The conversation usually begins this way: "Are you from Vietnam?"

"Yes."

"It's such a beautiful country. My (wife/husband/significant other/friend) and I were there last (year/month/week). The food was unbelievable. The people were so nice. And everything was so cheap ..."

"Um. That's what I've heard."

"So you haven't been back?"

"No."

Sometimes I follow up my no with an explanation: "I just haven't had the (time/money/emotional ballast) to make the journey."

My explanation is always brief and never adequate, but the travelers are quickly satisfied. They breathe a little easier. The lines of confusion around their eyes soften. I think, for them, hearing that initial, unvarnished no is as perplexing as encountering an American child who is not excited at the prospect of going to Disneyland. The travelers then proceed to share with me their tales of a vacation paradise: of a land that they—depending on their age—have come to see in a different light or for the first time; of a people whom they admire for a lack of anger toward America, or an openness toward all things American, or both.

More often, though, I allow my no to sit in between the travelers and me like a boulder, an impasse meant to strand words and experiences, to swerve the conversation down another road toward another country. To Italy, perhaps. That country I've been to twice in less than three years. Or how about Spain? I've visited there as well. It's such a beautiful country. The food was unbelievable. The people were so nice. And everything was so cheap.

It's true that if I met you at a dinner party or on a plane the last place I would want to go with you, conversationally, is Vietnam. It's because I'm too often dragged there, politely but insistently, by people who barely know me but who know all about the country where I was born and where I had lived during the first six years of my life. I am now 35 years old, which means I have spent more than three-quarters of my life away from that S-curve stretch of land that I bear on my body like a tattoo.

If Vietnam is a tattoo, then I would prefer to think of it as an S that spans the hollow between my breasts or that hooks around my belly button, a beautiful green dragon that I placed there all those years ago, my secret scar to keep.

The reality is that Vietnam is an S on my forehead, an invitation for anyone to come along and comment on that country's evolving role on the world stage. The S is the start of a public discourse. I am, however, no Vietnam expert. I can barely hold a conversation in its language.

I don't remember the last time I dreamed in Vietnamese, the truest indicator that a language belongs to you and you to it. I have a spotty picture of the country's history. I have even less knowledge of its present conditions. I have not been back to Vietnam since April 1975. Above all, I am, if not angered, then still pained by a war that the land of my birth waged against itself. A "civil war" is one of the most galling oxymorons in the English language. I believe, as with all wars, that no one won, least of all the Vietnamese. I am a relic, unable and unwilling, unlike many of the Vietnamese in Vietnam (if I am to believe the accounts of travelers whom I have met) to move past this sad point.

Remember, I am no Vietnam expert. I am just a one-and-a-half-generation Vietnamese-American novelist, a peddler of fiction, who has not made the archetypal journey back to the land of her birth. I can offer you flowery words about that choice, but in the end it comes down to my inability to forgive and to forget. Corruption; greed; lust for power; domination replacing freedom as a guiding principle and goal; brothers fighting brothers; mothers giving birth to children who grow up to kill one another. Whom do I accuse of these crimes? My own flesh and blood. If this useless violence is my history, a madness that lurks in my gene pool, a propensity that might again show itself, I am not eager to travel back to its—and my—place of origin.

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