Cathy Linh Che: Why don’t you start first? Is that okay?

Ha Dinh: Yes, I’m fine with that.

CLC: Tell me a little bit about yourself and your inspiration for your children’s book.

HD: My name is Ha Dinh, and I live in Texas. I’ve been an elementary teacher for 16 years, and I’m Vietnamese American. I came to America in 1989 as a refugee with my family. We left Vietnam, and we lived in a Philippine refugee camp. After ten months, we were sponsored by Catholic Charities. We moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where I lived most of my life. I went to school, graduated, and moved down to Texas to be with my husband. I’m the founder of Happy Days in First Grade teaching blog, where I hope to inspire teachers all around the world with fun and engaging hands-on activities. And I’m also the author of Where Wildflowers Grow!

CLC: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing all of your history. Can you talk a little bit more about your inspiration for your children’s book? Congratulations!

HD: Thank you so much. So I’ve always had this story in my heart. I left the refugee camp when I was five years old, and I just remember glimpses of things that happened at the camp that stayed with me. And one of those memories that stayed with me was when we left the camp on departure day. I witnessed how much my siblings struggled with leaving camp because of the relationships and friendships that they built, how loved they were loved by their friends, and how that love was reciprocated. I never felt like I lost anything major in my life when I was at camp, so their feelings were a little foreign to me. I grieved the fact that we just kept moving. In my mind, we just kept moving. I just didn’t really understand why. Everyone was telling me that America is great. I had no understanding of what America was. I just understood that it was better because that’s what everybody was telling me. And so I just went along and just kept those memories in my heart until when I came to America.

The first time I ever felt like I lost someone was when my best friend in first grade moved to Massachusetts. Witnessing her family moving their boxes into the truck and then leaving, made me feel like the whole world was just going to shatter. I was like, I get it. Those feelings stayed with me, and I understood now what it means to lose friends and lose someone that you love so much so suddenly. You have no control over it. Growing up in the Southside in Louisville, Kentucky, where almost all of us were refugees, I didn’t feel like my story was unique. Special but not unique. Everyone just seemed to have the same experiences, but as I grew up and as I shared my story of how I came to America, it seemed to be very fascinating to other people. And then I knew that writing was the path for me, in addition to being a teacher, to inspire children in a different way.

So I just kept it all in my heart and went on and pursued my career in education. I had my bachelor’s in English and got my master’s in the art of teaching elementary education, with the understanding that one day I will eventually go back to writing. I just didn’t know when. When I started having my own children, and then when I lost my mom, it all dawned on me that the moment was now. If I didn’t document and write down these memories for my own children, they, too, would not have the opportunity to understand where I came from, how we got here, and our family history. I also wanted the kids who came to America, all the kids who lived in our apartment complex, all the kids I grew up with, all the Vietnamese American children I went to school with and went to church with, to be reflected too. I felt like this was our moment. It was our moment to share our stories and be proud of where we came from and how we got here, so then the next generation can also feel proud of the journey that we’ve all taken to be here.

CLC: What a moving story. It sounds like this story was motivated with you having an eye towards the next generation. You had this experience as a five-year-old, and without your mother to tell that story to your kids, you had to be that person. Does that sound accurate?

HD: When I lost her, I just kept coming back to the pictures of when we were in the refugee camp and when we first came over to America. It just became so apparent and so important to me that these memories aren’t lost. This time, this special setting, and this story of how many people came together to help us to lay down the groundwork for this future that we didn’t even know could be possible. I didn’t want all the hard work to be in vain and be lost in history. This was really the life story that I always wanted to write. I finally got to write it, aso it’s really a dream come true. And I feel like it’s taken me full circle.

CLC: I think children’s books are an amazing way to help personal and political histories have a new life. You impart this story so that your kids will have a sense of where they came from.

HD: Growing up, I always heard my mom and dad talk about the war through their eyes. The books that I encountered at the library and at my school were always from the perspective of adults. It never accounted for how the war affected children. It affected us so much and still affects us today. We are still unpacking all of this history and family trauma. We’re unpacking for ourselves and we’re unpacking for our family. And we’re helping our aging parents unpack all of the things that they had experienced but didn’t have the space to feel to talk about because life was so busy. It was like, we kept on moving, kept on moving, chasing that American Dream. They never had time to sit down and unpack things so that they could actually move on.

CLC: You mentioned trauma. This is a very different story from the ones I’ve read by Vietnamese American authors about refugee camps. This story is rooted primarily in joy. Even if there is the sadness of leaving, the vast majority of the story is about the joyful friendships that were formed in the refugee camps. Was this a conscious decision to focus on joy rather than sadness and melancholy, which often are big parts of the Vietnamese American experience?

HD: When I was querying this story for agents, the one feedback I always got was that this is a very different take on the refugee experience. When we think of refugee camps, we think of these images from TV, of children crying. That’s not to discount the trauma that comes with being a refugee, but this is a different perspective. That’s why it was so important for me to write it from a child’s perspective and to write in a way that honors this place and time that we don’t usually hear of. Even with the traumas of war, children will try their best to find joy and happiness. That’s their way of coping. For them, it’s a bridge for finding hope and happiness for the future. 

For the young character in my book, life in Vietnam was really hard. But at the refugee camp, everybody was together. Almost everything was given and passed out. We stood in line to get our food. Mom and dad didn’t have to hustle as much. They weren’t as stressed out. We all got to go to English classes. My parents got to go to cultural and career orientations and things like that. Even though we had limited electricity at night, and it was dim in the bunkhouse, we were happy. We would sing and enjoy being together and with the hope of one day having our turn to come to America. That hope carried us through. As a child, I remembered that this was the most important thing, which was family. Everybody is happy, everybody is safe, and everybody seems to be very hopeful. I wanted to really focus on that hope and that joy found at camp and really bring that to wherever we were going next.

