Twilight Zone

When you were growing up, did you ever feel as though there was another family out there just like yours but living in another dimension? And if you ever met, the space-time continuum would unravel? That's how I've always felt about my uncle's family in Germany who I visited last weekend.

Whenever I say that I have close family in Germany everyone is always confused as to how and why so let me give you some background first. In 1979 my maternal grandfather paid for my mother's entire family to flee Vietnam. Our first stop was to a refugee camp in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia where we waited for our final passage to a western country. My father's brother was able to sponsor my immediate family to America while the rest of my mother's family was only able to get to Germany where they've settled ever since.

Now back to the twilight zone. The similarities between my immediate family and my uncle's family have always been very strange to me. Both families have four children with two girls and two boys. The oldest in both families are girls who were born in Vietnam the same year. The youngest are both boys who are 10+ years younger than the other siblings. We only see each other once every 5 years or so but it's amazing to me that although we grew up in different countries on different continents, we are so much the same. We instinctively do the same duties in our parents' homes, we were forced to do the same embarassing dances as kids, we enjoy the same strange smelly food, and we are rooted in the same traditions. I am really surprised that both sets of kids managed to grow up more Vietnamese than German or American.

The only issue with being so similar is that when we do meet up, instead of unraveling the space-time continuum, we break the Geneva peace agreements. Being this much alike makes it very easy for our parents to spar against each other using us as weapons. It's a bit sad to watch them go at it so I try to stay as far away from the battlegrounds as I possibly can. Therefore, going to my uncle's house alone for the weekend completely unarmed was a little naive. I met my uncle's barage of how is my career going, how many homes have I purchased, why did I spend so little time in school compared to his kids. It is nice to see though that my cousins and I haven't gotten as caught up in the mess at the adults have. We still find excuses to sneak out of the house to go downtown for a drink and some fun.

In the end I made it back to London fairly unscathed and this visit meant that I don't have to go back for another 5 years.