Paper Walls and Glass Ceilings
Welcome to the Refractions Series, where we explore the intersection of tradition and modernity, culture and technology, through a Vietnamese lens. Each essay in this collection sheds light on the way we navigate identity in a globalized world, from the roots of our heritage to the far-reaching influence of technology. For more essays in the series, visit the Refractions page.
In nearly every Vietnamese household I recall from childhood, there were paper walls — thin, almost translucent barriers meant to divide space, but never truly shield sound or spirit. Behind them, children studied under dim lights, parents murmured arguments, grandparents whispered prayers. Everything was overheard, absorbed — fostering a raw intimacy born of unavoidable closeness, even if no one ever spoke directly of it.
Paper walls teach you exquisite restraint. You learn, instinctively, to lower your voice, to mask turmoil, to fold personal ambition into something small and quiet. But step outside those walls — into the glare of school, the clamor of the market, the vastness abroad — and a different demand echo back: ambition is oxygen. The urgent need to rise, to become something bigger, sharper, richer, louder.
We’ve built gleaming cities on that hunger. We’ve propelled our children through relentless international exams and across borders. We’ve vaulted from bicycles to luxury cars in the span of a single generation. And yet — beneath the shine, something still feels thin. Brittle. Like stretched paper about to tear.
This ambition isn’t entirely foreign. Drive runs deep in our veins. But sometimes, its modern dialect feels borrowed. It speaks fluent English, rattles off global tech jargon. It moves at breakneck speed, impatient, almost desperate — as if trying to outrun the long shadow of our history. And perhaps it is.
I’ve seen the cost etched in worried lines:
Young people, adrift, unable to share the landscape of their inner lives with grandparents who speak only the language of the past.
Parents, bewildered by the quiet anxieties shadowing children fluent in global trends, but lost for words at the family altar.
An elite class, ascending rapidly — sometimes forgetting the texture of the earth their roots sprang from.
We celebrate breaking glass ceilings, reaching for new heights — yes. It’s necessary, this upward climb. But what if, in our haste, we’re also tearing through those fragile paper walls that once held the messy, vulnerable essence of us together? That once made us undeniably human?
Progress matters profoundly. Growth is essential for survival. But modernity, when it demands the erasure of memory as its price, becomes a hollow victory — a form of profound self-loss.
Surely, there must be a way to surge forward without abandoning the vital poetics of where we came from —
The bittersweet cadence of folk songs carried across generations.
The deep patience learned in stillness and observation.
The ingrained belief that community well-being whispers at least as loudly as individual profit.
To be Vietnamese, here, now, seems to be a constant, precarious balancing act:
To hold a pulsing smartphone in one hand, and a faded, treasured family photo in the other.
To navigate the world in fluent code-switches, and still feel the magnetic tug of home.
To build taller, stronger walls against the storm — but to consciously remember, and perhaps even cherish, what was once held together, however imperfectly, with only paper.
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