Its the End of the World As We Know It

I just real­ized… I should really catch up before I leave tomor­row night for Santa Cruz.

But I don’t feel like writ­ing about the last cou­ple of days right now. So instead, I’m going to post about some­thing that came up in con­ver­sa­tion as I was chill­ing with Thu today.

We were talk­ing about how it sucks to be go to wed­dings at our age, because it seems like the adults pick out all the sin­gle kids and go, “So… got a boyfriend/​girlfriend? When’s it gonna be your turn?” And how even our par­ents do it, although a bit more sub­tly. And we talked about how both of us feel like our par­ents would be hap­pier if we mar­ried Viet peo­ple, but it seems like they’d be happy with any­one at this point, as long as we con­tinue the family.

And sud­denly, I remem­bered… in a pre­vi­ous post, I men­tioned a fam­ily friend named Co My Nga, and said that I had an inter­est­ing story about her, but I would write about it later. Well, that later is now.

Co My Nga is a really close fam­ily friend… (Oh, and for the non-​Viets… “Co” is the term for a pater­nal aunt, or it can be for female fam­ily friends close to your par­ents’ age.) Any­way, she was like best friends with my mom and her sis­ters when they were grow­ing up, and she got mar­ried just around the same time as my mom did. Well, she had a kid right after I was born, too. A girl. And she even named her daugh­ter sim­i­lar to my name. (It ends in Tuong, just like mine.) I didn’t remem­ber it (heck, I didn’t remem­ber Co My Nga, I had to ask my mom who she was) since I never took it too seri­ously, but I think it’s kinda been assumed… or maybe you could say “arranged” … that I would marry this girl. (Oh, and she has two other daugh­ters that are the same age as two other cousins as well… how the hell did they plan this?!)

I don’t think I’ve met the daugh­ter before, and the last time I met Co My Nga her­self was when I was like… six, maybe. She unex­pected moved away from my mom’s fam­ily, so I didn’t grow up with Stephanie (that being the daughter’s Amer­i­can name) like they had planned.

But here’s the scary part… at the wed­ding recep­tion (after I had re-​learned who she was and all), Co My Nga was talk­ing to me about my plans for the future, like when I’d be grad­u­at­ing and what I wanted to do after, and I was like, “Yeah, I’m prob­a­bly going to grad­u­ate next year… it’s tak­ing me five because I changed majors…” and she was like, “Oh, well, Stephanie’s grad­u­at­ing next year, too! I think I’m going to take her over to Sacra­mento and visit your par­ents next summer.”

Dun dun dun!

Tags: America, Dinhternet, Family, Friends, Viet