CLC: My parents were also refugees in the Philippines, but at a different time in 1975 and 1976. My friend the filmmaker Christopher Radcliff and I created a video installation called Appcalips about their lives as refugees, which includes information about how they were hired to play extras in the film Apocalypse Now. The audience often expects the piece to say: This is so exploitative; the parents must be doubly traumatized. But that is not the story they tell. They tell me that they were very bored in the refugee camp and that they met a lot of friends. Filming was quite fun. My own expectations about what a refugee experience must be is oftentimes overturned by first-person narratives. What do you hope that readers, young and old, will gain after reading your book?

HD: I hope that the younger generation will look at this book and have an appreciation of how we all came to America. My goal is to use this book as a platform for and a bridge for families to start having these conversations about their own journeys. Was it sad? Was it hopeful? Even if you’re not from the Vietnamese American community, there’s so much to learn from this. My students read this at my book launch with me, and they just loved it so much. They’re reading it on Youtube. I’m sure they’re looping it on Youtube. That’s why we’re getting so many views (laughs). 

But their parents and my friends who have children have reached out and said, “tTank you so much for this book because it really opened their eyes. They’re asking really important questions, like, “What are refugees? Why is she so sad leaving, but her parents are so happy? What is it in America that they’re coming for? Why did they leave Vietnam?” This book is opening up so many opportunities for families to have such important conversations with each other. And so that’s what I’m really grateful for. And it’s important to see my own culture reflected. We’re taking the power back. We’re using our own power to help the next generation see themselves and feel reflected.

CLC: Thank you. That’s so beautiful.

HD: Is it okay that I ask you some questions now?

CLC: Yes.

HD: Can you tell us about yourself and your inspiration for your book?

CLC: My name is Cathy Linh Che, and I’m the co-author of An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History. I was born in Los Angeles. I grew up in a very diverse, multiracial neighborhood alongside a lot of Vietnamese refugees who had settled in Northeast LA. A touchstone connecting us is that I also grew up in a Catholic church. In Vietnamese, it’s Thiếu Nhi Thánh Thể, which translates as the Vietnamese Eucharistic Youth Society.

HD: It’s now “movement,” not “society” (laughs).

CLC: Starting at age 7, I grew up in that community. I was đoàn trưởng, president of the Long Beach chapter until I was 27. I grew up in Highland Park and moved to Long Beach when I was 10. There were also a lot of Vietnamese people. Highland Park was Mexican and Salvadoran American. And Long Beach was mixed in terms of Asian Americans: Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, Pacific Islanders. There’s an array of Black folks as well. I grew up surrounded by lots of racial diversity. Even though my teachers read us multicultural literature, I didn’t learn very much about Asian American history. The only thing that I learned was the important history of the Japanese incarceration camps.

We were taught this part of history mainly because of activism during post-Japanese American Incarceration. Asian American activists demanded the addition of Japanese American incarceration to the curriculum. That is inspiring. I also wish that I could have learned more Asian American history. 

In my 30s, I became the executive director at Kundiman, which is an organization that nurtures Asian American writers. I learned how Asian American literature has its roots within the Asian American movement. I also learned about how the Vietnam War was a catalyst for Asian American organizing in the United States. I learned about the other moments of solidarities with other communities of color. Growing up, I learned about Cesar Chavez, but not Dolores Huerta who is a woman, or Larry Itliong, a Filipino American labor rights activist, who played an integral part in the victories achieved by the United Farm Workers of America.

Learning this history helped me find a place within the American narrative that was rooted much more in solidarity. It gave me a clearer sense of myself as a creative writer. Some of our first Asian American literature is inscribed on the walls of Angel Island, a detention center for Asian immigrants. The earliest publications of Asian American literature included poetry folios from writers of the Asian American movement. In 1968, student activists were the ones who came up with the name “Asian American.” All of this gave me a new narrative with which I could understand myself and my writing. 

I also read the book The ABCs of Black History by Rio Cortez. She’s a poet, too. That inspired me to write an Asian American history book that was accessible to children and to the adults reading to them. 

HD: I completely agree. Accessibility was one of the reasons that I was adamant about keeping this as a picture book. When I queried this as a picture book, there were agents who asked if I wanted to make this into a middle-grade book, like Inside Out, and Back Again? I love Thanhha Lai so much, but I wanted this to be in the picture book space so that it is accessible to the little ones because those are the ones I work closely with. I wanted to write a book that I could bring into my classroom and say, “Let me show you something.” I wanted something inviting. It’s easier to digest, easier to absorb, and easier for the children to relate toward their own lives. I don’t want to go off-course, but did you notice Thiếu Nhi Thánh Thể in my book?

CLC: Yes, at the end, you have pictures of Thiếu Nhi Thánh Thể.

HD: It’s also in the story itself. On the day they’re moving, my wonderful illustrator Bao Luu originally had the siblings folding their shirts. Instead, I asked to have them hold their khăn instead. It’s these scarves that members of the Vietnamese Eucharistic Youth Society wear, which tells you their age-group. My brother is holding a blue khăng for thiếu nhi, and my sister is holding the yellow khăng for nghĩa sĩ. My sisters actually helped start the first chapter in Louisville, Kentucky. 

CLC: Wow, legends! (laughs)

HD: The interesting story is that they joined Thiếu Nhi Thánh Thể at camp. At the time, we were not Catholics. My parents were Buddhists, just by culture and tradition. They didn’t really practice any faith one way or the other. But my mom did pray. Every day she would walk past a church and she would pray to Mary. She said if we ever get a chance to go to America, she would encourage us to follow the faith. So, when we came to camp, there was Thiếu Nhi Thánh Thể, and my siblings started playing with those kids. They wanted to join Thiếu Nhi Thánh Thể, and the kids said, okay, but you have to be Catholic. So they went home and said, “Mom, Dad, we want to be Catholic.” And my mom said, “Yes, if this is something that you choose for yourself, and that you’ve decided to be faithful to this for the rest of your life. If yes, we encourage that.” So my older siblings were baptized at camp. My other sister and I didn’t get baptized until we were in Louisville, Kentucky. 

So many rich and wonderful memories of camp were through things they did with their friends through Thiếu Nhi. I also met my husband through Thiếu Nhi, and our whole family is in Thiếu Nhi. I love that you and I have that connection. It shows how faith intertwines with culture and intertwines with history, with how our community was built, and how I grew up in that community. I wanted to represent all of these things. Even though this is just a picture book, I tried to pull in all aspects of my life, everyone who has ever impacted me, or influenced me to become the person that I am, and so I knew I had to include Thiếu Nhi.

