Safe.

It’s a word I have always felt while living in Vietnam, though it’s a country so foreign to where I grew up. A country where families pile onto motorbikes — some with helmets, many without. A country where rubbish is burnt on the streets and rats roam along telephone wires. A country where my salary as an English teacher surpasses government officials. A country that has been terrorized by the same powerful nation I was born in. A country where fifty years ago women and children were anything but safe.
And yet the locals smile on the street and welcome foreigners like me with open arms.

“We are always colonized, but we never colonize. We only want peace,” a local told my father and I after we visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh. The place was crowded but only silence could be heard.

After seeing the photographs, I couldn’t not write about it. The photographs of dead babies, crying mothers, burnt alive soldiers and deformed children. And yet I felt guilty for wanting to write about this. What right do I have — a privileged western white millennial? It’s not my story to keep or to tell. It’s not my country. But I am human. We are all human and this museum reminded me of that fact more than anything.

What was particularly moving for me was the collection of paintings by children born with birth defects from the agent orange chemicals. The paintings were kids trying to understand why their families could walk and they couldn’t. Why helicopters and army tanks are linked to their identity. Why their paintings were in a museum but other kids’ artwork wasn’t.

The devastating atrocities of the Vietnam War might be felt by tourists for a few hours in the museum, then repressed until the next conversation. They might have taken some holiday photos with army tanks and guns and bought souvenirs. Then it’s time to head home and get back to reality. But what about the ongoing wars around the globe every day? The headlines and statistics that bombard our social media screens everyday. The scary language and fear instilled by papers.

This museum didn’t leave me with hatred towards Americans, but it left me with both love and mourning for the innocent lives lost during this war. I felt love for this country I was lucky to call home for two years.

But we shouldn’t need death, destruction, terror and disabled children to feel this.