True You Identity Intensive

Hi A,

I feel ... pretty crummy.  Not physically, I mean, but crazy-grumpy.  One of those "I hate everything and everyone" times.

Janet is nice enough about it.  She says that it's all the soul things getting ready to get dealt with at a 3-day identity retreat/intensive I'm heading to in Portland tomorrow.  I'm looking forward to it  ... about as much as people look forward to having the handyman come to demo out a sink that's had a hidden drip going for about 8 years and the wood is all gross and basically decayed to blackened pulp, and then the guys fix the leak and dry it all out and rebuild with new white pine and put in fluffy insulation and patch it all up again.  You feel better afterwards, but the mucking out the gross part is the thing that's got me triggered.  Bah.

So.  Not feeling great right now. 

~Tim

Chili Oil Popcorn

Dear A,

We think often about going to Vietnam these days.  I wonder what sort of house or apartment we'll be renting, I wonder who our time will be invested in, I wonder how we'll use our house in Bend during the seven months we'll be abroad.  

On the weekend Janet and I watched a show and I cooked popcorn using an unusual-for-us chili oil.  For several years we've been using Lao Gan Ma chili oil to season our popcorn, and we prefer popcorn to be deliciously spicy.

But this time when I reached for the chili oil I brought out a Vietnamese chili sauce instead.

The bottle was nearly used up from making noodle dishes, so I swished 1/4 cup of avocado oil in the jar and sizzled our popcorn in it, just to see how it would taste.  And ... wow.  I don't know how much of the flavor is special because it's JUST THAT GOOD, or maybe it tastes like Vietnam to me and I'm responding to the nostalgia.  But wow. We have enough jars (3) to get us through to September, and I expect we'll be bringing more of this local (it's specific to our region of Vietnam) chili paste home with us.  Let us know if you want a jar of it--so good!  

~Tim

Seth's Blog pre-empts chili oil

Dear A,

So, I was ready to write to you about our chili oil, and I'd already taken the pictures and been mentally composing the letter ... and then today Seth Godin sent out an email that I thought particularly apropos.

In his post, he recommends against speaking to a crowd.  In my case, that's EXACTLY what I'm doing when I chose you to write to.  I'm still going to write about chili oil, but tomorrow.

Love,
Tim

PS. It's been an exciting couple of weeks since I posted on Facebook about returning to live in Vietnam.  Former students have been reaching out to me and getting reconnected.  It's what we hoped would happen, and it's happening sooner than it might have.  Super gratified that one of the girls that we made a good connection with 10 years ago (but whom we haven't seen or heard from in the interim) has reached out and is looking forward to reconnecting.

 

View Online

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The 1:1 method The reason that most memos, speeches and edicts fall flat is simple: we get stuck on the idea that we’re talking to a crowd. When we’re speaking or writing, the crowd is just an illusion. What’s actually happening is that there is one person over there, another over there, repeated again and again until it’s easier to imagine it’s a mass audience. The alternative method is simple: find one person, exactly one, and write to them, allowing the others to listen in. Embrace the tone of voice, body posture, breathing style and punctuation you’d use on just one person. You and me, here and now. If it’s not going to work for one person, why do think it will work on a crowd?          • Email to a friend •

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Facebook Post (anniversary/games-prep)

Dear Friend,

I don't think we see each other on Facebook. Actually I know that's true because I seldom post anything and equally seldom read about the lives of my friends. (I do actively use FB Messenger, by the way, and I'd be glad to be your FB friend for that purpose.)

Anyhow, I did post something at www.facebook.com/timchase.impact yesterday and I thought you'd want to see it:

This photo represents two milestones.

First, it's our anniversary. Thirty years ago we gathered in a church in Tulsa with our Lord and 240 family and friends to create together a new entity: a marriage. Today the three of us (Tim, Janet, and our Marriage) are healthy and optimistic about the future.

 
So we're on an anniversary getaway at a sweet Bed and Breakfast. That's the building in the background.

 
In the foreground are games we bought today. They're anniversary presents to ourselves (we hope some of you will also want to play with us...) but they're ALSO important because they are some of the early preparations we're making in order to move to Vietnam this fall. On our anniversary trip we bought several games to take with us--very exciting.

 
Many of you were our friends already when we first moved to Vietnam 10 years ago. We lived in Danang, a coastal city in the center of the country, and that's where we'll return for next school year.

 

"Dear Friend" ... Return to Vietnam!

[Tim] 

Dear Friend,

It's not 100% certain, but it's looking more and more as if ...

The Chases are returning to live in Vietnam!

We'll miss seeing your faces and playing tabletop board games with you in Bend, but I have to tell you that my heart is bubbly with anticipation and it's a delight to look forward into this transition back to Asia.

We lived in China in the 90s and kept up an email correspondence with many people who loved and supported us, and we sent out pretty frequent "Dear Mom" emails.  The idea was that if we wrote to an unnamed audience, our writing wouldn't have the same resonant voice that it has when we write to a specific recipient.  So we wrote to our Moms (we were just kids, then, not even into our mid-twenties) and let the rest of our friends and family "eavesdrop" on the conversation.  They were the Dear Mom Letters from our three years in China.