CLC: That’s so fascinating. My brothers and their partners were also in Thiếu Nhi, and they had met each other at younger stages in their lives. That’s what I love about your book. There’s something very specific. Not every person who comes to the U.S. will have come through Thiếu Nhi, but you thought to yourself, This is my story, so I want to imbue it with that.

HD: And I don’t know if there will be another opportunity to bring in Thiếu Nhi because it’s so specific! I like to put Easter Eggs in my stories. My illustrator was so gracious. When I was reading your book, I was fascinated. I’ve never come across a book like that, just learning about history in this impactful but simplified way. Seeing refugees and immigrants on the very first page. And seeing that solidarity. It’s not a regular A-to-Z when you would assume that, like, “K” would be for “Korean” or “V” for “Vietnamese.” It’s not that. You go deep. You make a conscious decision to not just feature, but educate. Can you talk more about that process? How did you choose what was going into your book?

CLC: Thank you so much. It means a lot to me that as an educator in the first grade space for sixteen years, you read my book and commented on it so positively. 

My co writer Kyle Lucia Wu and I felt very strongly that we wanted to represent Asian America as widely and fully as we can. Americans often have an image of what Asian American is: upper middle to upper class, East Asian professionals. But that’s not all of us. That’s certainly not my story. 

Though the Asian American Movement is a political story, I connect personally to it, too. The movement originated in California, where I was born and raised. I’m very proud of being from California, and I’m proud of being born with this as my root. 

Asian Americans are indebted to the civil rights movements that arose during that time. It is very entwined with the Black Power movement, very entwined with the civil rights movement, very entwined with the anti Vietnam War movement, with the women’s liberation movement, with disability rights, and gay rights. All of the different intersections that we are thinking about today, in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and disability, were present and demanding greater equity about fifty years ago, during the time when my parents were living in Vietnam and experiencing the imperialist power grab by the United States. And not just by the United States, but all of the world players involved. We wanted to begin with civil rights and our indebtedness to Black civil rights leaders and move through the recognition that there are a lot of Asian American identities that have been historically excluded, or even buried. We wanted to move spaces that have not been written about into the center.

We wanted to highlight the origin story of the Asian American movement, a coalitional, solidarity-based movement that could not have existed without the leadership of civil rights leaders across the country. 

The book calls for inclusivity and solidarity, especially because Asian Americans are used as a wedge group. The model minority narrative is everywhere you look, and that’s a big part of what we were trying to undo. The book was born from our hunger to learn what had not been available to us. We wanted to share what we had been able to learn along the way. Obviously, there’s so much that we can still learn, but we’re hoping that it is the beginning of something that other people will step into. 

HD: Yes, that’s what I appreciated from reading this. It’s the understanding that so many communities worked so hard to create what we know of as Asian America today. There wasn’t always this coalition or this self-recognition of a collective group of people. Now there is. For our children, they’re used to hearing “Asian American” without understanding that this was not a thing not so long ago. If it weren’t for these amazing people who led the way and risked their lives, we wouldn’t have this right now.

CLC: Yes.

HD: What is the most important thing that you’ve learned from your parents’ generation?

CLC: I learned about the power of story. My parents’ education had been interrupted, primarily, by the war. My mom went up to 6th grade before her schoolhouse was destroyed. My dad graduated high school, but his graduation was interrupted from when he was ten to fourteen by bombs from French fighter planes and the battle between French and Japanese forces. My parents aren’t usually considered writers or artists. But when we’re around the dinner table, or when I’m cooking or watching TV with them, or at any point in our domestic lives, my parents are telling me about their lives in Vietnam and during the refugee camp and the aftermath. They’re amazing storytellers, and they’re amazing storytellers together. It taught me about the power of story for giving me a sense of myself and the power of a collective story. It is much fuller to have two or more people providing different perspectives. 

This book was co-written with my co-worker Kyle Lucia Wu. I’m the daughter of Vietnamese refugees. Kyle is a biracial Chinese American whose dad is from a small town in New Jersey. The illustrator is Kavita Ramchandran, an Indian American woman who grew up in India. So we have lived through very different experiences. We’re all coming together to create a larger weave. The proliferation of Vietnamese American literature has arisen with our community’s knowledge of English and access to publishing houses, which my parents’ generation did not have.

The power of language, in shaping my sense of who I am and my sense of having a place, was imparted by that generation. Whenever I go to Vietnam, I’m very moved. I’m very struck by the power of collective storytelling. I went to Vietnam recently just to visit my auntie. I hadn’t been back in seven years. I attended a đám giỗ to celebrate my grandma’s passing. Those are annual events where you pass stories along to different generations. You meet new members of the family. There’s an eight month old you didn’t know before who gets introduced. I am somebody who many people have not met before, but I get introduced into the fold, so I become part of this collective family story that really has a long line extending backwards. With oral storytelling, a person doesn’t end with their death. They live on. They live on through our gathering spaces. You sit down, you eat, you drink beer. But the food sharing becomes like a big part of this communal storytelling experience that feels very much like my writer’s origin story.

HD: I can totally relate to that. At every opportunity, my parents would say, “Back in Vietnam…” That was how our conversations started. I was like, “No, not again. It’s the same story.” But the older I got, the more I thought, yes, the same story, but there’s something new this time. When you’re growing up, you just don’t think that it’s all that important. But then you realize, oh my goodness, they are truly passing down history to us. And time is of the essence. Nothing lasts forever. And the only way for us to understand where we came from and continue this tradition of passing down stories is to make a conscious decision every time we’re together. One thing I’ve learned from my parents is resilience. I think that that shows in the story: no matter what the circumstances are, we’ll just keep moving forward. 

