In Vietnamese communities all across the world, this Saturday will mark the biggest holiday of the year: Tết, the lunisolar new year. People take a break from work, meet with family and friends and spend time together with traditional food, games and practices. One of the most important parts of celebrating the new year is the idea of homecoming — returning to your hometown to see your relatives and those you grew up with. 

For my family though, along with many other overseas Vietnamese families, this tradition of returning home isn’t exactly practiced conventionally.

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My mother’s family had lived in Vietnam for generations. With relatives living close to one another, either in the same house or the same village, Tết celebrations were easily organized. Family members would come together, usually at the eldest relative’s home, and graves were always close by to visit those who had passed on. 

The first generation to experience a change from this was actually quite recent, as it was that of my grandparents, only two generations ago. My grandfather and grandmother moved from the north of Vietnam because of growing hostilities where they lived. 

Though unable to return to their “home” for Tết, they were still together and developed a new sense of what home was. Their home in the agricultural fields of the north was now in the industrial city of Saigon in the south. It might have been different, but nonetheless, they were a family and willing to both create new traditions and maintain old ones.

However, soon an even more drastic change came. With the end of the Vietnam War, violence reached my family’s new home in Saigon, known after the war and today as Ho Chi Minh City. 

To try and escape the conflict, they took whatever money they had to get boats from the local fishermen and used them to escape the war zone. Of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese war refugees who left by sea, today called the Vietnamese boat people, my family was one of the lucky ones. The majority of my relatives were taken in by vessels from other countries, though not all the same ones. Some ended up in Australia, others in Japan, but for my mother and her direct relatives, they ended up in the United States.

For a long time, just surviving in a new country was the main goal of my family. It took time for them to reach a point where they could focus on other things besides just making sure everyone was alive and well. After all, forcibly leaving your home country, living in a refugee camp and knowing that your family has been split apart are all very traumatic experiences. 

Though it took years to finally establish themselves and start reconnecting, their work paid off. One by one, they were able to find one another even across the world and establish a network that still impresses me today. We have our own family website, yearbook and regular reunions all to make sure that we can keep in touch with one another. And of course, we celebrate the new year together, too.

Today, there’s no real hometown for us to return to, and it’s difficult to get people from all across the world to have the time to meet up during Tết — especially considering how the majority of us don’t get time off for the holiday. Instead, we make do with what we have and have multiple local reunions rather than a single global one. 

For me, this means that this weekend, I’m going to Orange County to meet up with my relatives who live nearby. We’ll exchange li xi, eat banh chung, play bau cua ca cop and even pay homage to our country of residence by watching the Super Bowl.

In the hectic life of being a college student, this is a long-awaited break for me and also a good reminder to ground myself by remembering where I came from. For our family, homecoming isn’t like in Vietnam, but it’s just as meaningful. Wherever our family is, that’s home; it doesn’t matter whether it’s in Vietnam, the U.S. or any other part of the world. So, as this weekend approaches, I get to put everything aside for a moment. I get to take a deep breath, center myself, and finally, I get to go home.