In this original essay for diaCRITICS, poet Linh Dinh reflects upon the absence of poetry in U.S. society, offering us a haunting glimpse into the Poetry Junk Yard “where every life form, radiant or otherwise, goes to die, with its dreams, Hollywood or otherwise, never coming close to being fulfilled.” Yet outside of this fatalism, Dinh etches a bittersweet cartography where poetry actually still lurks across the land. He recalls an exchange with a fellow poet, an American veteran of the war in Viet Nam, whom he meets at a dive bar in El Paso, Texas. The poets initially discuss Juarez, yet after the vet shares a confessional dream poem set in Viet Nam, the conversation becomes suddenly mired and weighted with conflicting associations over Vietnamese bodies. We are then left with Dinh’s bleak observation, “Nearly all of our poems are barely read now, much less in the future.” But as long as there are poems about us, we still exist. 

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Inside The Tap in El Paso, Texas

It is Poetry Month again, but most Americans wouldn’t know it, preoccupied as they are with forechecks, Mitt, Kim, Lady, Pippa and Doritos Locos Tacos. What a far cry from what Walt Whitman envisioned, since he actually thought our country would value poets more than any other. It has gotten worse and worse since his days. Just think of John Brown, for example, since Brown triggered an explosion of poetry, with hundreds of poems published in the immediate aftermath of his raid and hanging. Back then, Americans still considered poetry to be an essential response to, and perhaps even shaper of, national events and crises. Now, poems are completely irrelevant, and a major reason for this is the mass media. Americans are most indifferent to poetry because our country generates more nonsense and distraction than anybody else. Though shunned and drowned out, poetry still lurks across this land, however:

In New Orleans, two guys sit behind typewriters on a sidewalk in the exceedingly charming neighborhood of Marigny. Inspired by Jazz, no doubt, they will instantaneously write a poem on “your topic,” and, get this, at “your price.” Go ahead and try them, but don’t go easy now. Demand that they write a poem on Grimm’s law, gimcrackery, the Dust Bowl, viridity or the amazing life and death of Ioan Petru Culianu, for example, and pay them well, of course.

In Boulder, there is a smudgy facsimile of Walt Whitman wandering around, wearing sandwich boards that announce, “I’m Reverend Friendly—a poet and I know it. I earn my bread by reciting a poem I have stored in my head, But if you’re too poor, I’ll do it for free instead. Halleluiah, praise be to the Holy One!”

When the Reverend says one, he means the same poem each time, but sometimes not even that in its entirety, as when he forgot the final, killer stanza to Baudelaire’s “To The Reader.” After some nudging from me, however, Friendly finally belted out, with flecks of spittle spraying my poor face:

Boredom! He smokes his hookah, while he dreams
Of gibbets, weeping tears he cannot smother.
You know this dainty monster, too, it seems —
Hypocrite reader! — You! — My twin! — My brother!

In Boston, there is a young woman whose life is truly a poem. She said, “From the age of twelve, I’ve always wanted to be an animal,” and that’s why she goes barefoot and lives outside as much as possible.

Drifting around for the last four years, she has traveled as far north as Alaska, and as far south as New Mexico. In Montana, she slept outside in -20 degrees. She was staying with Occupy Boston until the police evicted their encampment from Dewey Square.

She has investigated the Transcendentalists and found them half-assed.

“If you want to be an animal, then Thoreau ain’t shit,” I said.

“Yes, Thoreau ain’t shit.”

In Chicago, there’s a Poetry Garage, and, no, I’m not making this up. Why would I make it up? I’m too honest, earnest and anal retentive to make anything up, ever. The Poetry Garage is at 201 West Madison, and for a modest fee, say, $2,000 a month, you can park your miserable, beloved poem in the Poetry Garage, where no one, but no one, will ever proposition it, not that it’s been getting lucky anyway, lately or ever. My primary and lifelong interest, however, is not in this Poetry Garage but in the cousined, digestively related Poetry Junk Yard, reputedly further West, where every life form, radiant or otherwise, goes to die, with its dreams, Hollywood or otherwise, never coming close to being fulfilled. Hey, but the road was fun and crippling! The Poetry Junk Yard is said to be larger than the Earth itself.

In Providence, some wise guy at Cafe Francaise has decided to scrawl some effete, literary hors d’œuvre on the chalk board each morning, and on March 11, 2011, at exactly 1:12PM, I was affronted with this nonsense from a guy I’ve never heard of: “Poetry begins when we look from the center outward–Ralph Waldo Emerson.” This nutrition-free yet pestering nugget was promptly redeemed, however, by a lovely coda–and all codas are lovely, my dear, in its proper lighting and coupled with a carafe or six pack–right beneath it, “Today’s Soup: Chicken Tortilla.”

As we all know, Providence is home to excellent Brown University, an ivory Watts Tower that mostly benefits folks parachuted in from divers brown stones, cul-de-sacs and walled and moated communities. That is, they ain’t quite germaine to Providence itself, with its million Dunkin’ Donuts and a few excellent Cambodian eateries. So here’s the punchline: Brown pays only 2 million bucks of city tax yearly when it should cough up 19, which is exactly the deficit of corn syrup and trans fat-mainlining Providence. Ah, but Brown has an excellent writing program!

Opening a Brown door to go outside, I nearly slammed into a white bearded and ushanka wearing character, so I shouted my standard greeting, “Yo, let’s go for a beer!” But this Russian caricature dude was not impressed. Though he seemed crazy, he probably thought I was crazy. It turned out he was the take-no-prisoner Keith Waldrop. Just so you know now, Keith doesn’t bullshit, and he has stopped going to poetry readings or lectures. He has enough poems in his head to last several millennia, so he has to use what little time he has left to hunker down and turn each one over, to examine each from all sides, to decide whether it belongs in the Poetry Garage or the Poetry Junk Yard.

In El Paso, there’s a gentleman with a vaguely rhythmic specimen permanently lodged in his head. I found him at The Tap, a divey, old man’s bar downtown. A retired Vietnam vet, he had spent 13 years in Juarez, but the increasing violence and extorting cops chased him back stateside. We did agree, though, that Juarez had its sweetness and charms. It’s not just cops with assault rifles and flyers everywhere seeking loved ones. At any time of the day, it’s more alive than El Paso, that’s for sure. With its bustle and colors, Juarez reminded me very much of Vietnam, I told him, and he concurred, “But if they feel like shooting you, they’ll shoot you right in the middle of a crowd. Even if it’s sixteen bullets, they’ll all hit you, with none hitting anybody else!”

After I admitted that I was more or less a writer, he said that he too wrote. He was a poet, to be more specific, “I’ve been writing since I was four!”

“Do you have any poem in your head you can write down for me?”

“Yes! In fact, I do. I’ll write it down for you right now.” And he immediately went at it.

Done, he motioned for the bartender to come over so he could declaim his poetry to her. She listenly patiently, though without much comprehension, even if there was no Norteno music in the background, yet at the end, she beamed in relief and shouted, “That’s beautiful!” Before scramming away.

As he handed his poem to me, he explained how he managed to compose it, “I wrote this after my first wet dream. Yes, my very first, when I was already in my 30′s! I dreamt that I was back in Vietnam, and I was in a firefight, and it was one of those terrible firefights when you couldn’t even think, when your mind went blank because you were so confused and terrified. My mind went blank, and I couldn’t think at all, but suddenly the noises stopped, and I was in this hooch, and it was completely silent, and in walked six or seven Vietnamese women. You know, when I first got to Vietnam, I couldn’t tell the women apart. The men, I could figure out, but the women all looked the same to me. I was sleeping with this one girl, and I thought I was in love with her, but then I couldn’t tell if it was her I saw on the streets. Is that her? Is that her? Anyway, here I was in this dream, and in walked these Vietnamese women, and they were all beautiful, but I couldn’t tell them apart, so I had to look at their legs. Suddenly, I could tell which woman was for me, because she had black legs!”

This vet was black, by the way, but as I started to comment how ironic it was that he couldn’t tell Vietnamese apart, when racist whites, and Asians too, would say that they can’t tell one black from another, he stopped me with volcanic irritation, “You have no rights to judge my feelings! This is my soul! My creativity! You’re judging my art! You have no rights to judge my art!”

And with that, our conversation ended, but I still have his poem here. Like most, the chance of it being even slightly good or readable is very slim, but who am I to say? Nearly all of our poems are barely read now, much less in the future.

In Austin, someone has scrawled on the bathroom wall of a cafe on Congress Street, “I don’t know if you or I exist, but somewhere there are poems about us.”

Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union. 

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Linh Dinh’s ‘Poetry Sightings’

Anvi Hoang interviews Professor Nhi Lieu, author of The American Dream in Vietnamese.

Nhi T. Lieu is assistant professor of American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of The American Dream in Vietnamese (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).  Her other published works have appeared in Frontiers: Journal of Women Studies and Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America. Her new book project tentatively titled, Beautiful Citizenship: Transnational Asian/American Embodied Practices in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism, explores how the strategies of consumption in private and personal choices in fashion and beauty reconstitute cultural and racial identities while transforming meanings of citizenship through embodied practices.

Nhi Lieu is such a happy and cheerful academic professor. She laughed more than any professors I’ve met before – great energy to be around. Her research is an important contribution to the understanding of the Vietnamese diasporic community in the U.S., for both scholars in the field and the community itself.

Anvi Hoang: There are a lot of interesting stories in your book. In a nutshell, what isAmerican Dream in Vietnamese about?

Nhi T. Lieu: [Laughed]. It is about a lot of things. It is about the formation of identity of an immigrant/diasporic group. It looks at popular culture and other forms of cultural productions as sites of study. What’s new and interesting about this project is that it looks at this refugee/minority population through a different lens – it looks at everyday life and the ways in which popular culture and things in the everyday affect the social, cultural, political aspects of a community.

AH: Did you have Vietnamese audience in mind while you were writing this book? Who were they?

NTL: My parents [laughed]. I wrote the book for an academic audience and I hope that the new generation of students at the universities would learn about the experiences of their own community, and people who are part of this community – some of them are actively participating in these cultural forms not really understanding the context of how they emerged, not really understanding what it means to feel nostalgia toward the homeland. A lot of these students have no connection to Vietnam except through forms of popular culture. They’ll go to the áo dài pageant, they’ll watch Paris By Night, and listen to the music, but not really understand the context of how, for example, the music from Khanh Ly emerged, or why the diaspora has nostalgic longings for the homeland.

Author and critic Nhi Lieu

AH: What is the importance of the music variety shows to the Vietnamese community and their cultural identity formation?

NTL: They operate in very complicated ways but for the most part, they work by connecting to what they define as “culture.” Part of it is a move to preserve Vietnamese culture; part of it is an understanding of what “Vietnamese-ness” is about. In these videos you can learn a lot about history, language, and culture. Even the comedy skits are indicative of the issues that the community faces. And they are meaningful in those ways because they reflect but also capture what the community is experiencing as it assimilates and acculturates into the United States. And these forms are not only about cultural preservation, they’re also about engaging with U.S. popular culture. There are a lot of performances that connect and bring in aspects of American culture, which are then folded into the acts. In the book, I discuss how Paris by Night uses West Side Story, for example, as it is reinterpreted for the Vietnamese audience – it is like multiple re-appropriations of American culture that then gets rendered as Vietnamese.

AH: You mentioned in the book the overlapping diasporas between the Vietnamese and the Chinese when Little Sai Gon was built. Did you see it played out in the music variety shows?

NTL: Yes and no. I think they were not able to really compete with the sheer abundance of the films that were produced in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and now Korea. So what happens in the shows themselves is that there was an effort to engage with and connect to – because there is no way they can compete with these forms of culture. So they align themselves with Korean productions, for example, instead of challenging them. What they did was team up with the people producing Korean popular culture and they went to perform in Korea. Incorporating these other forms were a way to add to the Vietnamese experience – but not the Vietnamese from Vietnam experience, the Vietnamese American experience – that is also a statement of modernity. In this sense, “We’re modernized and we want to be modern the way Korea is modernizing.” There is also a Vietnamese American-ness in these cultural productions that places a stake in diasporic Vietnamese-ness. It is not just about Vietnamese in Vietnam – it’s actually against the Vietnamese in Vietnam. It is about the diaspora and its strength in forging a diasporic identity with Vietnamese communities in the other nations that are modernizing as well.

AH: Is there a strong Chinese influence in those videos?

NTL: There is a distinction and I think the war is what distinguishes the Vietnamese experience from the Chinese experience. The war in itself really takes precedence when Vietnamese Americans are articulating their identity. The Chinese see the war as having an impact on their identity but I think I might have argued that, and I am citing Chuong Hoang Chung’s study where he says that immigrants who are of Chinese descent have travelled so much, that the Chinese have picked up and left, picked up and left, picked up and left wherever they’ve gone. This is part of their migration – you can make that argument for Vietnamese Americans, too, now given Katrina and all other recent events where they picked up and left. They’re part of this narrative of migration in recent developments. But the fact that the war is so much more meaningful for Vietnamese immigrants has a lot to do with their own identity.

It is funny with the way my mom is always separating Chinese and Vietnamese through food [laughed]. She would say that, “Vietnamese food is based more on fish sauce and Chinese food is more soy sauce based.” It is the most barebones and symbolic way of thinking about identity through this food connection. Even in something as simple as áo dài– but áo dài is totally influenced by the Chinese and the French – it is always articulated as authentically Vietnamese. It is interesting that Vietnamese have claims over these things. So the war and the meaning of the war then separate Vietnamese immigrants from Chinese immigrants because Chinese immigrants see the war as part of another process that induces their migration, whereas the Vietnamese have a real stake in their national identity that relates to the war.

AH: Could you talk about the symbolic meaning of the beauty pageants in Vietnamese communities?

NTL: [Laughed]. Beauty pageants are one of the ways in which the community engages with gender, with ideas about self and women’s place in the community. They’re also symbolic of other dynamics that occur such as the symbolic display of culture. A lot of it is symbolic for women. This is the only avenue for women to showcase their abilities to retain and navigate culture in the diaspora. This is one instant where women can be perceived as having power as cultural bearers of the lost nation, and as newly assimilated subjects in American society and throughout the diaspora. Beauty pageants are very meaningful because it allows the community to showcase what they perceive to be authentic cultural forms. It is a display of pride in the community.

AH: Could you talk about the Vietnamese cultural identity struggle involved in the building and naming of the area now called Little Sai Gon (over a Pan-Asian American village)?

NTL: My argument is that it is part of this recognition of the Vietnamese community and their struggles to forge an identity in the United States as subjects who experienced the war. The mobilization occurred because they didn’t want to disappear – they want to assert this distinctive identity as refugee subjects of a war that Americans failed to help them with. The nit-picky ways of articulating Vietnamese-ness demonstrate that there are larger issues involved here, because Vietnamese culture is something that is constructed, as is Chinese culture. These are subtle constructions but both ethnic communities are invested in their own political stakes. So it is about a political articulation of Vietnamese-ness.

AH: What is authentic about Vietnamese culture?

NTL: I don’t believe there is such a thing [laughed]. It is totally constructed and that’s why I am arguing that there is a concerted effort to make it authentically Vietnamese. I think it is important to contextualize it within history, especially of the war. This experience is unique because of the war and there are historical connections to be made. We can claim something as Vietnamese but the historical origin can never really be traced.

AH: Your study shows that Vietnamese identity in the U.S. is formed by the social political circumstances many of which are out of the control of the Vietnamese?

NTL: Yes. The Vietnamese have tried as much as they can to control it but a lot of it is out of their control. The fact that they are considered as a refugee group in need of assistance is not something they can do a lot about. They can control it in ways that are productive to their own interests. For example they mobilize against communism under those kinds of arguments.

AH: What is the future like for the Vietnamese community?

NTL: In the conclusion, I try to engage with the future and what it means for the community. I think one of the interesting aspects of what’s going on currently is there’s a lot of back and forth, the transnational exchange, that is in the realm of the private. [Laughed]. People are doing these things but they don’t want to admit to it. Because in the end, this community is still against communism to its core. Until this nation that they once called home becomes a liberal democracy, people are not going to publically recognize it as something legitimate.

AH: What is the relation of the homeland and the diaspora in terms of efforts to look for happiness?

NTL: In my new project, I am examining images of bridal photography to see how they engage with ideas about assimilation and modernity. I study how it is part of this larger process in which immigrants are looking to the homeland for authenticity. The gaze is multi-directional in that the people in the homeland are looking to the West to see how they would construct their images of happiness in marriage. At the same time, immigrants in the United States are looking back to Asia to see how they can authenticate their experiences because having been here a decade or two they are no longer in touch with their authenticity. So on their wedding day they decide, “ I think I want to go ethnic” [laughed].

This is part of how I conceive culture too – culture is always a beautiful set of ideas, that it is not something authentic. Authenticity is not ever reachable, in a sense.