My dad didn’t finish school. He stopped in 6th grade. The hardship of living in Vietnam with a single mom meant he had to sell toys in the street to help his family. My mom didn’t have the opportunity of a formal education. She grew up in a village and she would walk to her teacher’s house with a bag of rice as payment to learn how to read. The thing that’s helped me keep going, like you mentioned, is this importance of access. We have access to language and systems that were invisible to us when we came to America- liike the publishing world. I would have never imagined that one day, I would also be part of the publishing industry. I went to the library. I saw books. I held books. I loved books. I just didn’t know how to break into this world. We just knew that we needed to go to school. You just go to school and do your best. That’s going to help open doors. One of these days, I would knock on that door and see where that would take me. It’s amazing that there’s this proliferation of books coming out now, and that I can connect with so many Vietnamese American authors. For the longest time, I felt, “Where do I go with this? Who wants to take this story? Who would take a gamble on it?” But the Asian Americans who came before us showed that the general public does want to read these diverse stories. There is a hunger and a need for it. 

CLC: How did you find a home for your book? I was curious since I think there might be other people who have a children’s book in their hearts and would love to write one.

HD: I have this background in education and seem to always have this need to explain things (laughs). I have something on my blog called the “Author Life” series on how I got started in the industry. For me, it’s always about sharing knowledge and helping others find their path. It’s wild to me because I’ve carried this story in my heart for the longest time. Like, “I have a story about being a refugee in the Philippines. Does anybody care?” I was yelling out little bits, not knowing if anyone would ever care in this world. But when my mom passed away, it felt like it was now or never. So I gave myself one year because, being a mom and teacher and small business owner, my life is already super busy. Also, if I didn’t give myself a time limit, I don’t think my husband would be able to deal with me, because that’s all I would ever talk about.

So I did a lot of Googling and research, and I came across this publishing house. I submitted my story, and the publisher was very kind, and said that she really loved the story, but it wasn’t ready. She recommended me to enter this contest to be matched with a mentored author. On a whim, I did it. I was matched with an author who really helped me flesh out my story and polish it. I joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. On their Facebook page, I learned about this pitch contest on Twitter. So I worked on my pitch, and right before I went to school, I did the sign of the cross and was like, “Lord, if this is meant to be, let me know.” So I tweeted it and went to work. And then I started getting likes from agents who wanted to see my story. I received some passes and I took all of the feedback and just kept working on the story. Then one of the agents who liked the story, who is my agent now, signed me on. From there, we subbed the story. And the editor who ended up buying my book from auction was one that I met through the pitch contest. The path of how this book came to be was that every hand it fell into belonged to people who really loved it, and loved it for what it is, and not wanting to change it according to their perception of what it should be. They took the story as a picture book, and as a story of how people actually enjoyed living in the refugee camp. I feel grateful to have been a part of this journey.

CLC: Thanks so much for sharing that.  It’s a story of real heart and passion, and you’re not going to quit. Also, what I really love is there’s a lot of humility because along the way, there was rejection.

HD: There’s so much rejection in publishing. 

CLC: But also flags, if you look in the right place, that you’re on the right track. So, congratulations.

HD: One of the things I learned from publishing is that rejection is protection. When things fell through and I was rejected, I was like, no more, I’m done. But then I have to remind myself that it wasn’t a good fit, and it will be a good fit somewhere else. What was your process like in publishing this book?

CLC: Well, I never thought I would be an author. I loved writing, but publishing was what other people did. I like the architecture of poems together in a book, but to publish it—was that something I’m allowed to do? I was a school teacher, teaching 9th–12th grade at a public school. Kudos to teachers because it’s exhausting. Even as it’s rewarding, it’s depleting in different ways. So I ran off to an MFA program to study poetry some more. That’s when I learned how to send my book out to contests. I didn’t have an ego about it. I thought, this is an opportunity to get my book shaped and to improve upon it. So it took two years. The book came out, and I was so proud, so happy. It’s been nine years since that last book. 

Then, I saw my friend who is a poet publish a children’s book. That was inspiring. I thought that was something I could do eventually. I told my friend Kyle about this idea, that I don’t know when I’ll work on it, but it would be nice to write together. Then she later reached out, “I have this Google Doc. I have A to Z. I’ve brainstormed all the things that can go into each letter.” So she was off and running, and I was going to hold on for dear life and let myself be carried by her energy. That collaboration really helped because, at times when she had too much going on, I felt energetic, and the opposite would also be true. We really, in a beautiful way, carried each other through. She had a literary agent at the time who read it and loved it. She said it made her cry. We sent it out, and we wanted to find a home for our book that was going to understand its vision and not censor us. Especially with book banning right now. So we ended up with Haymarket Press. It’s an independent leftist press that really gets us politically. 

We’re both adult authors. She has published a novel, and I have published an adult poetry book. We wrote it the way we wanted to write it. We know that it has big words for children. But we felt that it was okay because it’s a book that’s meant to be shared between children and adults. It’s a multigenerational book. We did have somebody to read it for leveling, but we also made conscious decisions. Like, if the rhymes are really great, so we’re going to go for it. Our foray into children’s literature has been amazing because I love reading to children. Not only children, but I love reading in Vietnamese American spaces and Asian American spaces. These have been our most joyful audiences. It’s a dream come true. You get to face the kids in the audience who you wrote it for and see their eyes light up. You see their parents’ and their aunties’ and their teachers, and their eyes are lighting up, too! I get to see knowledge being passed on. 

HD: It’s so important to fill these spaces for children. This year, my book is part of my school’s library collection. So for my daughter who goes to school there, and my son who had just graduated from there, and my friends, and the other teachers there. It’s been a wonderful experience. And I’m so grateful for your book. To have it and share it with my own children and show them this rich history of solidarity.

CLC: Thank you so much. And I’m grateful for your book. My siblings have four children collectively, so I am always looking for books that will give them a sense of how they are and where they came from. It’s amazing to be in this space together and have our books in conversation.

HD: Thank you so much. I also have another book coming in 2025. It’s called A Jade Bracelet, and it’s based on my mom giving me my jade bangle. I feel like there’s a solidarity among Vietnamese girls growing up in the 90s with the jade bangles our moms gave us: feeling like I didn’t want to wear this, it’s too hard, and all of this squeezing. I was channeling all of that to write this story.

CLC: What a beautiful homage to your mother.

