khong sao.” Then he said to me, “Vy oi, con phai nho nhe.” Out of everything that could be remembered from the trip, I remember my father’s instructions the most. Next was how much I enjoyed riding on the motorbike. At some point I stayed at my mother’s cousin house while my parents stayed at my mom’s friend’s house. My mom’s cousin took me around Saigon and to a amusement park there. At the time I did not know that the amusement park was Dam Sen, but after coming back to Vietnam a few years later, that ‘s when I knew. At Dam Sen I took sticker pictures with my mom’s cousin, we wore wigs. My mom’s cousin, my aunt, wore a pink one and I wore pinkish red one – fun times. I remembered one night when Vietnam won a soccer match and the city went wild. While driving to my aunt’s house, I, sitting on the motorbike with her, my aunt thought her brother went to celebrate with the city and entered a street race. She frantically drove to search for her brother, fearing that he might die if he joined the street race. While looking for him, she didn’t realize that she was on the street that the people were racing. A loud sound blasted and they were off, streams of motorbikes went passed us, we could only stand there and wait until they all left, and then one motorbike swiped the back side of my aunt’s motorbike. We fell and the my aunt’s motor bike fell on me. Luckily, an officer came, who was trying to stop the race, guarded us after we fell. I came out with only a few scratches on my legs. That was my first experience in Vietnam.
The most memorable moment in the sixth grade was when I was sent to the principal’s office. What did I get sent to the principal’s office for??? You might ask. It was because I got a B in one of my subjects. My teacher talked to the principal, sent a progress report home, and also called home. When I got to the principal’s office, she asked me the reason why I had a B in one of my subjects. And the only reply I could think of at that time was because I wasn’t turning in my assignments because I got lazy. My mom had a talk to me about it too. I told her that it was just a B; it’s not a big deal. And her response was, “if it’s not a big deal then why did your teacher send a progress report home. I want an A in that subject by the end of the quarter!” Blahhh But I got an A anyways.
In the summer of 2000, I went to France with my parents and my mother’s younger brother and his wife. We stayed at my grandmother’s cousin’s house. I saw a bade (the cleaning down there toilet) for the first time. The first week we visited Paris and went shopping. My grandmother’s cousin showed us where she worked. She worked for Chanel’s sowing factory. My family in the U.S. went to Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. We stayed there for my grandmother’s cousin’s aunt’s 75th anniversary with her husband. It was pretty exciting. Fifty of us went to a church and everything. Then my parents and my uncle and his wife and I took the train to Switzerland, we went to go look for my uncle’s father’s sister there, but she wasn’t home. We ended up staying at a hotel for about two days. My uncle and his wife bought Swiss watches, and my father and I bought Lindt chocolate. The chocolate is so good; it is a little different from the Lindt chocolate that is shipped to the U.S. It is a lot softer and creamier. When my family and I got back, my family and my grandmother’s cousin and her husband went with us to Belgium. My father’s best friend in the Khong Quan lives in Belgium. The only thing that I remember was my father’s friend’s son commenting on how my English didn’t have any accent attached to it. Afterwards, my family and I went to south of France and stayed at my grandmother’s cousin’s friend’s house. I played Connect 4 with their daughter. I don’t know how I communicated with her because she only spoke French and I didn’t. haha Next we all headed to Italy. We passed by Monaco to Milan. There we went into more Cathedrals.
During the beginning of my eighth grade year, I was asked to switch from the violin to the viola because there were so little violas in our school orchestra. Once again, during the winter of that year, my father received another call from his older sister saying that my grandfather was sick. However, when we got there, my grandfather seemed fine, healthy. It is a good thing, but my family spent money to travel to Vietnam once again. My grandfather does not live in Sai gon, but in Bien Hoa; it takes about 45 minutes to travel by motorbike from Sai gon to Bien Hoa. My father drove me and my mother drove her half sister. It was kind of funny; my father insisted on not wearing the face mask that the locals wear to avoid the dust of the streets. So when, he got sleepy from driving so long and yawned, I saw a crap load of dust come into my father’s mouth. He spat it out right away, but it was funny because I told him to wear it and he insisted not to. That year I stayed with my uncle-in-law’s family house in sai gon. We play cards a lot. They liked to gamble; “Chin nut” they called it. This was the first time that I spent Lunar New Year in Vietnam. It was pretty interesting. In the center of the city they had flower markets, and they even nursed bushes into the shape of a dragon, very elaborate and cool looking.
Freshman year was when I joined volleyball, basketball, and shot put and discus in track and field. It was also the year the my dog bite in 1993 was finally settled.
The Summer of sophomore year was when I started working at my uncle’s music store. I packaged CDs and DVDs into little plastic wraps and then blew dried it so that the plastic would shrink around the CDs and DVDs. I worked on and off whenever he needed the extra help.
