Dear Mom,
It’s still the quiet of the morning and I’m still not sure I have the right answers, but life feels a little more clarified than yesterday. Clarified. That’s not to say perfectly clear, but lots of the muddy silt has dropped out of the churning water in my bucket and settled down overnight, and the water above the silt is clear enough to see through. If I wanted to put a stick into the muck at the bottom, I could make the water cloudy again, but if I’m careful the water will stay clear. Clear enough.
That’s partly to do with your many thoughts toward us, I know. Ask for thoughts from home and get ready to receive hope! Wow. “Thank you thank you thank you cảm ơn.” (Which is what I’ve taken to saying to people here. More about that in a Post Script.)
If I’m grateful for your thoughts for me, and I am, imagine the emotions of my soul when I was writing just now and remembered this one:
Okay. Here’s where we’re at. We’ve asked to see again a pretty good house in a pretty good neighborhood today. It’s one that we saw the other day when we were so disappointed to lose the amazing house. Er … I think I need to back up for the benefit of those newly tuning in.
Early this summer we reached out to the same realtor team that helped us find a rental house 10 years ago. They’re still in business and agreed to help us find a house, even though normally they only work with clients renting for a year or more.
I cruised through the houses listed online (they’re mostly sham listings, click-bait) and chose one that had a gorgeous open-plan living room and kitchen, plants and trees outside on the wall, aircon in the living room, the works. I said “we don’t care about the bedrooms, but we want a house where we can cook together with friends and have more than one table set up for games/eating in the living room” and I sent them the link to the click-bait, too-good-to-be-real one. Now, several months later, they were showing us unsuitable houses with all kinds of fancy bedrooms and narrow/small/normal living spaces.
And then.
They said “now, if you want to we could go see this house today… it’s a little more expensive …” AND THERE IT WAS. Phuong was showing me her phone and I grabbed my phone and scrolled way back and matched up photos from my phone to hers. She was saying that she could show me the exact house that I’d used to shape our hoped-for outcome. Saying DREAM HOUSE is a little strong, but it is a gorgeous house in a perfect location. We went to visit, gave it our hearts, and then when we sat down to go over final details she said “minimum 12 months” and showed the realtor the text exchange in which she had specified this. Crushing.
Probably if we weren’t hot and still jetlaggy, being full of the right kind of joy, strong in every good way and detached from the material pleasures of life, it would have been fine. “Oh, that perfect house you offered us isn’t available? Gotcha. Okay, moving on…”
But for us it felt crushing.
Today’s clarity, then is several things.
We’re not looking for an apartment. We’ve tried getting our heads around how hosting 8 motorbikes at a time can be a good thing in an apartment setting, and it just doesn’t work. Maybe sometime this year we’ll see something and say “ah! next time let’s move to that sort of apartment!” but though we’ve tried, we can’t make it feel right.
We’re ready to settle for pretty good. The PERFECT was introduced to us and then removed, and I’ll sort that out with Dad later. But today at 4pm, unless something comes from sideways, we’ll sign for a pretty good house in a pretty good neighborhood.
So thanks for thinking. Hoping for continued clarity in the next 8 hours.
~Tim/Janet
PS.
You would not believe how many local people have some basic English now. And how many local people are now fully proficient! It’s a dramatic change.
Saying “thank you” is more of a western thing than an Asian thing, as a general rule (we say it flippantly, all the time, for every little thing, but other cultures tend to reserve thanks for larger occasions, I think). So I’ve taken to saying “Thank you thank you cảm ơn” to people in place of trying to get the “cảm ơn” by itself to communicate, because the thanks are a little out of place and they don’t expect me to be reaching for some tiếng Việt. Saying thanks in my own language first cues them to what I’m communicating and then when I flip it and say it in their language they can hear it.
“Thank you thank you cảm ơn” seems to be working very well as a language strategy, and I get big smiles when I do it. So to you also, for thinking of us:
“Thank you thank you cảm ơn”