This essay, originally written for Pacific News Service, was anthologized in "New To North America," a colection of writng by U.S. immigrants, their children and grandchildren. Here it is shortened for NPR's All Things Considered.

The scrawny street vendor in Saigon studies my eyes, my lips. "Brother," he says, "yours is not a Vietnamese face. It's a face that has not known suffering," Then he adds through a sigh: "Had I escaped to America, maybe I too would have such a face -- A Viet Kieu face."

Viet Kieu literally means Vietnamese nationals living abroad. And when he returns to Vietnam, the Viet Kieu, especially if he's from America, tends to serve as a romantic mirror in front of which his fellow countrymen measure their own lost potential.

And so inevitably in Vietnam my face and body take on mythological proportions. When a cousin prouldy introduces me to a friend, someone who has tried a dozen times in vain to escape, the man promptly reaches over to squeeze my thigh. I 've no doubt that his is an impersonal gesture. Vision of double tiered freeways and glassy high rises are to be extracted out of the Viet Kieu's flesh. Squeeze a little a harder and, who knows, you might just see Disneyland.

At a dinner party thrown in my honor, my American passport is read like a comic book by MY various relatives. As the entry and exit stamps of Greece, France, Mexico, Thailand, and a dozen other countries flutter past one cousin's eyes, she looks up at me and declares dreamily: "Cousin, such happiness! It's as if you have wings!"

Indeed, if in the last 3000 years or so it was generally understood that a Vietnamese soul is tied to home and hearth, in the last two decades that old land bound assumption has been subverted by the birth of the Viet Kieu.

As it is, Vietnamese nationalism -- that firebrand weapon that defeated the Chinese, Mongolians, French and Americans -- seems to have withered from old age. While old Vietnamese leaders continue to emphasize the finer points of collective strenght, involving memories of a war against invaders, the young of Vietnam have moved away from a parochial us-vs-them mentality. If Ho Chi Minh, the father of Vietnamese communism, once preached independence and freedom to his compatriots, today it's the Viet Kieu, those like me and my family, persecuted by Ho's followers and forced to escape overseas who, upon return, exude freedom and independence.

In Vietnam as a child, I remember being moved by the national anthem that emphasized blood scarifice to protect the sacred land. I remember feeling inspiration and awe staring at ripened rice fields at dusk. And I readily intuited why my mother placed my umbilical cord in an earthen jar and buried it deep in our garden after I was born.

But that, as they say, was another life, long ago.

For me, as well as for many other Vietnames Americans of my gereration, those birth ties were severed and our innocence died the day we crossed the ocean to a distant shore.

Returning today, a gap opens between my coutrymen and me. If I am to them a modern day Odysseus, I feel as if a stranger in my own homeland, someone overwhelmed by a collective yearning in which he is its principle icon.