The beginning of junior year, during volleyball practice was when I went up for a back-row attack, made contact, very nice hit, felt something give out in my left knee, and fell to the floor. I found out, when my brother took me to UCI’s sports medicine clinic, that I had torn my ACL (Anterior Cruciate Ligament), and might have torn my MCL as well. I didn’t have any insurance so I couldn’t do anything about it, but just let my knee heal whatever way it can on its own. I was in line to breaking my high school’s all time record in shot put and discus. I was planning to go to CIF for it, and that year my volleyball team went to the semi-finals for CIF. UCLA was willing to have me on their shot put and discus team as well. It was one of the hardest times of my life because sports were my life. That year I concentrate on my poetry writing since I couldn’t play sports anymore. I entered a poetry contest and was a semi-finalist for the poem I wrote called “The Forest.”
During the Summer of 2003, I flew to visit my grandpa in Texas along with my mother and brother. Every morning I would wake up early to talk to my grandfather about life. My grandfather always emphasized how a girl should know to defend herself. During the day my brother and I hung out with my half cousin, Anh Hap. We went to the movies and went to Six Flags there. His good-bye present to me was chili cheese fries, because I was craving some, and a stuffed animal tiger and named it, Happy.
Summer of 2005, I went once again to Vietnam. I wanted my whole family, including my sister, to go this time. For some reason I had a feeling and urge to go visit my grandfather. I really don’t know why I wanted to go, but I just knew that my family had to. My brother drove his own motorbike around Saigon. Our family flew to Da Nang , and took a van to Hue. My sister drove my father on the motorbike, my brother drove himself, and I drove my mother. At the end of the trip, grandfather passed away. My parents stayed behind in Vietnam for the funeral procession. And I had to go back to the States to start my senior year.
During my senior year, my sister moved to Hawaii to work. AAA was branching out to Hawaii. She was the supervisor over there and was supposed to maintain contact with the mainland. Also, during that year, by about third quarter, my Vietnamese teacher calls home expressing that I have misbehaved in class. He said to my parents that I put my foot in the middle of class and had disturbed that class. However, it was not so because that day in class we were taking a test so how was putting my foot disturbing the class if everyone was concentrating on taking their test? Plus, I was sitting in the back of the class. I admit though, it is not appropriate to put your feet on a desk. But my feet are too long; they don’t fit in the vicinity of a simple high desk. So, I got yelled at by my parents and they came to my high school open house to apologize to the teacher. I hated him after that. I have too much pride for my family for my family to apologize to this teacher because he did not teach me anything in that class. I had more appreciation and respect for my American teachers who actually taught me something. From that point I understood the power a teacher had over me, and I did not like it. But that doesn’t stop me from being me. I was still outspoken as before.
Summer of 2006, I graduated high school. My whole family’s gift to me was a ticket and cash to go to Vietnam. This time I went by myself. Well, sort of, I went with my mom’s middle sister and her two kids and my mom’s youngest sister and her husband and kids. I hung out with them for about two weeks and a half. We went to Ca Mau, my uncle-in-law’s hometown and met his sister over there. Then afterwards, I stayed behind by myself and hung out with my friends and family on my own. But my main purpose to go to Vietnam was so that I could burn incense at ancestor’s altar where my grandfather’s cremated body was. It was exactly his one year death anniversary. I also gave money to my father’s side of the family while I was there.
When I came back to the States, I enrolled to Irvine Valley College since my brother wanted to attend that school and has work in Irvine as well. My brother needed to take some classes before he applied to get his doctorate and my mother thought it would be more convenient to carpool. While I was attending community college full-time, I also applied to work at Hot Pot City. I worked roughly 33 hours a week. At Hot Pot City, I was the hostess, waitress, kitchen worker, and cashier. Since the restaurant was like Shabu Shabu. I had to explain to the customers how to eat there. In the center of the table there was a grill and in the middle of that was the hot pot. What the customers had to do was go to the refrigerator and choose the raw foods that they wanted to eat and cook it at their table. Most of the time, customers didn’t know how to eat the restaurant and so we as hosts had to explain the process to them. Each plate that they chose in the restaurant had a price and that was how we calculated their bill. At times, customers didn’t know how to cook their food, so as waitresses we had to help customers cook. It was very interesting working at a restaurant; you meet all different types of people.
