"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

Subscribe HERE (Impact Endeavors is 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