Leaving Home

When my dad was 17, he boarded a plane to Saigon, Vietnam to procure a job.  He touched down on June 22, 1967.  He fully expected his father to be waiting for him at the airport, but as he came to find out, Gramps had no intention of picking Mike up.  It was just that type of “tough-love” family relationship.  Too scared to leave the airport, Mike waited.  After a few hours he spotted a man from the plane ride from Hawaii to Guam, and begged him to take him to the tanker company.  The man obliged and guided Mike in a taxi to the front doors of the company and even took care of the cab ride.  Mike went into that building and announced that he was reporting for work.  They told him to take a hike.  There was no way Mike was going back out there.  At this time, the war was in full swing and the streets were a scene the likes of which he had never experienced.  He planted himself in a seat and he waited all day.  After much discussion, the office came to realize that they had sent Mike a letter of intent to hire him, and they would have to relent.  Had he left on demand, his life may have taken a completely different path, and I would not be here to write this account today.  They sent him to a hotel to wait for his call to duty, and he did not leave that room for three days and three nights.  On his fourth day in Vietnam, he went to work on the tugboats.

My dad worked in Vietnam for five years.  About two years in, he went back to San Diego.  He knew he was supposed to sign up for the draft and he figured he’d better look into it.  The court ordered him to appear, and, representing himself, he answered a very pressing question put forth by the elderly female judge: “Where have you been hiding for the past two years?”

His response: “Vietnam.”

It was an answer that stumped a judge who had heard it all until then.  He was duly entered into the draft, but his number was never called.  Though my dad was a bystander on the streets of Saigon, he never took part in what they are now calling over there, “The American War.”  He met my mom when the boat pulled into Singapore, and the rest is history.

I am 28 years old, and I intend to live an unordinary life.  In about a month, I will be moving to Hanoi, Vietnam.  This is in answer to an ad I saw in the chiropractic classifieds.  The ad had been catching my eye for about three weeks before I yelled across the house, “Mom, what do you know about Hanoi, Vietnam!?”  You see, my initial mental response to this ad was, “Who would ever want to go live in Vietnam?”  She called back, “Ohhh, its Verrrrry nice.”  Really?  Well let me just google it a bit and find out.  Hmmmm, Froder’s is calling it one of the top ten destinations of 2010.  Next month will mark its one thousandth anniversary.  It’s one of the top cities to shop in Asia.  Good food.  Good coffee.  Hmmmmm.  Let me just send in my resume and see what happens.  And they asked for a picture.  I’ll let that one ride as the asian persuasion.  Can’t hurt.

Besides a major birthday for Hanoi, next month also marks a big day for me.  It is the one year anniversary of my very own chiropractic office.   It’s also my last day in the office for a while.  This is the office I built up from scratch in a town where I knew practically no one.  It took exactly two months from the day I made the decision to open my practice to the day I opened my doors for business.    It was the scariest two months of my life and I lost about fifteen pounds in the process from stress.  At the time it was my hope that I would be able to cover the costs of doing business.  I took a one year lease on my space, and prayed that I would be able to cover the rent.  I set a modest goal for what I hoped to make in the first year.  I reached that goal after month 8.  (note to self: set higher goals.)  (Note to other chiros: Phyllis Frase, practice coach.)  On October 19th, I will gently wrap my practice up, and place it in my proverbial pocket for later.  Did I just compare my practice to a throat lozenge?  Well it did get me through some tough times and it did make me feel better in certain respects.  In the future I will look back on it as that year after chiropractic school that I lived with my parents and had my own doctor’s office.  Weird combo, I know.  More about that later.

This is a shout out to my friends and the other young professionals who might be reading this!  I have a lot of chiropractor friends, and for some reason I have an oddly lot of lawyer friends as well.  Wasn’t there some type of general consensus growing up that if we got “Dr.” on our degree, that things would be peachy?  It may just be my crowd, but the economic state of affairs is pitiful.  After procuring the mountain of debt in student loans, which cannot be gotten rid of with a simple declaration of bankruptcy, we are sent  off into the workforce with a heavy burden to carry.  It can be down right depressing!  My overhead just to get by in business and personally each month tops six thousand dollars.  And I live with my parents!  Is it any wonder that I dream of the days of being a coffee barista with no student loans to pay off?

What is the American Dream?  And who is really living it?  Who is this “Jones Family?”  And why do we have to keep up with them?  Somewhere along the way we all get brainwashed, and there is no escaping it.  We are born naked, and then we take on layers and layers of ideas until they culminate in the grand product of “us.”  It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it is important to recognize the different hats, mittens, scarves, t-shirts, etc, that we wear . . .  Also that we do not wear them blindly, but question the purpose for why they got put upon.  

So what am I wearing right now?  Wouldn’t some people like to know.  I see myself coming up in a society that lives by the following: the more you make, the more you spend.  I see four year olds that have their own Wii and iTouch.  I know plenty of people, myself included, for whom its okay to spend ten dollars a day at a certain five pointed ‘bucks, and never think to bring in their own coffee mug.  It's really not okay the amount of coffee cups I go through in a year.  I’d like to take off the “over-contributing to pollution” hat, and replace it with the “bring-my-own-cup” cap.  And then there is the overall: grow up, go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, and retire.  And then when it doesn’t go that way, we feel like we aren’t doing “it” right.  My point is, there are things we do every day without question, and I’d like to start waking up to being a total american zombie.

Personally, I know I am spoiled.  I have been given and taken every opportunity.  The american way is that we give our children the freedom of choice.  I love to watch parents negotiate with their kids in a toy store.  “Honey, do you want this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, honey which one do you want?”  As a friend just pointed out to me, she had kids in Cambodia bowing and thanking her for a toothbrush on Christmas.  If all I got on Christmas was a toothbrush, I would cry.  As I sit back and analyze my life, having every choice open has led to a deep feeling of dissatisfaction.  How can I be satisfied with the life that I am living when I know there is a more interesting parallel reality of which I can be living instead, right now?  This is a problem, because it does put a damper on my actual reality.  So I am again taking another choice, but this time forcing myself to stick to it.  And you are my witness.  I am going to place myself into the most bizarre parallel reality that I can come up with at this point, and not allow myself to change my mind.  I hope this settles it. 

This summer I went swimming with a friend.  I am not a very good swimmer.  There is a definite limit of how far I am willing to go.  My friend suggested that we swim across the lake to the cliffs.  I said there was no way.  Then I hesitated.  Wanting to impress, I said that I would give it a shot, but he had to do lifeguard duty just in case.  Overall, I probably swam nearly half a mile.  I don’t usually swim more than two lengths of a pool.  And something profound happened.  I realized that the only thing stopping me are the mental boundaries that I have in place for myself.  Remove them, and there’s no telling how far I can go. 

So I’m taking a job in Vietnam.  I don’t know more than three words in Vietnamese: “hello, goodbye, and very much.”  Thanks Oanh Hong Le, for telling your family you loved them very much at every break in chiropractic school : )  I don’t know anyone in Vietnam.  And I am in anticipation just as much as you are to see how it all turns out.

Thanks to the people who inspired me to do this by making their own plunge.  Your waves have rocked my boat.

A De Rouchey Van Praag

C Carter

T Cartwright


The adventure starts in a month.  Stay tuned!