That summer I attended summer school as well as maintained the same working hours. Then during the fall I started working at Irvine Valley College’s EOPS Office at the front desk. I filed paperwork, shredded confidential paperwork, collected and counted up students’ time cards, those that did work-study. I also called students to remind them to set up appointments with their counselor’s or remind them that they have a counseling appointment the very next day. In addition, I had to: collected students’ files for the appointments that counselors have the following day, help students print out their schedule and booklist in order to borrow books from the Program. I must: check if they returned previous terms’ books before they can borrow books for the next term, collect and check off books that students have returned, organize them in the storage room, get the books that the students order from the storage room. If the EOPS storage room didn’t have the book, I have to ask from my superior, Maria, to request the book from the student store. My co-worker, Erica, named me “Rocketin’ Robin” after a song I did not know because my name is Thuy Vy pronounced (Twee V), supposedly my name is in the song, and because I don’t stop working. One time, I didn’t take a lunch break and so my boss told me I had to come an hour late to work the next day, but be paid as if I was there. That had never happened to me before because I was so used to working at the restaurant where I kept constantly working and was not allowed to do other things.
At the end of December was when I stopped working at Hot Pot City. The school workload was getting too much. I had taken 6 classes that semester: a poetry class, geography class, calculus, social psychology class, management accounting, and speech class. In the poetry class, I wrote a poem about the dog biting me incident, it was so detailed that my class seemed to feel the sadness. I really like that poem; I believe I have it posted on my myspace page. That year I found out that I got accepted to UC Irvine for Economics, UC San Diego for Economics, UC Los Angeles for Business Economics, and was rejected from UC Berkeley for Business Administration. I decided to attend UCLA because that was the school I had always wanted to go to.
That summer I once again went to Vietnam to get away from home and hang out with friends and family in Vietnam. It was just to relax, and to have a home away from home. Upcoming fall I moved in late because my move-in date was on my father’s birthday, as so I had to change it. My roommates got a chance to know each other before I came. Then, when I arrived, I found out that I was living with two blonds, also transferred, that wanted to join the same sorority. Their appearance was not what bothered me, but what bothered me was that they both messy people. The part about being blond and in the same sorority helped them to distance themselves from me though, and to side with each other when I had a problem with their mess. I wanted to change rooms, but my RA said it was too hard to change room because one can only change rooms if someone would want to change with me. Who would want to exchange rooms and live with messy people? Plus, I was a transfer and so I did not know how the housing system worked, which sucked. So I stuck it out. I attend classes and found out how competitive Business Economics was. I did not like it one bit, but it was interesting information to learn. However, people in my econ classes did not want to have study groups, it was an every one for themselves type of environment. Winter quarter wasn’t that much better, one of my best friends that I met at UCLA attempted suicide. She didn’t like the competitiveness at UCLA either; her major was Bio-Chemistry, and so she digested a full bottle of Advil and half a bottle of Exedrin. Thankfully she threw it up that very day. My other friends and I felt that she needed help and so we had took her to the hospital for some psychological help, thinking that they would help her. However, all they did was make her wait, then ask her questions, and sent her back. We all stayed at the hospital with her until morning.
The last thing that happened to me this year was my knee surgery. Because of all the stairs at UCLA, my left knee couldn’t stand it anymore. At times my left knee would give out and I would almost fall. Therefore I decided that I should get knee surgery. I had an orthopedic surgeon look at my knee. She said, “if you want your knee to be somewhat more normal than now, then you need to have surgery. I don’t need to tell how it feels to go without the surgery; you’ve done it for more than 3 years already.” I had my surgery during spring break on March 26th. No one informed me as to how much pain I had to endure post-surgery. My parents had taken me to school the following Monday to one of my classes. It was only a 50-minute class, but I could barely remember anything about my surroundings that day because there was so much pain in my knee. I could not sit in my chair; I tried my best to position myself as best as I could to feel as little pain as possible. I pushed myself to focus on what my professor was saying in order to ignore the pain. I blinked a lot to refocus my eyes. Though that day was not hot, I was sweating; really clenching my fists and straining my eyes to understand my professor as she explained our syllabus. After that class session, I realized that I could not attend the first week of Spring Quarter. Sitting down in lecture for fifty minutes was impossible since most of my concentration was given to holding back tears due to the pain. I had no choice but to inform my professor about my condition and request to submit my assignments for the first week via email. All my other classes were longer than fifty minutes; if sitting for fifty minutes made me want to cry there was no way I could endure more. All my professors allowed my request, however I had to get notes from my classmates. I emailed classmates from classes that my professors lectured and had notes for. Only one person replied to my email for my other class and even then I could not receive the notes, and what was worse was that during the first week the professor had assigned three assignments that needed the notes to do and I couldn’t use the class textbook for reference because it was still stuck in the mail. Even if I could concentrate and read the