Interviewer Anvi Hoang

- interview by Anvi Hoang.

Anvi Hoang is a writer, culture observer and promoter, gardener and traveler. She makes it one aim to celebrate Vietnamese people everywhere in her writing. Anvi is working to promote better appreciation of Western as well as traditional Vietnamese music. She lives in Bloomington, IN.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Nhi T. Lieu: Authenticity is not ever reachable

diaCRITICS will periodically have guest blogs. Here’s one from Stephen Sohn, professor of English at Stanford University, where he is completing a manuscript on Asian American cultural production. He often reviews Asian American literature at his blog.

Here’s Stephen Sohn’s review for Nguyễn Quí Đức’s 1994 memoir, Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family.

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'Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family'

I’ll start this review with an immediate caveat: there are particular linguistic notations, accents, and symbols that I won’t always be including in place names and ethnic names; I’ve already botched the name of the author, which should be written like so: Nguyễn Quí Đức. In any case, that being said, Nguyễn Quí Đức’s Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family expands the memoir’s focus in that it is both autobiographical and biographical; it spends time developing the strands of his mother’s, his father’s, and his life as they eventually diverge.

Nguyen, less one of his siblings, an older sister who suffers from mental illness, leaves Viet Nam as a refugee in 1975, while his parents stay behind for different reasons. His father, in particular, as a high ranking South Vietnamese governmental official, subsists in prison for many years. Nguyen’s re-writing of his father’s experiences are interesting in that it obviously would have taken an immense amount of interviewing and temporal reconstruction. Nguyen also relies upon poems that his father had written during his time in prison to help nuance the incredible challenges of his life as a prisoner; his constant movement, the endless monotonous days, and the persistent interrogation remind me much of Xiaoda Xiao’s work on life in prisons during and after China’s Cultural Revolution. His mother tries to remake her life in the post-war regime and maintains a steadfast hope that she will be reunited with her husband.

What is particularly fascinating is Nguyen’s construction of his diasporic subjectivity. Though his parents eventually do reunite and their family again rebuilds in the United States, Nguyen looks to Viet Nam as his home. Despite immense difficulty, he still manages to gain early entry into the country, hoping to reconnect with his roots. The epilogue reveals his critical and nostalgic stance toward conceptions of home, which I think is one of the emotional centers of this book: “In those moments when I shut out San Francisco and think of home, memories of war and a difficult past fade away. The pain is then replaced by the remembrance of family and friends, of rediscovered time and space, of a simpler way of life. . . . I know my notions of my homeland are romanticized. But I am also aware of the difficulties I would face if I were to return to life and live in Viet Nam” (262). The title poignantly refers to Nguyen’s journey to Viet Nam in order to recover the ashes of his older sister, who dies from a kidney infection, one developed while his mother was first visiting her husband after being apart for so many years. She had been suffering from an undiagnosed kidney issue for many years. In some sense, he travels to get the ashes that will symbolically reunite his entire family in the United States.

This memoir adds to the growing body of Vietnamese American memoirs (that include, for instance, Jade Huynh’s South Wind Changing, Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala) that detail the complicated American acculturation that follows the refugee movement.

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Stephen Hong Sohn, a former University of California President’s Postdoctoral fellow (2006-2007), is currently completing work on a manuscript on contemporary Asian American cultural production. He has co-edited Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (Temple University Press, 2006) as well as a special journal issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination (SLI, Vol. 37.1, Spring 2004) on Asian American Literature. He has recently completed editing a special journal issue for MELUS, entitled “Alien/Asian: Imagining The Racialized Future” (Winter 2008). He was co-chair of The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS), a literature society affiliated with the American Literature Association from 2006-2008.  Recent publications include the afterword to Myung Mi Kim’s Dura (reprinted by Nightboat Books).  He co-edited a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on the topic of “Theorizing Asian American Fiction” in 2010.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! A Review of Nguyễn Quí Đức’s ‘Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family’

diaCRITIC Anhvu Buchanan reports on jailed singer and Communist critic Viet Khang, and asks you to do something about his cause.

As some of you might know, there is a petition out there right now, urging the White House to press Vietnam harder on human rights.  This is a direct response to the “Free Viet Khang” movement, aiming to spread awareness of how brutal the Vietnamese Communist regime is.  Viet Khang is a talented and courageous musician.  It’s been a few months since the Vietnamese police arrested Viet Khang, a musician who was brave enough to raise the crimes of the Communist Party to the public.  Because of his music, Viet Khang is now in jail, but because of Viet Khang, the Communists are both scared and worried.

Two of Viet Khang’s songs have caused quite a stir in the country.  One song is titled “Viet Nam Toi Dau?”, which translates to “Where Is My Vietnam?”  The other song is called “Anh La Ai?”, when translated to English, means “Who Are You?”  Both of these songs raise some very core issues in Vietnam today, issues that the Vietnamese government has been trying to cover up for the longest time. I have included both below.

The song “Viet Nam Toi Dau (Where Is My Vietnam)?” raises the issues of the Chinese invasion and the islands of Paracel and Spratley.  Viet Khang sings about all of the embarrassing concessions that the Vietnamese government has made to China, and asks when it all went so wrong.

The second song is translated “Who Are You?” and includes below the English translation of the lyrics. The video briefly features a speech given by Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez.  Ms. Sanchez has  been an important advocate for the Vietnamese community in the state of California.

If you support the human rights movement, and would like to contribute to the cause, please sign this petition and help Free Viet Khang. All you have to do is click on the link below and follow a few simple steps.  It shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes.  The petition currently has 65,000 signatures but the more names we have, the more likely The White House will take this seriously. Please sign and help spread the word and let’s work together and #freevietkhang.

Sign this White House Petition and help Free Viet Khang

- Anhvu Buchanan

Anhvu Buchanan is a San Francisco-based poet with an MFA from San Francisco State University.  He co-curates The Living Room Reading Series and collects wonderful internet findings and blogs them.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! #FREEVIETKHANG: Singer Viet Khang Protests the Vietnamese Government

 diaCRITIC Kim-An Lieberman introduces us to a new Vietnamese American poet and her award-winning work of poetry.  Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out &  Back Again takes us readers into a child’s experience of immigration and the American South through the beautiful and lyrical storytelling.

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Vietnamese American literature continues to flourish, and author Thanhha Lai is one great reason why. As diaCRITICS noted last November, Lai won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature with her debut novel Inside Out & Back Again. (To relive the moment, click here and watch her acceptance speech.) She is, to our knowledge, the first Vietnamese American ever nominated for a National Book Award in any category. By winning, Lai joins such luminaries as Maxine Hong Kingston and Ha Jin in a very small club of Asian American authors to have achieved this prestigious recognition. Inside Out & Back Again was also recently selected as a 2012 Newbery Honor Book by the American Library Association—another Vietnamese American first.

A closer look at Lai’s much-lauded book reveals a thoughtful approach to storytelling that succeeds on many different levels at once. Following a family of refugees as they journey from Vietnam to the U.S., Inside Out & Back Again blends history lesson with coming-of-age tale. The story itself, as recounted by a spunky and introspective 10-year-old who shares the author’s name Hà, rings especially authentic for its semi-autobiographical status. Lai’s primary source material is her own childhood memory of escaping with her family from wartime Saigon—only to find herself equally embattled as a cultural outsider in Montgomery, Alabama. Additionally, while Lai writes with a young-adult audience in mind, lyrical language and multilayered subject matter ensure that readers of all ages will find much to appreciate.

Inside Out & Back Again is arranged chronologically to resemble a journal—a format strongly linked with narratives of girlhood, from Anne Frank to the Princess Diaries. To this familiar context, Lai brings extra depth by writing in poetry rather than prose. The language remains straightforward and accessible for younger readers; the poems themselves consist of short lines and compact stanzas that allow the plot to flow easily. At the same time, the line breaks and white space on each page lend a reflective, measured pace to Hà’s observations. Spare syntax encourages us to pause on key symbols and motifs, like a beloved backyard papaya tree in Saigon or the strange “hiss every s” sounds that Hà hears in her initial encounters with the English language (as exemplified in this excerpt from the book, describing Hà’s first days at an American grade school).