The Frequent updates.  Small happenings.  Recently I had a chance to re-read some of that correspondence and I liked it better than the blog we wrote when we lived in Vietnam 2015-16, so it made me want to try something closer to that when we return to Vietnam next year.

This time, though, I'm writing to my one-time neighbor in Bend.  (If you're reading this, you're not him.)  We shared conversations both shallow and deep, we worked together on a couple of projects while he lived in Bend, and I like him still, even though we're out of communication nowadays.  But he's the one in my To: field on these emails/blog-posts, and if you subscribe (please do) and see Dear Friend as the first words, you can know that you're reading over his shoulder as I tell about the happenings in Vietnam.  I'm not sure yet who Janet will choose as her recipient--she might even revert to writing to her mom again rather than writing to "a friend" or it may vary from letter to letter.

One more paragraph on the WHY for me.  I'm not writing to my mom this time because the blog is such a public forum.  Vietnam is fantastic, but it's still a closed political system where you should never write about Politics or Religion, even in private (dubious privacy, even when encrypted) and definitely not on Facebook.  So I'll steer well clear of those topics in my blogposts.  My own mom is pretty likely to want to talk about religion (in "private-but-assumed-to-be-read" emails, and we'll be using careful language) and how relationship-with-God is going for her and for me.  So it won't work so well for me to write to her, whereas the FRIEND who is my blog-post-recipient is not interested in politics or religion, so that will help my posts stay on the right side of the line.  

Oh!  I'm SO giddy with excitement.  I'm ready to write.  This year I'll bring you along as we're planning to go, and by the time we go we'll all be ready.  I'm not worried about boring you--you're far away but we had some good times together and I trust that you're eager for me and glad to hear from me.  

Find the subscribe button and put your email address in so you get the Dear Friend emails when they start rolling.

And, Dear Friend, we do still love you and your family.  I hope one day our lives intersect again, this side of eternity.  All my best,

~Tim

bit.ly/vietnamchases

Home 3 Weeks. Vietnam lives on.

[Tim]

We've been in America for just over 3 weeks, and home in Bend for two of those three.  We are loving being home, but we keep leaving Bend and are looking forward to finally just being home!  We were home for just a few days before going up to Spokane to visit my family for a week, for example.  This week was summer camp for three of us (two boys and volunteer-dad) and now we're off to a wedding in Portland, so it will be August 1st before we're home-for-good.

Reverse Culture Shock
Janet and I remember coming home from China in 1998 and experiencing a pretty good measure of reverse culture shock.  It's more than "you forgot what it was like to be home ... SURPRISE!!"  We experienced that, too, when we visited a WalMart supercenter and were astonished and overwhelmed at the abundance and color.  But as you know, shock has definition beyond "unexpected surprise," and it's that other shock-to-the-system that is referred to as culture shock.
Re-entry has been low-stress for us this time.  We are returning to life that is very much "normal" for us.  Same house, same belongings, same job, same friends ... slightly different furniture.  People who have stopped by to visit have been consistent with comments "It seems like you weren't even gone!"  They aren't being rude, like "we didn't miss you while you were away" or anything.  It's just that we stepped out of our lives for a year ... and then stepped back in.  The jumprope kept rhythm while we hopped out and got a drink, and now we're jumping in again, and it all seems so easy and rhythmic.

But there have been days when I have felt simply awful.  Not suicidal, but certainly depressed.  Of the first 10 days after arriving back in the USA, I was "up" on 6 of those days and melancholy/angry/uninspired/self-reproachful/slothful/icky on 4 of them.  The second 10 were much, much better; in fact I think that there wasn't a single sickish day among them.  Today is worse again, but only half as bad as the miserable ones when we had first returned.  Thought you'd want to know an honest answer to the ubiquitous "how is it to come home?"

Keeping in Touch
We want to maintain contact with our Vietnamese friends (and renewed connections among the Chinese students that we got to meet up with as we traveled home), because we love them and because we want to see them again when we return.  Maybe we'll live there again when the kids have all finished high school?  We think it would be neat to see them again at intervals, so the 19 year olds will be 25 and in a different phase of life, and then maybe we go again when they are all 30 and have children of their own.  Or something like that.

Going Our Way?
Recently we met with a couple that is planning to go to live in Vietnam (our city of Danang, in fact!) and it is our great pleasure to share tips/tricks/stories.  If you are preparing to go, why not make contact with us at <timchase.impact@gmail.com> and we'll arrange for a video call or answer your questions over email.  We'd love to meet you.

And Goodbye.
It's always possible that we'll write in this journal again, but for now I'm signing off.  I feel a little bit like Truman: "In case I don't see ya... good afternoon, good evening, and good night."

Aannnd... We're HOME!

[Tim]

We arrived home today.  Not all the way to Bend, but almost.  We made it to Oregon tonight and are with friends, then tomorrow we'll go home.

We picked out some photos that tell the story (with some embedded comments, if you click to see them) of our trip north from Danang.  We went north by train to the crazy limestone islands of Halong Bay, then crossed by foot into China, then went by train and bus to two cities in China and finally to Beijing.  Today we woke up in Korea, and now we're in the USA.  A wonderful trip.

Go see the pictures and captions:  https://goo.gl/photos/ZcjZEgefZxQieASS6