textbook, I could not concentrate for long. Oxycodone, the medicine that was prescribed to me to relieve my pain, had extreme side-effects that did not allow me to concentrate because it was such a strong drug. Side-effects like difficulty breathing, off-setting my central equilibrium, and will cause drowsiness. I felt all the side-effects; the worst was the difficulty breathing because along with my asthma at night I had to grasp for air. The first time, this occurred, I understood why my doctor and nurse told to be sure not to take more pills than prescribed; there was a higher possibility to overdose on these pills than normal medication prescribed by other doctors. Thus, at night I lost sleep and throughout the day I could only take naps to try to make up for it. I was constantly drowsy, but I could not sleep because I could not breathe and because of the pain. Second week and on was not so much better. I lived in a triple dorm room and I was one of the people on the top bunk, because even climbing a ladder to the bunk was impossible, I had to sleep on the floor, my roommates did not accommodate me at all. The Monday I came back to my dorm room during third week, one of my roommate’s stuff was all over the floor: dirty or clean, all were wrinkled clothes spread throughout the dorm room along with books and other belongings such as her wallet and shoes. I moved all such items to the side because I could not trip on them in my condition. She started a verbal fight with me, saying this was her room as much as it was mine; she can make it as messy as she wants. I apologized for moving her stuff, but explained my situation “I cannot trip over your stuff in my current state.” I could not risk re-injuring myself. Still, even after doing my exercises to recuperate my knee every day, the pain in my knee was still able to keep me up at night which meant that during the day I had to make it up. Furthermore, during class I could never sit still for too long; every position whether leg extended or mildly bent would at first feel less painful, but the pain would gradually increase with time, and so I had to always had to readjust myself every few minutes. As my knee healed, my living situation with my roommates got worse. In crutches for the majority of the quarter, I could not throw out the trash from the bin, but could only manage to throw out my own trash which was small enough for me to carry in my hands while using my crutches. Because, I did not throw out the trash in the trash bin, trash started piling up in the trash, from perishables to non-perishables. The trash overflowed to the point that there was trash all around the bin and also fell in the recycle bin. I told my roommates that the trash can was too full; one of them threw out the trash can, but neglected to also throw out the recycle bin which had a banana peel left behind in it. In addition to the contents in the recycle bin rotting away, my roommates had left coffee cups on our dresser top to rot away as well, to the point that the coffee within the cup looked like cottage cheese. And to add to their collection of items rotting away on our dresser were cups of ice cream that did not look like ice cream anymore since they were sitting there for at least two weeks. The only reason I knew the cups once contained ice cream because of the shape of the cups. I had once again told my roommates to clean up after their mess, but it was no use. I was forced to avoid my dorm room until it was necessary for me to come back. One, I could not breathe in the room; it smelled too much and blocked my airways. Two, the fruit flies that had infested the room were a big nuisance and disgusting. Then stench of my dorm room attracted fruit flies for a whole week. No matter how long I left our windows open, the fruit flies remained in our dorm room. That was my year spring quarter.
Before joining the program, I took three classes during summer session A. Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and International Development: Economics of Developing Countries. I had a crazy time keeping up with all the classes. Then finals came; I was glad it was all going to be over so that I can go to Vietnam, but then during finals week I got sick, and so all my finals were delayed. I struggled to finish all my finals. So when I did finish, I only had two days to pack for Vietnam since my flight was on the 1 A.M. on the 5th of August. When I got to Sai gon, there was no one to greet me. I had to borrow a stranger’s phone to call my aunt in there. We then went to her house and chilled for a bit, and afterwards went out to meet with my friends and hung out. I found out that my friend was pregnant, and so we couldn’t go to Vung Tau. Thus, I decided to stay in Sai gon and hang out with family and friends. I went to go eat at Quan Ngon since one of my friends had not eaten there before and saw advertisement for the restaurant saying that it was a really good place to eat. When we got there, it was very disappointing. The portions were small, even for my friend who was a local Vietnamese, service was bad, and everything was expensive. It was very disappointing. After we ate there, we went to another restaurant with better service, half the price, and ordered twice as much food. We were so full after that. My friends love to eat, yet very tiny and thin. I don’t know how they do it. I eat half of what they eat and I feel like an elephant. Hahaha
Well, everything else is history. I had booked a flight from Sai gon to Ha Noi at 9:30 A.M. Then that flight was cancelled because the flight was empty. And so, I was pushed to the flight at 11:20, and that flight was full. And once again, I was stuck on the flight to Ha Noi at 12:45, which sucked for the people who were waiting for me. I felt bad, but I had no control over anything, which even sucked more. When I got to Ha Noi, I realized how much more populated it is not, than six months ago. I was here last December because my sister wanted to go to Vietnam and wanted my parents and I to go with her, my brother couldn’t come. Then, when I think back to 1999, when I travel throughout the country and ended the trip at Ha Noi, the city was a lot more dead then. The city was way less crowded. I don’t even remember trucks being in the city. There are a lot more new apartment buildings than I remember. But then again that was 10 years ago. A lot has changed since then.