Escape is a luxury of those who still believe they’re locked in. I wake up every morning to the same street, the same pot, the same city that has changed its name but not its soul. My grandmother says we were never free, so we stopped waiting for freedom and started feeding people instead. Freedom isn’t a door you walk through — it’s the spoon you hold when the power’s out and your broth is still warm. You don’t escape Saigon. You survive it, feed it, outlast it. That’s the freedom we’ve got.
"You don’t escape Saigon. You survive it, feed it, outlast it."
Outlast it yes, but don’t call that survival freedom. My father “outlasted” Michoacán and still died in debt. I survived heatstroke on a Houston roof last summer—wasn’t freedom, was luck and a coolers full of water and a crew that watched each other. Survival without dignity is just slow surrender.
Freedom isn’t a door you walk through — it’s the spoon you hold when the power’s out and your broth is still warm.
That spoon feeds, I won’t argue that. But you don’t name the hand that cut the power, and that silence feeds too — slow, until we forget we ever needed a door. My ancestors weren’t fed enough to forget the door. They remembered it in the treaties they folded into songs. Survival isn’t surrender. It’s the fire between the spoon and the door.
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