Lai’s choice to versify her novel also conveys an important cultural note. Just like any act of translation, rendering a non-English-speaking character’s thoughts in written English presents a challenge. Lai wanted her concise poetic lines to capture some of the innate characteristics of Vietnamese without compromising the English-language integrity of Hà’s voice. As the author explains in an interview with School Library Journal, “I thought in Vietnamese in terms of images, then translated those images into English in a way that left the rhythm of the original language intact. The Vietnamese I know, influenced by my mother, is naturally poetic, rhythmic, melodic….I was able to cut many unneeded words, leaving just the core, like boiling down sap to make syrup.” Lai also cites Vietnam’s best-known bard Nguyễn Du as an inspiration: “he can convey the world inside two lines of six or eight syllables. I’ve always loved that.”

Thanhha Lai

Another key to the book’s success is Lai’s ability to frame a moment from the past with concerns that remain widely relevant for middle-schoolers and adolescents today. Details of the communist takeover in Vietnam as well as the racially tense atmosphere in the 1970s American South infuse Inside Out & Back Again with historical realism. Hà’s inner thoughts and emotions, however, transcend her immediate time and place. Lai tackles issues like schoolyard bullying, which Hà endures almost daily for her first few months in Alabama, and the hardships faced by a single-parent working-class family, with Hà’s father still missing in action in Vietnam. Likewise, a central theme is Hà’s preteen puzzling through the intersection of gender and identity. The only daughter and youngest child in a household full of brothers, Hà resents being perceived as weaker or lesser than. She loves her family, but she is headstrong and opinionated—continually defying “girl” expectations both in traditional Vietnamese culture and in her new American home. Hà’s older brothers also embody a range of possibilities for what “boy” can mean, from sensitive animal-lover Khôi to muscled martial-arts aficionado Vũ (who rechristens himself “Vu Lee” after his movie idol Bruce). Once again, Lai strikes universal chords within an authentic and specific context. Her characters reflect core concerns of American adolescence, as well as aspects of the social value-shifting and recalibration of personal identity that go hand-in-hand with assimilation into a newly adopted culture.

Though a familiar story among both the Vietnamese diaspora and the many war-made diasporas beyond, Inside Out & Back Again offers a fresh telling to engage a new generation of readers. Its verse-novel format and resonant themes also reward deeper examination. Lai reminds us all to look back at history in order to look forward with better understanding. Fittingly, the book ends with distinct hope for a future enriched rather than burdened by the past:

Our lives
will twist and twist,
intermingling the old and the new
until it doesn’t matter
which is which.

 Kim-An Lieberman hails mostly from Seattle and holds a Ph.D. in English, specializing in Vietnamese American literature, from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Breaking the Map: Poems. More info at her website.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! A Winning Debut: Thanhha Lai’s ‘Inside Out & Back Again’

diaCRITICS special contributorHuy Vu reviews Victor Vu’s film Cô Dâu Đại Chiến (Battle of the Brides) .

Note: The follow review contains several spoilers about the plot of the film.

The Film

Wealthy playboy Thái (Huy Khánh) has finally found the love of his life. Unfortunately he’s also dating four other women at the time, and none of them know about each other. Through a series of “wacky” misunderstanding, he somehow manages to propose to every single one of them on the same day. Will he be able to get himself out of this one and marry his true love? More importantly, will anyone care?

Cô Dâu Đại Chiến is not a good film, not even close. Everything in this movie is over the top to the point of being cartoony, and all the “laughs” so forced and belabored that it feels like the film was made by a bunch of 10 years old giggling behind the camera the whole time. It’s pretty clear that director Victor Vũ (he also shares a co-screenwriting credit with Hồng Phúc) is doing this one on autopilot. His direction knows no restraints. All the actors chew through the scenery like they haven’t been fed in weeks; every line delivery and facial expression is exaggerated to the point of absurdity. A character can’t just look worried, he has to look WORRIED, and if somehow you didn’t manage to get it, there’ll be some kind of CG onscreen graphic, musical cue or cartoon sound effects to make sure that you do; there’s zero subtlety involved. The jokes mostly consist of slapsticks, “funny” sound effects, sight gags, characters mugging for the camera etc., and most of the time they fall flat. It feels like the filmmakers are just desperately throwing anything they can come up with at the screen and hoping that something sticks. Even serious moments in the film are marred by the comically overdramatic performances. A basic rule of comedy is if you’re going with an over-the-top approach, there has to be at least one “normal” character to contrast the    craziness. In this film everyone is so insanely off-the-wall that the audience quickly becomes numb to the endless series of gags. Simply having people “act” funny isn’t the same thing as “being” funny.

It was very frustrating watching this film because I knew that director Victor Vũ had already covered this material before, and much better, in his far superior film Chuyện Tình Xa Xứ (Passport to Love, 2009). That film has a similar subplot: A hard-partying playboy finds the love of his life and has to change his way. Except where Passport to Love‘s protagonist is always likeable despite his two-timing ways, Cô Dâu Đại Chiến’s Thái is a smarmy, fast taking A-hole who would barely be believable as a used car salesman, let alone a “modern day Don Juan” like the film tells us. Everything about this guy is annoying, from the porn mustache to the way he keeps turning to the camera to tell us his thoughts about relationship and how he likes his women (“good looking, smells good, and good looking”).

Would you sleep with this man? If the answer is yes, how much is he paying you?

Aside from the fact that he’s rich, it’s extremely hard to see how all these these girls could possibly fall head-over-heels for him. As a character, Thái is thinly written and he exhibits no growth at all throughout the film. He wants to be in a loving and stable relationship, yet the values that he looks for are shallow and superficial (Is she attractive? Is she willing to stay home to cook and clean for me? Is she ok with me continuing to see other women even after we get married?). Not once in the film does he express concern for someone else beside himself and he never stops to ask whether it’s him who needs to change. Instead he judges women by how their values fit into his life. The “winner” is the one who cramps his style the least.

It doesn’t help that the film presents the girls he dates as psychopaths with serious emotional issues, and it’s pretty much impossible to tell them apart aside from their job description. Phương, the airline attendant, is desperate for a relationship after a string of failed boyfriends. Quyên, the chef, is a control freak. Mai Châu, the doctor, is a party girl; and Trang, the actress, is a gold digger. Even Linh, the girl he falls in love with (spoiler alert!), is revealed to be an obsessed woman who has been stalking Thái for TEN YEARS in order to get revenge after he dumped her back in high school. I do give the film credit for that unexpected ending, if only because the character finally gets his comeuppance, but the twist comes out of nowhere in the last 5 minutes of the film and is never even hinted at throughout the previous proceedings. This leads me to believe that even the filmmakers realized  that there’s no way to rehabilitate a character this badly written, and so they decided to just go M. Night Shyamalan on us and do something completely nonsensical to end the film on.

Technical

Although shot on a RED One camera, Cô Dâu Đại Chiến simply doesn’t look that good. Most indoor scenes were shot flat with very minimal lighting and outdoor scenes suffer from overcast conditions. Granted, a $500,000 budget is not a lot of money and the weather in Vietnam is often not conductive to outdoor shooting, but not much attention seems to have been given to the look of the film. Shot choices and staging are unimaginative at best, although some crane and dolly shots do provide some variety. The end result looks more like a high budget television drama than a feature film. To be honest I wouldn’t have cared less what the film looks like if the content had been compelling, but the fact that it’s not simply draws attention to the flaws of the cinematography.

The film features numerous CG sequences, and these are of similarly poor quality. In the opening scene the camera tracks a knife as it’s being throw, and it’s immediately obvious when the knife changes from a prop into a fake looking CG counterpart, then back to the prop again. I’m of the opinion that if you can’t afford good CG, don’t use them at all or use them very sparingly. This film uses them all the time and not in a very subtle manner, which often serves to pull the audience out of the film.

The music is a mix of instrumental tracks and Vietnamese songs, and they’re fine if unmemorable. The film appear to not have been dubbed, and the soundtrack is clear, which is nice.

Final Words

I can’t recall another film where I’ve felt so openly hostile to every single character on screen, even our supposed protagonist. There is just really no attempt to humanize any of the characters; they’re presented as stereotypes and they stay that way throughout the film. Yet for the story to work we’re expected to feel sympathy for them. This film feels very much like a throwaway production that has been rushed through the door as quickly as possible in order to make a quick buck (and it seemed to have worked, because this film took in more than $1.4 million at the box office, about 3 times its budget). While I’m glad that everyone involved made money, I feel that in order for Vietnamese cinema to evolve and stand on its own, we have to start seeing more sophisticated films than this. The industry has to move away from focusing purely on sex appeal and juvenile humor at the expense of a compelling story and multifaceted characters. Here’s to hoping that the audience will start voting with their wallet, and force all Vietnamese filmmakers to elevate their game.

