Memory without Pyrotechnics: Vu Tran’s Intervu, Part 2

In December 2010, diaCRITICS managing editor Julie Thi Underhill wrote her first diaCRITICIZE about her dilemmas regarding ‘authentic’ belonging as Vietnamese American of Cham-French and Euro-American descent. She centered her bond with her childhood friend V., who she left anonymous to protect his privacy, lest their middle school conversations haunt him. Two months later, diaCRITICS editor Viet Nguyen sent Julie a note asking if V. was the writer Vu Tran who’d been selected as a 2011 finalist for the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, awarded to foreign-born individuals who have demonstrated outstanding achievement during the early stages of their careers. So Vu Tran is easily decoded from V. Not so clandestine after all. Busted!

Julie then requested the “intervu of all time,”  to continue their middle school tradition of puns, in honor of Vu’s recent accomplishments. Julie adds, “Since he is also the first Vietnamese American artist I ever knew, it also feels appropriate to give mad props to Vu for the inspiration he’s provided me during the twenty five (or so) years since he first awed me with his stories.”

This is part two of two. The first part was published, here on diaCRITICS, on June 6, 2011.

What do you think it means to have recognition as a Vietnamese-American writer, within this society? We do hear about the American war in Việt Nam as being a haunting of the American psyche. What does it mean to have recognition from within this society that’s still struggling over its ambivalence regarding the American war?

Oh god, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know if I’ve thought of it in those terms yet because for me, and this might be naïve, and it might be naïve or it might be this point in my career, but I’m only obsessed with the writing. I only focus on the work, and whether my sentences are good or not. And anytime I get recognition, I’m like, “Oh, you like it because you like the sentences.” I don’t always think about it in terms of, “Well, you’re liking it for political reasons.” I’m fully aware that that has a lot to do with it, but I am so obsessed with the writing of it, the art of it, that I don’t think about the identity politics involved in it, or the mistaken expectations. I don’t think about that. Maybe I should think about it more, I don’t know. But the recognition is good for me automatically, I mean, the thing that I automatically think when someone gives me something like this is, is that, “Oh, you like the way I write.” [Laughs]. I’m not so naïve that I don’t know that it doesn’t have something to do with, oh, he’s a Vietnamese American writer writing about that thing, you know.

Obviously, you wouldn’t be getting the awards and the recognition if you weren’t amazingly talented. So it’s definitely not tokenization, just to clarify. I was wondering, by that question, are you asked to perform acts of reconciliation by writing or being a certain way, as a Vietnamese American writer? Reconciliation for things that haven’t been sorted out yet in society. 

The honest truth of it is, I will only have a good answer for this once my book comes out and I start getting reviews. You know, I’ve done a lot of interviews in the last two or three years, and that stuff does come up. If you’re writing for a newspaper or you’re NPR, or whatever, it’s always nice to have a narrative to kind of apply to your guests. And that has been my narrative. They’ll ask me about how I came here. They’ll asked me how it’s been like growing up. And that’s also the narrative of this foundation [which just gave me the prize.] They’re all about recognizing the immigrant artist or scientist. And that narrative is a nice narrative in the United States, because we like to believe that we’re inclusive, and all those things. I guess there is a reconciliation aspect to it. I don’t know if I’ve experienced it enough yet to be really bothered by it, or to have a commentary. I know it’s there, though. If not for me, then for all the writers like me. It’s definitely there. I just don’t know how to answer that question because I haven’t experienced it directly yet. But in a mild way I have, in those interviews, those questions always come up. I know that it’s what’s most interesting, I think. I am more concerned with starting my career, and any recognition is good. That doesn’t mean I’ll just blindly accept it and not think about it, but all I’m saying is that it’s so hard to kind of like finish your book, and get your foot in the door of this industry, that I haven’t yet had time to really consider those things fully and articulate my own response to it yet.

We can revisit this later after your book’s out, because I just think it would be an interesting thing to resist against, if we go back to the whole, “I’m not going to tell you.”

I never talk about my novel. But it’s apropro here. I have a scene in novel in the second chapter where there’s a Vietnamese character who says to the American character that you Americans like to think that we’re a melting pot and everything gets mixed up and everything. Yeah it gets mixed up, but it’s more like vinegar and water. Eventually different things will go back to the place and the people and the things like it. Which doesn’t mean that we don’t integrate, we obviously integrate. But at the end of the day, though, that melting pot idea is a bit of cliché. People want to belong. They just do, they want to belong. Whether its people who look like them, or think like them, of feel like them, or come from where they come from. People want to belong. And this notion that we can just wondrously and miraculously reconcile everything and to be this melting pot of goodness, just because there are a lot of biracial babies nowadays. That’s wonderful. But I feel the narrative is too tidy sometimes.

How do you think the critical reception of Vietnamese American lit has changed since you first began publishing stories? Do you see change or do you see a lot of the same?

It’s a lot more open in the sense that it’s open for everyone. More open, not completely. There are more diverse voices in contemporary American literature than there ever was. In terms of Vietnamese American writing, there are bigger names. Monique Truong, for example. There are other Vietnamese American writers, but even if you’re a reader that’s one of the only names that everyone knows. The others are still kind of not well known. I don’t know what to think of that. It has to be better now that there are more voices than there were. I’d like to see a Vietnamese American writer reach the status of [Kazuo] Ishiguro, who is not considered a Japanese English writer. He’s just considered one of the best writers out there. I’d like to see a Vietnamese American writer to reach the status of Haruki Murakami, you know, who’s very Japanese but also who’s not.

You’ve gotten a lot of recognition, including an O. Henry. What has really stood out for you along the way as being your true points of encouragement?

