---
date: '2024-12-31'
description: and a beginning of a long friendship
id: Mimi
layout: letter
modified: 2026-10-11 21:18:28 GMT-04:00
noindex: true
signature: with kinship and comradery - Aaron
tags:
  - friend
title: to mimi and tuong an
created: '2024-12-31'
published: '2024-12-31'
pageLayout: letter
slug: posts/24/Mimi
permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/posts/24/Mimi.md
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full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt
---
![[posts/images/edward-hopper.webp|Soir Bleu, 1914 by Edward Hopper]]

I’ve been thinking lately about how every social media channel demands a different self, as if each platform
is its own small world. What I’d put on Twitter might be all wrong for Instagram; what I craft on Instagram feels out of place on Facebook.

But there’s a delicate kind of intimacy in our connection, the way we talk as if we already know each other’s tastes,
humor, and quiet insecurities. Perhaps it’s thanks to V, or because we exchange messages in Vietnamese.
Wittgenstein once wrote that language is a game, and that speaking it is “part of an activity, or of a form of life”;[^1] we learn its rules by belonging to a certain family, or
tribe. Speaking Vietnamese puts me in that family, but not speaking it enough, or well, makes me feel
like the game is slipping away from me. Seven years in Canada can dull the mother tongue and, with it,
some piece of my own identity.

My mother once said being Vietnamese lives in how we care for others. I didn’t understand then.
Now I watch you both, how you’ve built this life in the foreign cold, how you opened your door without question
when I needed somewhere to go.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking in English first, having to translate back to
Vietnamese. It’s a betrayal so small you could miss it, like a hairline crack in a family photograph.
But when we’re together, eating, talking about nothing important, I forget to notice which language
I’m using. Maybe that’s what home is, the place where you stop counting your words.

I’m happy you two found each other and that you’re building a beautiful life here. Your companionship is a small refuge from the noise of other people’s expectations. I wish you peace and comfort for the holidays, and I’m already excited for what 2025 holds. And thanks to you, I can still play that language game.

\[^sign\]

[^1]: Ludwig Wittgenstein, _Philosophical Investigations_ (1953), §23: “the term ‘language-_game_’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the _speaking_ of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.”