A Bay Area native, Huy discovered his love for filmmaking in high school but did not decide to pursue it as a career until he entered college. While earning a degree in Chemical Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, he studied cinematography on the side and spent the next four years practicing his craft. After college he continues to pursue filmmaking and hope to one day make it a full time career. To date his films have screened at several film festivals in the U.S and in Vietnam including the Vietnamese International Film Festival, the San Diego Asian Film Festival, and the Yxine Film Festival, earning several awards including Best Director and Best Cinematography. You can find out more about his work at www.hiddendreammedia.com.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Cô Dâu Đại Chiến (Battle of the Brides, 2011) Review

diaCRITICS special contributor Sahra Vang Nguyen reviews Jenna Le’s brand-new book of poetry Six Rivers.  Jenna Le, a second generation Vietnamese American, draws from six rivers to illustrate and articulate various experiences from mythology to personal history.

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Jenna Le’s debut collection of poetry, Six Rivers, is a vividly illustrated stream of writing and beautifully evocative of past, present and mythical memories.  Her subject matter reaches as far back as her mother’s homeland, Vietnam; tangos in modern America with her experiences as a second generation Vietnamese American; and extends into an imaginative dimension dancing with characters of the dead.  The book’s composition is craftily broken up into six sections, each named after a different river that is representative of her creative casting. The Perfume River, located in Hue, Vietnam, encompass tales of Vietnam; the Mississippi River sheds childhood memories of growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Charles River share aching love stories from her college years studying in Boston, Massachusetts; in the Hudson River, love and relationships intensify during her post-graduate studies in New York; the Aorta summons a medical theme as Jenna Le eventually becomes a practicing physician; the River Styx, where the god of the underworld, Hades, resides, is an ironically refreshing leap into the future because it advances the reader into a beautiful afterworld that is not meant to incite death but rather inspire from the past.

In “Inheritance,” Jenna Le, paints a beautiful and honest picture of her Vietnamese American identity as the product of war and diaspora:

I have my ancestors to thank/ for the skin between my stretch marks . . . No other heirlooms have lasted . . . I have last century’s warmongers to thank for this sorry fact: politicians, children trained to kill/ and an ocean, stormy-yellow-black.

The skin between her stretch marks elucidates the “tough skin” Vietnamese people have developed through centuries of war, imperialism, global diaspora and rebuilding livelihoods in new nations.  Through distressing times, people’s spirits are stretched thin, and Vietnamese people are not one to be broken; with buoyancy on refugee boats and the torrent tide of changing times, they bounce back.  In America, the Vietnamese community have a reputation for losing it all and rebuilding, from the Fall of Saigon to Hurricane Katrina; no other heirlooms have survived but the spirit of endurance.  The warmongers, child soldiers and stormy-yellow-black ocean speak to the devastating impact the Vietnam War has had on growing generations of Vietnamese Americans.

Not only is Le’s writing vivid and fervent, she has a knack for drawing powerful analogies.  In “Tanka (Epitaph For A Young Woman),” her simile for love brings tingles to the back of the reader’s neck:

Her love for her husband/ was like saffron/ a spice made by grinding/ a crocus’s female sex organs/ til just powder remains.

Sensual and provocative, she describes how a love so hot and spicy can make the lover soft, tender and delicate.

In my favorite piece of Le’s, “Haibun,” she reveals the everlasting pain of her abortion:

. . . death doesn’t borrow: it only takes./ Noon sun dries, but cannot heal/ an umbrella/ the storm turned inside-out . . .

The irreversible decision of aborting her child leaves her forever damaged.  There is no way to fill such a void, not even another child in the future.  That kind of loss will eternally leave a part of her hollowed out.

There is not one word or one theme that can encapsulate Jenna Le’s collection of poetry, Six Rivers.  She employs an array of poetic forms from the sonnet to the haibun. She introduces the reader to a range of characters—dead, alive and mythical.  As a lover, a medical practician and a storyteller, she demonstrates that her identity as a Vietnamese American is not confined to the social constructions of her skin.  She is snarky, humorous, vulnerable and imaginative. Six Rivers evokes a range of emotions—inspiration, empathy and sometimes discomfort. While the chapter ends on the Styx River, it leads you to summon the past in order to imagine new possibilities.

Jenna Le

Jenna Le is a second-generation Vietnamese-American, born and raised just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota. She holds degrees from Harvard University (a B.A. in Mathematics) and Columbia University (an M.D.). 

Sahra Vang Nguyen is a writer, painter and perpetual student on the path of exploring the human potential.  On the professional tip, she is the full-time Director of the Writing Success Program at the University of California, Los Angeles where she helps students discover their voice, power and confidence through the writing process. You can learn more about her art here: www.riotinthesky.com.

Sahra Vang Nguyen

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please like, share, and comment on this post! A Review of Jenna Le’s ‘Six Rivers’

diaCRITICS occasionally features guest blogs and reprints. Originally published in Finding the Words, this essay by Madeleine Thien is about the casualties of war.  But more than that, it is about the ghosts who still wander long after the fire has ceased, looking for their place in history.  Most of us gaze upon photographs and stories of people trapped in war and fail to realize the most important detail: They were human beings.

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Bao Ninh, now living in Hanoi, became a novelist in the second half of his life. Until the age of forty, he served in the North Vietnamese Army, fighting the Americans for a decade along the Ho Chi Minh trail, then passing another decade as part of the NVA’s body-gathering team. Demobilized in 1987, he began to write. Three years later, he published his first and only novel, The Sorrow of War. It is a slim book, so small that it would fit easily into a coat pocket.

My own copy, an English translation, came from a bookseller in Phnom Penh. The paper is thin and nearly transparent; dog-eared and worn, the book is in fact a photocopy of a photocopy. The sentences slope crookedly across the page and in some places, the text is smudged and faded from humidity. These counterfeit copies are everywhere in Southeast Asia, available in bookshops, in sidewalk stalls, sold by children roaming the streets. Reading from it in the April heat of Phnom Penh, I feel as if the very air changes. The novel collapses time, collapses worlds.

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Kien, the novel’s central character, joins the North Vietnamese Army in Hanoi when he is eighteen years old. By the time Saigon falls, in 1975, his brigade of five hundred men has been obliterated and more than three million Vietnamese have died in the war. His last duty is to travel the length of the country, trying to find and identify the bodies of those who remain missing in action, a mission that takes eleven years. “If you can’t identify them by name,” the head of his team tells him, “we’ll be burdened by their deaths forever.”

As Kien works his way across the postwar battlefield—abandoned now, brazenly lush, idyllic—ghosts free themselves from the mud. They play cards, drink, lose themselves in romantic and lustful abandon; they die, decay, sing, and tell dirty jokes, while Kien drinks cup after cup of brandy, “the way a barbarian would, as if to insult life.” The dead step from every corner, every house, every jungle trail, creating a narrative structure that feels like a tide coming in and washing out—relentless—more like labyrinth upon labyrinth than any solid Aristotelian form.

Here, the dead remember other dead, they call up their own ghosts, so that we are always remembering, and living, through an infinite corridor of others.

Unable to comprehend the present, Kien begins writing about the past, “mixing his own fate with that of his heroes,” embracing a turbulence of memory anchored to neither time nor space, which adheres only to “that circled arena of his soul.” The uprush of so many beings, writes Bao Ninh, “penetrated Kien’s mind, ate into his consciousness.” Kien takes it upon himself to make a place for as many of the lost, the unnamed, as he can, writing a story in which “any page seemed like the first, any page could have been the last,” becoming in the process a kind of composite, invoking the dead in order to keep his life afloat, dissolving himself in first-, second-, and even thirdhand remembrances. The stories, of a time when “all of us were young, very pure, and very sincere,” become his only reality in a world reborn.

Eventually, even Kien himself will disappear, replaced by a different storyteller, perhaps the author himself, perhaps not.

“Who else but you can experience your life?” A simple question, voiced by Kien’s stepfather, but one that Bao Ninh turns inside out. Rather, the reader experiences just how many lives Bao Ninh can bequeath to us through the single, solitary mind of Kien, through a character who never quite solidifies, who floats from night to night; from the jungle to the city; from existence to disappearance.

Bao Ninh

Near the end of the novel, Bao Ninh asks, “As for the author, although he wrote ‘I,’ who was he in that scout platoon? Was he any of those ghosts, or of those remains dug up in the jungle?”

