Von

This is Von. She is in her mid-twenties and a recent graduate of Marlboro college in Vermont. She was born in Vietnam, but adopted by a family from the United States at the age of six. Once in the States, she quickly lost her Vietnamese language skills.

My brother Nate and I met Von and her friend on an overnight boat cruise on Halong Bay. With just fourteen of us on the boat, we were able to have exteneded conversations with almost everyone -including Von.

Von is an articulate, well-educated young woman. Her speech is peppered with talk of social justice, the International Monetary Fund, and imperialism. Von tends to see the world through a binary Marxist lens of oppressed/oppressor.

Conversations with Von inevitably turn to U.S. foreign policy. I can hold my own in a conversation about geo-politics, so I probed a little. Von summarized U.S. foreign policy over the last hundred years for me: The United States has been and is an international bully.

Von has spent several summers -including a college internship- back in Vietnam. So even though she grew up in The States, she has a network of friends and associates in place in Vietnam. Von had just moved to Vietnam a few weeks before we met her and she was traveling Vietnam with her friend before starting a new job at a non-governmental organization in August.

She plans to stay in Vietnam indefintely.

Earlier this year, needing to fill a few extra minutes at the end of one of my classes, I posed the following question to my students: Given the choice, would you rather leave Hong Kong and never be allowed to come back or stay in Hong and never be allowed to leave for the rest of your life. It generated some lively discussion among my students.

It was almost midnight and several us night-owls were sitting on the roof of the house boat as it slowly motored its way through the innumerable islands of Halong Bay. The conversation had been flowing freely until we had one of those inevitable lulls. So I posed my question changing the location to The States. (We had to change it to Italy for our new friend Bruno.) We went around the table and everyone thought it over and hesitantly gave his or her answer.

Until we came to Von.

She didn't hesitate.

"Leave the U.S. and never come back."