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An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History
by Cathy Linh Che and Kyle Lucia Wu. Illustrated by Kavita Ramchandran
Haymarket Books, $18.95

Where the Wildflowers Grow
by Hà Dinh
Penguin Random House, $14.99

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Claire: You’ve been thinking and writing about beauty and fashion for much of your scholarly career, from your first monograph The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion, which was published in 2011 to the co-edited collection, Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia, which was published in 2019 to your most recent book, Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam. You’ve also written about popular culture and digital media and technology in two other very prominent co-edited anthologies from earlier in your career, Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, which was published in 2007 and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, which came out in 2001. 

Can you tell us about your arrival to the project that became Experiments in Skin and how you see it building on and speaking with your past work and scholarship, and also perhaps, turning to something different and new? 

Thuy: That’s such a good question and a generous one. It also reminds me of how old I am! In some ways, I felt like the book found me rather than me finding it. There was a lot of experimentation, trial and error, in this project. But, as you were mapping out my scholarly trajectory, I realized that this experimentation sat on a lot of work that I had done before in thinking about the relationship between race and labor and aesthetics. I have long been interested in the ways that studying everyday engagements with objects or practices that we think of as feminized and thus degraded can open us up to big questions about our economic life, our world-making practices, about how we understand ourselves in relation to our history. I think I was always interested in trying to figure out how people engage with these banal objects—a lipstick, a scarf—as a way to articulate questions that are maybe hard to pose or to talk about. I think that’s what this book sits on.

But when I was doing my research, and I say this in the book, there were a lot of twists and turns and a lot of finding my way through questions that I didn’t even know I had. I started this project thinking that I’m going to do a study of luxury consumption in a post-socialist or a late socialist state. And I go to Vietnam to do this. And then it turns out—and maybe I should have already known this—that all the things that I’ve read about what consumption is, either as a tool of domination or a way of expressing certain kinds of agency, were true, but did not fully set the terms for what the people that I met there were endeavoring. The project really took off when I realized, actually, I was less interested in consumption as an abstract practice than in the emplaced and embodied question of: “What was consuming these women?” And what was consuming them was partly what was going on in their present worlds, but also what happened in their history. Once I realized that, I had to return home, and turn to the archives, because I couldn’t understand what was consuming these women through an ethnographic mode alone. 

Claire: That’s so remarkable because I think what you’re also pointing to in the shift that happens in your research and in your questioning is also profoundly a shift in method. And your methodology is really one of the most striking dimensions of the text. I know it’s one of the dimensions that my peers, friends, colleagues, and I really take up and think deeply about. There’s something that’s just so prismatic about your methodology—the way that you bring ethnography, archival research, and intimate close readings of cultural texts and historical artifacts all together. What I find so animating about this sort of collection of methods is the ways that they all synergize together. They feel equally vital. They’re actively hammering something out. And I’m wondering, how do you see your methods speaking to and collaborating with each other? Why was it important for you to tell the story about beauty, race, and war using these particular methods? 

Thuy: Well, like yourself, I was trained as an interdisciplinary scholar. And though I have a degree in American Studies and was taught to appreciate the convergence of different methodologies and to be capacious in thinking about all the tools that I can bring to my research, it wasn’t until I was confronted with a social reality that was hard for me to figure out that I realized what that really meant. This is to say that it wasn’t that I set off to do interdisciplinary research necessarily, but that I was confronted with a set of questions I could not answer through a single method alone. I was confronted with problems that really forced me to take up multiple tools. 

Having said that, I’d never really spent the amount of time in the archives that I did for this book before. And I gained a really deep appreciation for the work of the historian through this—how elucidating one document can be, how tedious sorting through boxes of them is. For me, these methodologies had to work together because they had to help me tell a story that I couldn’t tell without all of them. For scholars like you who are trained in this interdisciplinary work, I think it’s such a boon to you because these methodologies will not seem unfamiliar. They won’t seem entirely scary. Even though it is a very different process to go and do the deep archival work, to do the deep ethnographic work, to do that kind of visual analysis, it’s part of the water you swim in. It’s actually part of how you’ll learn to see the world. 

Claire: That’s so helpful, especially for me now at this particular stage where I’m figuring out my methods and trying to attend to them as more than just something that I pick up and put down. But rather, really thinking about how they get stitched into the project, how they actually become, in many ways, the project itself. What’s so profound about Experiments in Skin is that the methods are the story. It’s about what you see and what you don’t. And then, therefore, what kinds of tools and approaches you use to surface those ghosts. 

Thuy: Absolutely. One of the things I also learned  is that people are always inventing their own methodologies. Part of this book is about how Vietnamese women practice science. How they’re not outside of it, even as they pose a challenge to the kind of science that these dermatologists and military scientists were engaged in. They use things like “popular epidemiology,” they offer ways of knowing the body and knowing their environment that are deeply methodological, [for instance,] how to use touch as a way of knowing skin. That really helped me to understand what a methodology is: it’s a way of doing things. And a way of doing things is also about a way of conceiving the world. These are not separate at all. 

As researchers, we are, at our root, trying to comprehend something, to understand some problem. We’re using the tools that we have to help us do it. But the truth is everyone’s trying to understand the world that they’re living in, right? And everyone is developing different tools to do it. How do these work together? How can we learn from these different kinds of methodologies and different ways of knowing? 

Claire: I love that so much. And it reminds me of two things. Firstly, it reminds me of the ways that Trinh Min-ha thinks about interdisciplinarity as not so much this question of accumulating expertise of different specialized knowledges, but as one of breaking down and shifting the very borders of these different knowledges. What Experiments in Skin does and what you do and what the women in your book do is disintegrate and dissolve what we think of and what we know to be science and history. In these moments of disintegration there is also, as you write in the book, these real pockets of world-making, of small freedoms. 