Was he any of them, all of them, or none at all? Bao Ninh’s literary creation is an empty man, a sieve, who is brought alive by other voices. Kien survives the war but his identity, his self, is ruptured. He becomes both a full and an empty vessel, a character who knows that only a greater humanity, a flood of conflicting voices, will hold his self together. “Let our stories become ashes now,” a young woman tells Kien at the war’s end, wanting him to forget the past. In the moment, neither recognizes that ash remains, that the residue survives the conflagration. “I know, of course,” wrote Bertolt Brecht, “only through luck did I survive so many friends. But tonight in a dream I heard these friends say of me, ‘Those who are stronger survive.’ And I hated myself.”

*

On its initial publication in 1990, The Sorrow of War was briefly banned in Bao Ninh’s homeland. Since then, however, it has become Vietnam’s most beloved war novel, a book celebrated for its relentless, humane depiction of the generation that fought the war. Here in North America, Bao Ninh’s novel has been criticized for being rambling, incoherent, untidy, and uncontrolled, for lacking the poignancy and clarity of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Perhaps the critics are right. Or perhaps fiction, like the human mind itself, is more elastic than we give it credit for. The Sorrow of War defies, takes apart, its own structure, makes a mockery of linearity, in order to voice its truth.

In Cambodia, the artists who might have told the story of their war—the writers, poets, dancers, filmmakers, painters, artisans, and musicians—were killed. Among the two million Cambodians who lost their lives during the Khmer Rouge revolution, an estimated 90 percent of the country’s artists died of starvation and disease, or were murdered in the fields or in the prisons of the Khmer Rouge. Others were silenced by exile and poverty: Libraries were emptied and Cambodian writers became like Brecht’s banished poets: “Not only their bodies but even their works were destroyed.”

Images, not words, have come to represent the Cambodian genocide. The most famous of these are the thousands of photographs from Tuol Sleng, a high school in Phnom Penh that was converted into a prison and used primarily to murder “enemies” within the Khmer Rouge itself. The majority of Tuol Sleng’s victims were peasants, cadres, cooperative leaders, soldiers, and commandants who fought for Pol Pot and his ministers, as well as students and teachers who returned home from abroad, hoping to serve their country; the remaining victims came from all walks of life, all age groups, and all professions. Of the sixteen thousand prisoners who were brought there, there are eleven known survivors.

Nhem Ein, the Khmer Rouge cadre who photographed each prisoner, was asked how he wanted people to react when they viewed his pictures. “Firstly,” he said, “they should thank me … When they see that the pictures are nice and clear, they [should] admire the photographer’s skill. None have any technical errors. Secondly, they should feel pity and compassion toward the prisoners.” I have been to Tuol Sleng many times. In the hot, stale rooms, air disappears. The tiled floors are dirty and stained. After grief and pity, what I feel is rage and a determination to understand. Movements and ideologies do not spring from the air; we are building them all the time, persuading ourselves of their value, following their bright promises to utopia. Such tidy narratives, in myth or in literature, succeed only in evoking an illusory land, more false than the ghosts of Bao Ninh’s landscapes.

In the photocopies of photocopies, translations upon translations, Bao Ninh’s ghosts have been granted a second, enduring life. The Sorrow of War can be found in the placid northern guesthouses of Laos, and in the endless shelves of the Kinokuniya Bookstore in San Francisco. In June 2010, I took a bus from Bucharest to the Black Sea, where some two thousand years ago, Ovid passed his final decade in lonely exile. I spoke about The Sorrow of War to a colloquium of Romanian and international writers, carrying in my pocket the same dog-eared photocopied book I acquired in Phnom Penh. As I read from the novel’s pages on the edge of the Black Sea, the salty air slowly diminished, and Kien’s jungle, once again, grew lush. Such is the strange world of fiction, where words allow us to live again an unlived experience, where memory can be preserved on paper. Between ourselves and the most enduring works of art—whether a poem, a painting, a piece of music, a film—every return widens our vision. We hope, each time, to carry ourselves deeper into the encounter. We hope to carry more of the world, and our own experiences, with us.

In 1997, twenty-two of Nhem Ein’s Tuol Sleng photos were enlarged and exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In MoMA’s brief exhibition text, there was little context and almost no history. The viewer, gazing into the faces of children about to be executed, would not know, for instance, how Khmer Rouge leaders had educated themselves in the Marxist study groups of Paris, how some Western leftist intellectuals had shrugged off criticism of the Khmer Rouge revolution—dismissing the stories of Cambodian refugees as American propaganda—or how our governments supported Pol Pot after 1979, how we allowed his foreign ministers to hold Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations until 1993. The photographer was credited as “unknown”—a falsehood—and the individuals in the photos as “unidentifiable.”

In a country where so many lost their voices, it seems absurd that pictures taken by executioners were believed capable of telling the entire story. Perhaps MoMA’s curators, like Nhem Ein himself, believed the pictures to be so complete that they could exist independently as artistic objects: images of suffering, relics of tragedy so powerful that they required no words, no prior knowledge when a stranger approached them. Nhem Ein’s photographs are distressingly beautiful. Thousands and thousands of times, men, women, and children stared directly into the camera’s lens, unsure if they were seeing their brother or their murderer. Unable to hope, unwilling to despair, their faces remain fixed in a grievous calm.

But here, in the present, the ghosts should be allowed words and a history, a time and a place of living, a specificity. It seems so little to give or to receive. Instead, they became mute images from a foreign war, distorted by our projections: of suffering, innocence, brutality, madness, and incomprehensible ethnic conflict. As the journalist Nic Dunlop wrote, “The victims are presented as the Khmer Rouge saw them: without a name, without family, without an identity or country.”

“The philosophy,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “of art for art’s sake ends, if it has the courage to pursue its tenets to their logical conclusions, in the idolization of beauty. Should we happen to conceive of the beautiful in terms of burning torches we will be prepared, like Nero, to set living human bodies aflame.” Pol Pot was, as Arendt described Hitler, true until the end to his own ideology: enacting a revolution he believed would strengthen Cambodia and purify its people. Both men were “prepared to sacrifice everything to this consonance, this ‘beautiful’ consistency.”

A few years ago, attending a writers’ conference in Boston, Bao Ninh was interviewed by an American who had served in Vietnam. The American, Marc Levy, was met with reticence when he asked Bao Ninh to describe the NVA’s tactics, jungle strategies, and ideological training. Finally, Levy asked Bao Ninh if there was something more he wished to say, something their interview had overlooked. “We were human beings,” Bao Ninh said simply. “That is what you must tell people. We were human beings.”

In 2006, rumored to have finished a second novel, Bao Ninh admitted that since the publication of The Sorrow of War, he had written continuously but he did not know if he would ever publish again. “I keep stopping myself,” he said. “I keep holding myself back.” Now, at the age of fifty-eight, he edits a weekly literary supplement in Hanoi, and he lives the life of a reclusive author made famous by a book that, in its selflessness, in its lost individuality, managed to speak for a generation. Like Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, the novel spans not only the unfolding of many lives, but a profound psychological plummet. “There’s been a lie told,” says a former Viet Cong, now double agent, in Johnson’s novel. “I’ve told it. I’m going to let the truth reclaim me.”

Soon, I’ll return to Cambodia, a country that I love, and one that continues in an uneasy peace. There, another generation, born after the last UN peacekeepers withdrew from the country in 1993, is slowly finding its voice. I have met dancers, journalists, painters, and musicians alive in their art. They do not idolize beauty. They create art not for art’s sake, but from necessity, to hold together what is beautiful and what was broken, to seduce, to escape, and to conjure from themselves some small thing that will last, to be encountered again and again, retold, experienced anew, like photocopies scattered across a region, like persistent efforts, as all of us grow older.

Originally published in Finding the Words, edited by Jared Bland. Copyright © 2011 by Madeleine Thien.

Madeleine Thien is the author of three books of fiction, including Simple Recipes, a collection of stories, and Certainty, a novel.  Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Five Dials, Brick, PEN America, Warscapes, and the Asia Literary Review, and her work has been translated into seventeen languages.  In 2010, she received the Ovid Festival Prize, awarded each year to an international writer of promise.  Her most recent book, Dogs at the Perimeter, will be published by Granta Books in 2012.  Born in Vancouver, she divides her time between Montreal and Berlin.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Photocopies of Photocopies: On Bao Ninh

diaCRITICS is excited to share this L.A. Times Q&A with artist Gabby Quynh-Anh Miller, where she discusses the restrictive cultural and political environment for artists in Viet Nam by shedding light on the contributions of Nha San Studio. Founded in 1998, Nha San was the first artist-led, non-profit alternative arts organization in the country. Dividing her time between Berkeley (CA) and Hanoi, Miller co-runs Nha San Studio as something “separate from the commercial realm, purposefully separate, and intentionally separate from the state-run way of doing things,” as she puts it. Her insights illuminate the potency of performance art in Viet Nam, plus the necessary obliqueness of artistic expression in a country within where debates about propriety and authenticity occur within the need for 17 stamps. Miller’s accompanying video, Dream of Lakes, makes a fine companion piece to the Q&A.