I think the O. Henry really opened a lot of doors for me. More than I’d ever thought it would, it really did. I was in Best American Mystery Stories. That helped a lot. I started getting published in a lot of different anthologies. The biggest thing has been the Whiting Writers’ Award. That helped me get a job here at the University of Chicago, which is another big accomplishment for me. I think those are the three or four major ones for me. I sold my book before the Whiting, but I think things like that helped me get my foot in the door in a lot of places. It helped me get job interviews. It definitely helped me get my job here. It put my name out there so people started asking me for stories, you know, things like that.

And the dream of all dreams would be the Pulitzer, I am guessing. 

I don’t know if that’s the dream of all dreams. We’re talking about the pinnacle, like what I would really want. I want the Pulitzer, of course I do. I definitely want the MacArthur Genius Grant. I want all that shit. Trust me, I do. But I would like to be at a certain point in my career where people like Thom Yorke are saying, “Yeah, I read Vu’s novel the other day.” When other artists that I hold up to that kind of esteem are engaging with me on that level, I think that would be what I would like. Because then that means you’ve already won the Pulitzer and the MacArthur. [Laughs]. You’ve reached that level where they can mention you in an interview with like Pitchfork or something, and the readers will know what they are talking about.

When you won the [$50,000] Whiting [Award], I remember thinking, “I’ll bet Vu’s parents are happy he’s a writer now.” I always think of you when I have Vietnamese American students whose parents don’t want them to do anything other than—well, for them, it’s often doctor or lawyer. For you, it was more like running the family business. Do you have any words of wisdom for those Vietnamese American students who are not pursuing art or cultural production when they really want to be, because they have a sense of familial obligation towards recovering whatever the losses were in trying to give the family a good life through immigration? Because you broke away from that expectation and said, “No, I’m actually gonna write.”

The way I would say it is that first of all, art will satisfy you in a way that a good job at a corporation might not always do. Art will satisfy you because you are engaging with something that comes out of you in the truest way. And number two, I think art will help you understand the world better than, I think, any other form. One of the things I always tell my students about why people who read books are always going to be smarter than other people—any book, novel, whatever—is that when you read a book, you are basically engaging with how someone else interprets the world. And when you engage with others interpretations of the world, you inevitably compare it with your own interpretation of the world. And that comparison is how you become smart and more importantly how you become wise. Because the hardest thing in the world is to articulate yourself, you know? The hardest thing in the world is to articulate how you feel. And art helps you do that because you see how other people articulate themselves, whether its through filmmaking, music, painting, or with words. And that is why art makes you wise and makes you smart. And that’s why you should pursue it in any way that you can. Whether it’s a hobby or something professional. And that’s something that making $100,000 working for Lehman Brothers will not necessarily give you. It might, but I don’t think in the same way that a good book, or writing a good book, can.

What are your own strongest motivations to write? What is continuing to motivate you to have this be what you want to do?

There are so many answers to that. One of the answers is, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do and if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t feel like myself. I feel like I would lose my definition of myself if I stopped writing. Because that’s literally—you know this—that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. So that would be a part of it. The other part of it is ego. I want to feel special. I want to feel great. I want to think of myself as accomplishing something great. And for me, writing is the way to do that. And I think the third reason is that I love art in all senses. I love all kinds of art, right? And when I engage with something that is spectacular, the feeling that I get from it. You know what it’s like when you hear a great new song or a great new band, or if you see a great movie. It’s like this overwhelming sense that the world is great. Even if it’s something that was depressing. But if it’s beautiful, it’s just so wonderful, that feeling. And to be able to try to create that, so that someone else can feel that way. That’s as good a motivation if anything, because that takes care of the first two things, you know. It fulfills the ego thing.

Because you feel grateful that you could produce that for someone.

Yeah. But it also legitimizes my idea of myself, that I could do that. Here, I want to read you something real quick. It’s from a story called Carcassonne by William Faulkner. You really have to read it, but I’m just trying to remember this one sentence. It’s about a poet. It’s only about a five page story. But it’s about wanting to be an artist. The story is about being an artist, and wanting to “create something tragical and austere.” And something else. I can’t remember the exact quote, but when I get it I’ll send it to you. [Julie’s update: “I want to perform something bold and tragical and austere”.]

What do you think are the social or political responsibilities, if any, of a creative writer?

I have to agree with Faulkner. I think the artist’s only responsibility is to his art. If there are any other responsibilities that become more important than the art itself, then whatever they were trying to communicate will not come out the way it should. So politics doesn’t even matter if the art is not the most important thing. Hemingway’s leftist books, when people were expecting him to write from that point-of-view, that was when he was at his weakest. I think that’s true. Faulker’s quote is, “I would steal from my mother for my art. Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth more than any number of old ladies.” [Laughs.] “Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth more than any number of old ladies.” I don’t know if I would go that far. But I don’t think he would either. I think he’s trying to make a point. It’s that the art’s paramount.

What do you think the value is, in our society, of the creative writer?

Number one, I think that storytelling—and I know this is my bias with literature and with fiction—but I think storytelling will never die. Whatever form that it is, storytelling will never die. And you always need stories. If it’s just the story you tell to your loved one, at the end of the day, about the day you’ve had. We all need stories. That’s how we also hold onto our past. But the other value, I think, of art and of creative people is to expose people to new ways of seeing the world. And I think creative people are the best at doing that. Corporations aren’t going to do that. They’re not going to show you a new perspective that doesn’t make them money. If the old perspective keeps them making the money they’re making, they’re not going to change that perspective.

The world is always changing. As much as it stays the same, it changes. Contexts change. And creative writers, I think, or creative people, are some of the few people in society who can constantly bring those changes to light. Seeing things in a new way, I think that’s necessary. Otherwise everything would be boring. It wouldn’t just be wrong if you keep on making the same mistakes. It would just be fucking boring.