Secondly, and still staying with methodology, I’m also reminded of the work of translation in this book. You write that Experiments in Skin is at once a ghost story, a skin story, and a war story, which, as you show us, is fundamentally a story about beauty. This is such a striking formulation. And I sat with this for a really long time, trying to make sense of how we come to know war and remember war, and how this intimate knowing resists a kind of sense-making legibility; it requires a certain kind of translation. Here, I’m reminded of how Anna Tsing describes translation as a “messy process” of “jarring juxtaposition and miscommunications” that create “patches of incoherence and incompatibility.” And I’m really interested in whether you encountered such moments of incoherence and messy translation when researching and writing the book. And more broadly, what is the work of translation doing in this book? When did translation fail? And potentially, what was afforded in these failures and moments of incompatibility?

Thuy: I love that question so much and I think you’ve hit on something that is actually at the crux of what it means to think across national boundaries. What does that actually look like? And how can we do that methodologically? Theoretically? But to start with what you just mentioned, I think this book is in some ways a contribution to the work that many scholars have done on the intimate dimensions of empire. How do we think about empire through a very particular embodied lens, in this case, through skin? 

You’re absolutely right to say that this requires translation, and translation is a messy process. Sometimes understanding fails. Sometimes words are too incommensurate. Part of what I was trying to do in this project was to think about how we might begin to recognize each other, really see each other beyond the surface. How do we actually begin to perceive each others’ capacities for pain, capacities for joy? 

In the first part of the book, my attention is on these men of science, and how the scientific method is about an extractive move that fails to, and intentionally fails to, recognize personhood. One of the things that I talk about in the book is the ways in which, for instance, in Vietnam, the word for “body” and the word for “person” are the same. That doesn’t mean that there is no struggle for personhood or that subjectivity is not constructed. But it is different from seeing the body as an object, or a series of parts that don’t necessarily add up to a whole. In the second part of the book, I’m trying to think about how this different epistemology of the body–of skin–can lead us to different places.  

One of the ways that I might be contributing to this conversation about translation is in thinking about those moments when things don’t translate. Those moments when we know and we’re not going to say. We can call it a kind of ethnographic refusal. That’s one concept we can use to think about it—but I think it might be even more than that. There are moments, for instance, when the ladies in the salon say, “Well maybe she has been exposed to the poison, but I’m not going to say that. I’m not gonna say that because that’s a horrible thing to say” or “She might already know that. I’m not going to say it, I don’t need to say it.” We both know what is going on and we’re not going to say. There’s tacit refusal. But there is also a tacit recognition. A kind of recognition that doesn’t require telling you the truth of your condition or making you confront something you don’t want to confront or announcing something you don’t want to announce. 

You know, in translations, there is often an assumption that we want to have the most apt replacement for a word or the clearest metaphor so we can speak across differences. I guess what I’m trying to think about is, what do we do with those moments where there’s opacity and we’re okay with it? There’s intentional unclearness. And we’re actually okay with it because it doesn’t stop us from understanding. And it actually sometimes does help us to recognize each other better. 

Claire: I really, really love that. And it’s so instructive for how scholars and others might come to know one another, be with one another, live with one another. I think that at the heart of what is so transformative about Experiments in Skin is that it gives us methods for how to live, how to do life in ongoing crises. The sort of refusal that you’re speaking about is one such kind of everyday method for living a livable life that you surface throughout the book.  

Thuy: Yeah, I mean I think it’s a hard thing to say. But as scholars we have a will to know. We want to find out. We have a research question and we want to get it right. And to be able to live in that space where the will to know is not the only will, it’s not the only desire, it’s not the only way of being. To live with opacity, to live with uncertainty. 

These are really, really difficult lessons for me. Lessons that I’m still trying to learn, especially after living through something like the pandemic. In some ways, it is the lesson we all need to learn. We live in radically uncertain times and we want to do everything we can to bolster ourselves against the kind of precarity and risk that’s produced by uncertainty. And sometimes we can’t. And what we have to do is figure out how to live with that. That was one of the big lessons for me and it’s not a lesson that I can easily take up because I want to know and I want to secure against uncertainty. I’m a good neoliberal subject too (laughter)! I want to manage my risks. I want the good outcome. How do you live in that space of uncertainty? Because that is the condition that we are in. 

Claire: Absolutely. And I’m wondering if you see that informing what felt like a kind of collective preoccupation with beauty, skincare, and wellness during the pandemic. Because it felt like it was one of the very few things that we could shore up and secure. It was like, well, at least I can make sure my skin stays clear when everything else was kind of just on fire. 

Thuy: Exactly. I mean, I do think all of this is happening at once. On the one hand, I get how people try to take care of themselves as a kind of hedge or a salve, a relief and remediation against a really, really brutal world. On the other hand, what I was trying to say in this book is that the concept of self-care needs to expand because self-care actually doesn’t work unless care for others is also a part of it. We saw that clearly during the pandemic, in the emergence of mutual aid and other practices that recognized that our fates are actually very intertwined. That one of us can’t be safe if the rest of us are not safe. The kind of vision of care that I saw in my research was very, very relational. Relational in ways that I think are so different from what the consumption of beauty means for us here [in America]. Beauty, for the women I met, is also fundamentally about a way of living, a way of constructing life, a way of being in relation with each other, a way of doing things.

Of course, beauty in Vietnam is also about meeting certain kinds of standards or asserting certain aesthetic priorities. Beauty is all those things. I don’t want to reject or make people feel bad about wanting to take care of themselves, but I want to encourage us to expand beyond this idea of beauty as individual transcendence. And of course, I’m not the only one who has  said this. 

Claire: I think your book is so careful and generative in attending to beauty as something that can feel really compromising and also deeply animating. And I think what I hear you saying and what I’m also reminded of is how hard it can be to talk about beauty and what it means for us in our lives. 

I think often about something that bell hooks has written. She says that we need to theorize what beauty means in our lives so that we can build up critical consciousness, especially “when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living.” And on the other hand, we have these aesthetic philosophical theorizations of beauty that are telling us that beauty offers this kind of “unselfing” experience, in the words of Iris Murdoch. It takes us out of ourselves. But, I think your book and other critical beauty studies scholars complicate this by showing us that this unselfing is always already mediated by social and political forces and institutions. And so, I’m wondering, how has beauty and its meaning changed for you the more that you’ve studied it, the more that you’ve sat with it and lived with it? 