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Gabby Quynh-Anh Miller

Gabby Quynh-Anh Miller is a Vietnamese American conceptual artist who jets from California to Vietnam, bouncing between the live-and-let-live lifestyle of the Bay Area and the strictures of a single-party state slammed by human rights groups for cracking down on peaceful bloggers and activists.

Her work is currently showing alongside that of other artists who are from, or trace their ancestry to, Southeast Asia. The group exhibition in New Jersey is titled “Me Love You Long Time.”

The Times talked to Miller about making art in a country where speech isn’t always so free.

What is the art scene like in Vietnam, and how is it different from California?

It’s so different. There’s a huge amount of commercial galleries that mostly cater to tourists. Then there’s the fine arts university which is government-run and really based on early 20th century French teaching methods mixed with Socialist realism, mixed with advertising techniques, I guess you’d say.

Wait, let’s stop for a second. What does 20th century French mixed with Socialist realism mixed with advertising look like?

Weird. You spend five years honing the craft of drawing and painting in a very classical style. And with every new regime, the art school got taken over. The communist or revolutionary government took it over and it became a production center for propaganda and Socialist realist art.

Nha San Studio, the space we’re running, is separate from the commercial realm, purposefully separate, and intentionally separate from the state-run way of doing things. It opened in 1998 and it’s the first and longest-running artist-run experimental space in Vietnam.

In Vietnam, you have to ask for permission from the Ministry of Culture to do any public exhibition. So that means you give documentation of your work, what it’s going to be … some kind of explanation of the work’s meaning to the cultural police, and you say, “Is this OK?”

So we register every event as a family gathering to circumvent that.

Still from "Dream of Lakes"

Do you have a sense of what would get you shut down?

The way things in Vietnam operate, you don’t really know what the repercussions are. It’s at the whim of whoever is in charge at whatever gate you’re trying to get through.

A lot of international businesspeople doing work in Vietnam will complain about the hoops you have to jump through to get something approved. The rumor is that you need to get something stamped 17 times — and the implication is you maybe have to pay off 17 people.

The art world is just part of that bigger world. We’ve gotten in the habit of not even asking for permission because it opens you up to possibly having to pay a bribe.

How did you decide to go to Vietnam?

My mom is Vietnamese, and in 2005 I was going to college, and I didn’t want to go to college anymore. So I bought a one-way ticket [to go] there and I started working in art galleries. I ended up going back to school and doing my anthropology thesis on experimental art in Hanoi. It got me hooked.

People forget that Vietnam is a police state because you can go there so freely now. There’s repression of all kinds. Then you have these artists who are doing something totally strange — experimenting with performance and doing installations — which isn’t necessarily weird in America, but in Vietnam it’s definitely weird. That’s inspiring for me –- people trying to express themselves despite considerable potential repercussions and lack of understanding and support. Vietnam really needs artists.

If people are worried about getting their art approved, does “weirdness” play a different role for Vietnamese artists? Is it safer to do something weird?

There’s a lot of doublespeak in Vietnam. Journalists and lawyers are, on a regular basis, being silenced or taken away. Everyone knows that’s happening. No one talks about it that much. So everything is pretty oblique in terms of the way that artists are trying to communicate.

They’ll say, “I’m talking about my personal experience.” They won’t say it’s about society. Or they don’t want to explain their art -– because, if they put it into words, that gives [authorities] fodder for you to be chased after or hassled. Any artwork in that sort of context has a real power to it, a potency to it. You know that people are using these ways of communicating because they’re not really allowed to speak freely.

There are also debates about national identity that very much have taken place in art. The debate about what is art is really a debate about what is Vietnamese.

What kinds of things do people fear are not Vietnamese?

It’s not just the authorities, it’s within artists’ circles themselves. Two years ago, we founded this performance art symposium where we invited artists from other countries to work with artists in Hanoi for five days. More and more people came every day to watch the performances.

On the last day, we had a packed house … and we did a string of performances. In the final one, artist La Thi Dieu Ha did a performance in which she took off all her clothes, put a live bird in her mouth and released it. Pictures of this flooded the Internet, and it sparked debate about public decency –- contending that this performance was neither Vietnamese nor art.

There were repercussions from authorities — questioning of the artists, and the studio’s permission to hold any events was put on a temporary hold. But we opened back up with a beautiful installation.

At the same time, I can see that also freaking people out in some parts of the U.S. What kinds of things are sensitive in Vietnam that might not be sensitive here?

Nudity, politics, history. … But in the past six years, art that was taken immediately off the walls is now OK to be on the walls. The painter Ly Tran Quynh Giang submitted a painting of two women having sex to an exhibition of young artists hosted by the Fine Arts Assn. After the first day of the exhibition, the work was taken down. Now, Giang is in a book that’s a canon of 12 contemporary artists in Vietnam. I would say that conversations about sexuality are changing much more rapidly and openly than conversations about politics.

Still from "Dream of Lakes"

Do you find the art you make in Vietnam is different than what you make in California?

I’ve gotten more interested in performance art — which I don’t really identify with. In Vietnam, performance has become a really potent medium because it can be economical and can take place anywhere.

For instance, [fellow artist] Phuong Linh Nguyen and I made these business cards, which are really silly, but they’ve become this continuous performance in our daily lives. The photos make us look like call girls. [Each has a business card with a racy photo that says they’re a “personal assistant” to the other.]

We gave those out at a performance art event, joking about our relationship because we’re always helping each other. And within a few hours people were calling us, saying, “How much do you cost?” We’d hang up and they’d call the other one and say, “How much do YOU cost?”

When we tried to get them printed, the little hole-in-the-wall printing press told us, “We can’t print that.” It’s legitimate to be afraid of getting into trouble. The business card started as a joke — but the joke reveals real issues of working as an artist, of power and sexuality.

Recently I wrote this interview for an English-language magazine based in Hanoi with MEN, a [gay] Brooklyn-based dance music group that is playing a show in Hanoi in March. I did an interview with them and sent it to the magazine and they said, “We need to change the angle because we can’t have any mention of homosexuality in the article.”

Within the same week, I published a very open interview about being gay in a Vietnamese-language magazine with no problem -– the editor of the magazine actually commissioned me to write it. As far as I know, there is no actual rule, but they were afraid of the consequences of broaching social taboos.

So what did you do with the article?

First I sent them back a joke version where I just blacked out all the words like “gay.” Eventually I rewrote it and sent in these very handsome pictures of the band, differently gendered or just different, that alone should spark people’s interest.

I feel weird about it. I self-censored. But you have to try as many angles as possible. The band is all about visibility and gay liberation. I was trying to find a way to play a joke on the rules.

please like, share, and comment on this post! Gabby Quynh-Anh Miller on Making Art and Trouble in Viet Nam

diaCRITICS is pleased to feature the following profile and interview with Alex Luu, a Chinese/Vietnamese who left Viet Nam during April 1975. Today he is a critically acclaimed L.A.-based solo performance artist, workshop facilitator/teacher, and independent filmmaker who graduated from UCLA’s School of Film/Television. Luu has been performing nationally since 1989 and facilitating/teaching the MY OWN STORY (MOS) workshop since 1997. Luu’s autobiographical “performance theater” work addresses themes such as identity, racism, body image/politics, family dynamics and the overall under-representation of people of color (especially Asian American males) in mainstream media & culture. Here Margaret Rhee describes her own experiences with MOS and offers insight into Luu’s motivations.

Luu performs Thursday March 15 and Friday March 16 at Subterranean Arthouse in Berkeley, CA, with an artist’s talk Friday March 16 at UC Berkeley. Details follow the interview.

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Alex Luu's 'Three Lives'

In 2003, as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, I had the opportunity to participate in My Own Story (MOS), a workshop for Asian American students led by performance artist Alex Luu.  My Own Story was an intensive eight weeks of writing exercises, theatre blocking, and Theatre of the Oppressed praxis, which by the end of the process, participants are transformed.  By the end, Asian American students who felt they could never write, perform, or share, or even had a story, did—it was a beginning for many.  An acclaimed performance artist, Luu’s one-man show “Three Lives” is a raw & compelling inter-generational story of diaspora from Vietnam to America.  A multi-layered portrait of war, dislocation, and redemption that is at once comical and heartrendingly poignant.  As a facilitator he supports participants to dig deep within themselves and share humanizing stories they never knew they had and perhaps were always scared to tell.

