Sonny Le wins a prize in our subscriber drive!

diaCRITICS wants to add 100 new subscribers! The 25th, 50th, 75th, and 100th subscribers (and those who referred them) get their pick of prizes. Sonny Le is our 50th subscriber and has chosen a DVD of Minh Nguyen-Vo’s acclaimed film Buffalo Boy We‘re a little late getting this information posted, and we have close to 60 new subscribers, so please keep signing up via the email link or the networked blogs option on the right. And if you want to refer people and are on networked blogs, you can invite all your friends on Facebook to join via networked blogs!

A little more information about Sonny Le  comes below.

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Buffalo Boy 
(DVD signed by director Minh-Nguyen Vo). Set in 1930s southern Vietnam, this powerful coming-of-age tale is a richly textured reflection on the rhythms of daily life. The flooded landscape serves as backdrop for the mythic story of a relationship between a father and son, the cycles of life, and the inescapable flow of all things. Vietnam’s official submission to the 2006 Academy Awards.


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Where are you from?

Born & raised in Tân Châu, a small county-seat town on the Tiền Giang of the Mekong Delta, about 30 minutes from Cambodia.

Tell us something else about yourself.

Left Viet Nam as a boat person in 1980, spent two years in refugee camps in Singapore and Indonesia, respectively. Came to the U.S. at the end of 1981 and resettled in the San Francisco Bay where it has been home ever since.

What do you do?

Making a living in media and public relations, but began professional career as a social worker helping refugees and immigrants from Afghanistan, Russia, China and other countries, as well as Viet Nam, to negotiate and adjust to the disorientation of post-resettlement life, which was not unlike what I had once gone through myself. I went on to spend about 15 years in the cultural arts — producing, curating and managing a couple of Pan-Asian cultural arts organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 Do you have a favorite Vietnamese or Vietnamese diasporic work of art? If so, tell us about it.

Honestly, the only “work of art” by a Vietnamese abroad that I truly enjoyed and appreciated was Monique Truong’s “The Book of Salt.” I actually read it cover to cover. After over a decade in the arts, I had seen my share of works by break-out artists and performers, as well as those from the newly arrived immigrant communities. And here was Monique, her first book, a total departure from the typical first-person narrative from an immigrant exploring the new landscape while in search of racial ethnic identity or sexuality or personal politics.

“The Book of Salt” was funny, well-written, set in the past, yet familiar, and employed brilliant literary devices. How refreshing.

Unfortunately, as I write more and more, I find myself relying upon the above-mentioned tired old clichés — an outsider looking at the world and current events through the racial ethnic identity and national origin prism. Monique, please get me out of this dreaded purgatory.

 Anything else we should know about you?

I believe I am the first person of Vietnamese descent to have been to the Arctic Circle or at least in the Eskimo village of Noorvik, which is located 30 miles above the circle in the Bering Seas. As the regional spokesperson of the US Census Bureau, I accompanied the Bureau’s director to conduct the “first count” in the once-a-decade headcount or census, which this past year took place in Noorvik, where the natives are known as Inupik.

Though I did not work in Hollywood and it was short-lived, I was responsible for organizing the casting call for Oliver Stone’s movie “Heaven & Earth,” which we screened about 2,500 people in one and a half day in San Francisco and San Jose.  It was an uncredited job as a local casting director. I also worked on Wayne Wang’s “The Joy Club Club” and as credited casting director of Trinh Thi Minh-Ha’s “The Story of Kieu,” a modern adaptation and re-imagining of Nguyen Du’s classic, “Kieu.”

Selena, Cam Ly, Quoc Dai, Leonard Cohen, Thanh Tuyen, Blondie, Khanh Ly, Jimmy Cliff, Trinh Cong Son, Phi Nhung, Souad Massi,Che Linh, The Beattles, Manu Chao, Diana Krall, New Order, Van Khanh, Marisa Monte, among others, coexist harmoniously in my musical universe.

Read Sonny’s blog at: www.25hawkinsroad.blogspot.com

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1 COMMENT

  1. Yes, the outsider thing is not only old but naive. Who isn’t an outsider, who doesn’t have split allegiances, what in the world are most diasporic authors working in foreign languages referring to as Vietnamese? Taste is funny, though, so unpredictably idiosyncratic in prospect, so obviously determined in retrospect. I feel about Monique as I do towards her Gertrude, will-wishing but uninterested. We’re all Yalies, involved in Paris and modernism and so on. My guys are Nguyen Ngoc Ngan and Linh Dinh, writing from a solid grasp of Viet Nam about the big world, which they live and work in.

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