Thuy: I think it’s changed in all those ways that you just mentioned. Somebody reminded me of this really, really wonderful essay by Christina Sharpe, in which she describes beauty as a way of doing things, a way of existing, of caring. The essay is called “Beauty as Method,” and it came out after I finished writing the book. But when I read it, I saw that [Sharpe] was actually saying in beautifully succinct ways what I was struggling to say.

That’s the appeal of thinking with beauty, right? I don’t think in general that when we’re engaging with aesthetics, we’re actually seeking individual transcendence or to be outside of ourselves. I think we’re actually seeking ways of being in relation.

Claire: Yeah, there’s so much here that is blowing my mind and then also suturing it back together. This idea of beauty as being profoundly about a desire for relationality and a practice of relationality. I’m wondering if you see beauty in the potential for a kind of asociality, too. Is that possible? I’m thinking of this emergent scholarship around Asian American aesthetics, around ideas of inscrutability, opacity, and asociality. And I’m wondering, is there beauty there? 

Thuy: I think asociality is a form of sociality, right? In the way that being anti-fashion is a form of fashion and fashioning. I think there are many different kinds of sociality and many different forms of relationality. Even the desire to hold yourself back, to not make yourself known is a way of being in relation. So yes, I do think so.

And these are some of the questions that are coming up as we take more seriously what beauty is and what it can open up for us.  What is the role of aesthetics in our everyday lives? I’m not of the view that there is an “Asian aesthetic.” But, I do think about things like—you know, one of my first jobs was teaching in an art history department—how come there are so many landscape paintings in Chinese and Korean art history? Why is the landscape “the thing” rather than the portrait? Or the domestic interior? Or the fruit bowl? And I think to me it has something to do with that kind of relationality. A kind of contemplation of our place in the world [if there is a human figure in those landscapes, they tend to be very small]. And I don’t say that to essentialize Asian aesthetics as only concerned with thinking about our relationships. It’s many different things. I say that to encourage us to think about what material relations we can glean through the aesthetic realm. What can we learn about economic life, about military history, about scientific knowledge, about all these things that we don’t think live in the aesthetic realm? Whereas, I think everything lives in the aesthetic realm (laughter)! 

Claire: That’s super helpful. I want to keep thinking with aesthetics. I’m really just so taken by the book itself as an aesthetic form. Like, this is a beautiful book. This is a beautiful cover. And you write beautifully. I’m borrowing a question that I’ve been asked by my own dissertation advisors: what does it mean for you to write beautifully and to have produced such a beautiful book when what you’re also writing about is beauty’s very indebtedness to violence? 

Thuy: I say at the end of the book, beauty is often an alibi for violence, but it can also be an entree into understanding that violence. And I want us to think about both. I want us to think about the ways it cuts and the ways it ties. I want us to think about the ways it hides, the ways it opens up. That’s why I was so interested in thinking through skin because it’s all of those things: it separates and connects, it conceals and reveals. It produces a surface and then an underneath, an above and beyond, it spatializes even as it temporalizes. Skin is a surface where we can sense both space and time. One of the ways that we see the passage of time on our bodies is on our skin, right? That’s what a wrinkle is, a mark of time. We can’t help it. And no matter what anyone wants to tell you, you can’t stop time from being recorded on your skin. 

So I guess I want to think about all of those dimensions. I want us to also think about what beauty enables, as well as what it hides or demands or signals. And I so appreciate you saying that this book is written beautifully and it’s a beautiful book. Actually, the cover is a photograph I took while I was in fieldwork. So the aesthetic for me in this book is deeply, deeply everyday. It’s an image that I just happened to take as I was walking by. And there was this whole debate with my editor about the cover. Because when you publish a book, they ask you either to submit images or to give words that you want the cover to convey. I didn’t know what to say so we struggled with the cover. It was a last minute decision to use that pretty banal image. But for me it was perfect because it signaled how important it is to think about aesthetics as a practice of the everyday. 

There are, of course, many acceptable and good forms of scholarly writing. Some authors lay it out pretty clearly, like “I argue this, and I draw on these fields and scholarship, and I’m explaining this phenomenon.” I think that is a super helpful way of conveying information. But I say in the book that I was trying to tell a skin story, a ghost story, and a war story. And to me, a central element of a good story is that it can move you. 

I remember I was giving a talk and Viet Nguyen was in the audience. And he asked me, “You keep using the word ‘story.’ How is this a story?” And I thought  “Oh no, why did I say that, like I was some real writer? In front of a real writer. (laughter)” But what I meant was that I was hoping to reach people in many different dimensions—reach them emotionally, reach them intellectually, just reach them. Like I said, there are many different ways that we, as scholars, can convey the research we do. Here, I was trying to think about how to convey my research in a way that might push beyond the argumentative mode. 

Claire: Absolutely. I mean, this is why I loved the book so much. This book has traveled with me from Berkeley to Toronto to Korea to Japan. I took it with me to the DMZ. Your book travels in all of these ways precisely because the way you write is so much about attending to the textures of everyday life. And the way that you honor that is through the prose, the writing. I love that so much. It’s so instructive for scholars who are writing about things that would otherwise be taken for granted as excluded from the realm of the aesthetic and the beautiful. We’re writing about war, military, empire—

Thuy: Science, commercial culture, all of that.

Claire: Yes. I also love that you mentioned the book cover and what happened with the photograph and its selection because I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the model in your cover image. Her name is Tiana Tolstoi and she’s a French Korean model. I first came to know of her through the Korean modeling scene and I’ve been following her work for years now. And I mean, this cover is really such a rich palimpsest of everything the book is about. For instance, she’s modeling for Vichy, which is this French dermo-cosmetic brand, and she herself is mixed race French Korean. And so, I’m curious if and how this image informs the book now in its current life. 

Thuy: Yeah. I mean, she was at that time everywhere. I think people are often surprised when they go to Asia and they think it’s all going to be billboards of American celebrities. And then there’s Korean actors and Chinese models. I think people are still laboring under this impression that there is an American cultural hegemony [in Asia], but this is at the very least fragmented and fragmenting. In an essay [“White Like Koreans”] that I wrote in the anthology, [Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia,] I talk about the influence of Korean culture in Vietnam and the kind of aesthetic ideal, which is also an economic ideal, that Korea represents in Vietnam. In that piece, I was trying to make the argument that in order to understand cultural circulation in places like Vietnam, we have to think about the region as a unit of analysis. The region really helps us to fill in that gap between the local, the national, and the transnational, and helps us to better understand the multivalent nature of transnational cultural flows. 

