from alsoemi
Love, Intimacy, Power, and Revolution: Recapping my 20s so far
The streets in Vietnam were chaotic and grimy. But now and then, a corner would soften. A little like those relationships throughout my twenties.
I took a bus from Nanning to Hanoi, passed the border on foot, and witnessed the landscape change from mountains draped in silence into auto repair shops, worn-down diners, farmland, and tombs scattered in the fields. I was dropped off in the outskirts of Hanoi, in a cold rain. A motorbike driver on the roadside haggled with me, then gave in with a half-smile and tucked me into a plastic raincoat. He has the same moustache as Che Guevara.
I spent the next few days wandering the old quarters, occasionally riding a motorbike out to the farther museums. At the Museum of Ethnology, I saw traditional tomb houses built by some of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities. One of them was covered in wood carvings of men and women having sex. Prominent phalluses, round pregnant bellies. I was mindblown.
Their view of life and death was startlingly straightforward. Reproduction and death weren’t opposites. They simply lived on different ends of the same timeline. Traveling through Vietnam, I kept brushing up against something close to the core of being alive. And maybe, in the end, all we’re ever really doing is eating, praying, creating, and (learning) to love.
Even in the old town, that view of life and death seemed to linger quietly in the everyday. On my way to a popular café, I passed a small group of people in traditional clothing entering a worn building. A few flower shops lined the corner, their entrances crowded with white paper wreaths. I didn’t think much of it at first. Only later, glancing at the map, did I realize it was a funeral home. It stood right there between a boutique hotel and a crowded café, not hidden at all. Something about that unselfconscious coexistence left me stunned, all over again.
Somewhere in all of this, I started thinking about touch again. About how, in my early twenties, I was always chasing physical closeness. At a point I thought sex was the answer to love, proof of being wanted. After my first breakup, I drifted through a few casual encounters. I don’t even want to remember how numb they felt. I’d lie there like a machine, staring at the ceiling. Robot was the word that came to my mind. I’d never felt so lonely. I couldn’t bear the thought of dating anyone.
Then, two years later, I met someone new. A stranger whose kiss lit me up from the inside. For a while, I told myself it was just his warmth, the comfort of being held. But now, two more years have passed, and I came to know what I felt was home.
The one who once felt like home betrayed me. After that, some strangers felt like roles I was performing. And then, suddenly and quietly, another stranger felt like home again. It’s strange, almost funny, how fate weaves people into my life, and how those ghost-like desires resurface when I least expect them. I wish I had learned sooner what I truly needed. I wish I knew how to hold on to the ones who mattered at first sight.
By the time I got to Da Nang, it felt like fate from the past had arrived a little late. I met a girl at the hostel. We started simply: sharing museums, bowls of phở, quiet afternoons in cafés. And slowly, we discovered uncanny overlaps. We’d both studied architecture. Both worked in design. Both had flirted with the idea of art history but veered away. We even went through the same rabbit hole of obsessing over the same J-pop group. We had playlists in common. There was something oddly familiar about her, like I’d already known her somehow.
A day or two before we spoke, I’d been sitting alone by the beach. I forgot to bring a towel and had to sit on a stone bench, hot from the sun. People passed by, some laughing, some hand in hand. And I remember staring out at the sea, feeling like an outsider to all that. I wished then that luck would roll in like the tide, gently but insistently. That something would finally reach me.
Dalat was cold in the way certain memories are. It was quiet, soft around the edges, but with a strange power to reach deep. I was waiting for a midnight sleeper bus, killing time in a café tucked behind a slope. The place was warm. I recognized the waitress from the day before and, with a knowing smile, she gave me a 15% discount for remembering her. I ordered a latte I didn’t really want and opened The Five Love Languages, more out of curiosity than faith. But somewhere in the middle, the words started pulling threads I didn’t know were loose. I thought of someone from the past. For the most of our interactions we were always circling something unspoken. I pulled back when it got too close. I confused vulnerability with weakness. Maybe he took my silence as disinterest. Neither of us said what we really meant. So we began pushing and pulling subtly. Like love was a negotiation. Like it had to be earned. And maybe we both lost. Sitting there with that book open, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it might’ve been. If we had just stopped playing that quiet power game, if we had said what we really felt. Maybe everything could’ve been softer. Or maybe not. But I’ll never know.
I used to believe in unconditional love. But now I’ve come to admit that manipulation inhabits every relationship. I shape the people I love, sometimes gently, sometimes not. I think about how I train my dog: to sit, to stay, to not be too much like a dog. I reward her. I correct he.r I want her to fit into my life, and I call that care. And maybe that’s what love is too: not just affection, but regulation. Not just presence, but power. I don’t know if that’s cynical. Or just honest.
Saigon hit me like a rush of blood. There was no time to feel subtle things. The streets pulsed with noise and traffic and propaganda banners waving in the humid air. I went to the War Remnants Museum. Inside, the exhibits were blunt, brutal. It reminded me of when I was a kid, being made to memorize World War II horrors in school, and how uncomfortable I always felt. Not because I didn’t care, but because there was something suffocating about how those stories were told. Standing there in those exhibitions, I felt the strange mix of sorrow and unease. I felt deep pity for the suffering, but not hatred. I’ve grown enough to see how much narrative control is at play. How history, when used as propaganda, can turn pain into performance. There’s something graceless about staging trauma so it only ever speaks in favor of one side, then calling it education. It leaves no room for real reckoning, but rather just a tidy version of blame and virtue.
I stayed near the red-light district. Every night, I’d see women in heels and tight dresses waiting under flickering signs, while men leaned out of bars like they were watching a game. I couldn’t tell if what I felt was sadness or fury, or maybe just recognition. The way men looked at women. The way women learned to look back. The whole city seemed to be negotiating something: between pride and pain, power and longing.
I left Vietnam without any grand epiphany. Just a little quieter. A little more honest. I started this trip thinking I might learn something about love: how to find it, how to keep it, how to stop mistaking it for performance or control. But what I kept running into wasn’t just love. It was its shadows, its negotiations, its silences, its power plays. And it wasn’t just in relationships. It was in how we remember war, how we grieve, how we survive.
Looking back, my twenties so far were filled with people I tried to hold, or let go of too fast. With roles I stepped into, sometimes without realizing. I wanted so badly to be wanted, but I didn’t know how to ask without performing. I didn’t know how to stay without retreating. But in Vietnam, through the chaos and quiet, the tenderness and tension, I saw all of it reflected back. Messy, unfinished, alive.