Claire: And I think what’s so wonderful about the cover and about what it does aesthetically and conceptually is that it links your works together in that way. Because I remember when I first saw the book, I was reminded of your essay in that anthology. And I was like (gestures to book cover) “White Like Koreans”! I mean, it’s just a really synergetic, animating way of bringing your works together. 

Thuy: Right. If you read the Vietnamese words [in the book’s cover image], the storefront is not advertising products that promise lightness. They’re about oiliness and dryness, how to treat these conditions that are not really about the color of your skin so much as it is about the clarity of your skin, which I think is also a very Korean thing. 

Claire: If we began our conversation thinking about arrivals and how you arrived at the book, Experiments in Skin, I’m also wondering about returns and the experience and the work of returning in your book. You write in the book that while in Vietnam, it became clear to you that you needed to return to the United States to visit the archives there in order to uncover the fuller story of beauty, race, and war. And yet your ethnographic research in Vietnam itself was a kind of return wherein you travel back to the country that you were displaced from. Personally and methodologically, what was this sort of dual return like for you? And in these returns, did you experience the very things that you write about throughout the book, which are in Caren Kaplan’s words, who you cite, these “unruly intensities”? And if so, how did they come to shape and give texture to the book?

Thuy: Yes. That’s such a beautiful question and I really appreciate it because it’s such a thoughtful way of thinking about what I did, which I hadn’t even thought about in those terms. There’s a couple of things I would say. And you may have experienced this as well having done work in Korea, this experience of being the diasporic subject who returns to study “their own people.” I know Dorinne Kondo has written about this—about the ways that the ethnic subject of the US state then becomes situated as a national or even a returning diasporic subject, which then frames both your research and your sense of self in particular ways. 

People in Vietnam used to say to me, “Oh, you have Vietnamese skin” And I would say, “Well, you know, I live in the US.” And they would say, “But you’re still Vietnamese.” Those moments forced me to wonder: “What is it people see when they look at me in these different contexts? And how does that shape the way that I see what’s going on?” 

Another puzzle for a lot of us doing this work as “returnees” is: “Where does the field begin and end for you?” My mom is one of 10 kids and my dad is one of 13 kids. And so, I honestly have like 40 cousins in Vietnam. I always joke that I’m related to everyone. I spend a lot of time there just seeing family. That is not research. But there are things that I know that I can’t unknow just because it wasn’t in my field, or I didn’t learn it through research methods. So how do you negotiate those experiences during ethnographic work? 

I say [in the book] that it was my family friend, my childhood friend who led me to my research site. I know a lot about her and her family. And, as I mentioned in the end [of the book], I’ve visited her brother, who died shortly before I left. His was the third funeral I had gone to in her family. As you know, in Asia it’s all about the connections. It’s about who introduces you into the scene. So obviously my intimate and familial relationships have opened doors for me. But it has also situated me in a kind of web of relation, of life and death, that is really hard to get out of. I’m still in touch with all these people. There’s a way in which I know the conditions I write about in the book very intimately. And yet, I am aware that there are ways in which I cannot really know them, and, moreover, I don’t want to exploit what knowledge I do have for my own scholarly work. 

This affects how you reflect on your research as well. I had a student ask me during a presentation once, “These people are going to this place to take care of serious medical conditions. Isn’t it unethical to just be like, ‘Oh, drink nettle tea.’?” And I said, “Well, let’s think about the options here. Let’s think about how they ended up in this place. And let’s think about what are the alternatives to this kind of care that they’re getting.” And I’m trying to get them to think about all the different moral and intellectual frameworks in which not insisting on biomedical intervention is in fact a form of care. 

But I am really, really mad that those are the options. And when I come back and I’m in the archives, I cannot believe how these men are talking about the mass killing of Southeast Asians in such a disaffected way. They don’t have any unruly intensities. They don’t have any intensity at all. And I’ve said this before, but I felt, “Oh, now I get what people mean when they talk about the violence of the archive.” Because you’re sitting there and you’re looking at how they’re talking about “could we use malaria to kill people” as a kind of a problem they’re trying to solve. A kind of scientific and military problem, as if there are no humans on the other side of that question. I say in the acknowledgements, this book was so hard to write for so many different reasons. And those are some of the ways that were hard for me. 

Claire: I really appreciate that and I really thank you for sharing. I think the devastation that you’re speaking of is so much about the ways that war is no longer recognizable as such, that it is not—and you argue this so clearly and beautifully in the book—this temporally experienced event with these very clear demarcations of a beginning and an end. But actually, war gets vitalized constantly and differently throughout our lives. And that’s really hard. It’s really hard to be living amidst such persistent loss. I think what your book points to and what it helps us to see and to feel is how these unruly intensities, in your words, “errant feelings, displaced sensations, misattributed pleasures” can create these cracks, these kinds of frictions that produce these leakages. And I am really thankful for that.

Thuy: And I think they produce them in me too. This is part of what you’ve been asking me all along. I’m not outside of this scene. I’m not impervious to it. And nor are you. And that’s in part what I think is potentially useful about the work that we’re all trying to do. It is to open up these spaces where there are cracks. And to look into them and to see what we make of them and how we might exploit them, and how we might open them up further. That’s what I find really valuable about the work of students who are coming up and bringing new questions and opening up new cracks and making us look into these spaces and forcing us to think differently, to move differently. And, you know, I feel really, really gratified to be working in a place where I’m constantly in dialogue with students who are doing this. You included!

Claire: Thank you so much, Thuy. I feel so lucky to count myself as part of your genealogy of scholarship. It’s such a gift to be able to be in conversation with you right now in this capacity and also through your writing and your work. I know the same is true for other students. I’m just really grateful for the time that you’ve taken today to speak with me. And I’m so excited to see what comes next.

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