With Alex’s vital encouragement, my first performance piece through MOS was about my Father, who at the time was ill in the hospital.  While seemingly stereotypically stoic and oftentimes distant, my Korean American immigrant Father always encouraged my childhood interests in theatre, performance, and art. My parents were divorced, so growing up the rare and beautiful moments we spent one-on-one happened around my performances in school plays.  While seemingly ironic for a “typical” Korean American immigrant father, it was through theatre I could always count on him.  My Father never missed a show.

MOS was the first time I wrote my own performance piece and wrote about my Father.  Through the process of working with Alex and hearing other participants’ stories, I realized how often Asian American stories of happiness, trauma, and pain, are obscured and silenced.  It was through Alex I first learned about the Vietnamese refugee experience through his moving and powerful story about his father and grandfather’s refugee experience, as well as his own.  It was only with Alex’s support that I was able to write and perform my own piece, an important process as my father drifted into a coma during the beginning of the workshop process.  How to begin to mourn?  It was on the eve of our final performance at USC when my father passed away.  And in a small way, I believe he stayed, just until the very end of the show’s run.

I experienced firsthand the transformative nature of Alex’s work.  As an artist, he shares his own experience of the Vietnamese Diaspora while giving the tremendous gift for others to claim their own stories.  Something Asian Americans often never have the chance to do.  Luu has been performing & facilitating/teaching the MY OWN STORY (MOS) workshop nationally since 1989.  Currently he is a visiting guest artist lecturer at the University of California, Davis. Addressing themes of identity, racism, body image/politics and family dynamics, Luu’s performance works have been seen at Highways Performance Space, UC Davis Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, and this week, The Subterrarean Art House in Berkeley, California.

It’s been eight years since I first worked with Alex as an undergraduate, and I’m thrilled to see him perform in Berkeley where I am currently a doctoral candidate specializing in Asian American Studies.  Additionally, Alex will be performing and conducting a special guest talk/workshop at UC Berkeley this week as well.  We are currently collaborating on an anthology of My Own Story performance piece.  I’m honored for the opportunity to incorporate the MOS stage performances to the printed page—enriching the fabric of what we know as our Asian American lives.  Returning to MOS now reminds me once again, how important our stories are, how human our stories are.

Below is a short portion of an email interview exchange with Alex.  He wrote between his travels from UC Davis to Berkeley, and back to Los Angeles where Alex is based.

For those are not familiar, what is MY OWN STORY?

MY OWN STORY (MOS) is an autobiographical writing/storytelling/performing workshop/course for People/Students of Color that I have taught/facilitated for almost 16 years now. In a nutshell, MOS allows participants/students to come into a safe/creative space that I create, a safe/creative space wherein they can be completely themselves and dig deep, really deep beyond the surface and unearth, explore, discover (re-discover) autobiographical life stories. These are stories that are to a great degree, misrepresented/stereotyped, and often forgotten by mainstream media/culture.

Where have you taught it? How is the experience transformative to students? To you?

I have taught it at theaters, arts organizations, college/high school campuses. Most recently I have taught it at UC Davis, Berklee College of Music (Boston), and for the Ford Theatre Foundation. The experience is completely transformative in that it really allows participants to really tell their own stories on their own terms. It’s also transformative because it is a thoroughly organic process/journey–participants go into the course/workshop looking at certain things one way and gradually, become more and more open to recognizing that they DO have powerful, hilarious, poignant, triumphant, painful stories. By looking at these stories head-on, participants always end up empowering themselves AND go through healing.

It’s transformative for me every time I teach/facilitate MOS because with each group, I myself learn beautiful, tender, difficult stories and I am literally a much more enriched human being after each MOS group.

Can you tell us about THREE LIVES?

THREE LIVES is my full-length autobiographical one-man show that I’ve been performing since ’97. It had its debut that year at LACE in Los Angeles and ever since then I’ve been touring it on and off in different parts of the country. THREE LIVES is a kinetic roller coaster ride that combines performance art, theater, raw/intense physical movement, poetry, and monologue in telling the multi-generational (spanning 4 decades) of my Chinese/Vietnamese’s journey from war-torn Vietnam to America. It deals with dislocation of home, the violent cycles of war (on the battlefield and home), racism, identity, and ageism. It is also a comical & heart wrenching (and heartrending) portrait of the men in my family as they have dealt with the American Dream/Nightmare.

What was your process in writing it?

Since “Three Lives” is completely autobiographical, it can be said that I had basically “lived” with my story for many many years… The writing process was really lightning in a bottle. When I sat down to finally write it, it literally took me no more than 4 and a half days/3 nights! I’ll never forge that experience/process. It shocked me how quick everything came out. By the time I sat down to write the show, my body, thoughts, emotions were completely filled with all the memories/images/sensations/voices/stories of each and every character that it was quite effortless. I literally sat down at my desk and kept on writing and writing and writing… no real breaks, except to go to the bathrooms and eating. Everything just poured out of me, it was a cathartic experience and also bittersweet because I weeped a lot during parts of the writing process.

How was it healing?

It was healing because for the first time really, I was able to channel all of the wonderful (and extremely PAINFUL) stories and memories of me and my family, the most visceral being my relationship with my grandfather, who actually passed during the week that I wrote the show. When he passed, it gave the show even more specificity, focus, and power. I was already giving my grandpa a voice….his voice, because he never had one when he came to the US. It was also healing because I finally had to face some of the ghosts from my past, some ghosts from Vietnam ever since I left in ’75.

Do you find art as healing to the refugee experience?

Absolutely. Definitely for me, because art is the medium that gives me carte blanche to wrestle some of the ghosts/demons of my past, re-look at them face-to-face (sort to speak) and give these themes and experiences their due, even if some of these experiences and memories are negative.

What is significant about Vietnamese Diaspora?

In my opinion, it’s significant because it says so much about colonialism and the uprooting of culture. It is also significant because for better or worse, it is inextricably linked to Europe and America and how that link has affected and transformed so many lives and experiences.

How is it like teaching and performing in the Bay Area? Boston? LA?

Teaching & performing in the Bay Area, well, at least performing, is always exciting. I performed here years ago back in the late 90′s and the overall audience was completely receptive. As for Boston, it’s really become a second home to me, because I’ve spent the most time there performing/teaching there. The experiences I’ve had in Boston have also been interesting and unique because for the most part (and I’m speaking here dating back to late 90′s) there was no real strong presence in the Asian American performance art scene. I remember when I first had “Three Lives” debut there in ’99, so many folks (Asian and non-Asian) came up to me after the shows and thanked me because they said there was nothing like my work in that area around that time… Performing/teaching in LA is somewhat challenging, mainly because there is a lack of space, physical space to do the workshops. So actually, whenever funding/sponsorship comes through for a MOS workshop, I am always quite surprised!!

Who are your mentors?

Definitely Dan Kwong. Without the intensive training I’ve received under Dan, I would not be here doing the work that I am and have been doing since 1989. Other individuals that I have learned from are Shishir Kurup, Nobuko Miyamoto, Luis Alfaro, Rachel Rosenthal, and indirectly Augusto Boal.

Why Theatre of the Oppressed?

Because that is, in my humble opinion, one of the most seminal and real and all-inclusive forms of art/performance/theater. The philosophy and discipline of Theatre of the Oppressed, when I first learned of it and trained in (years ago) spoke to me because it actually gave me the challenge and ultimate reward/empowerment to tell my OWN stories on MY OWN terms. Theatre of the Oppressed also deals specifically with art that not only entertains, but also has as its foundation the tenets/dynamics of healing, liberation, and empowerment, especially for the disenfranchised/marginalized communities.

Alex Luu performs “Three Lives” on Thursday March 15 & Friday 16 at the Subterranean ArtHouse at Berkeley.  Special opening act by Loa Niumeitolu. For more info/ticket purchase, go here.

On Friday, March 16th, 1-2pm, Luu also gives an artist’s talk & mini-workshop in the Barbara Christian Conference Room, Barrows 554, on UC Berkeley campus. It’s free and open to the public.

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Margaret Rhee is the author of Yellow (Tinfish Press), co-editor of Here is a Pen: An Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press), and managing editor of Mixed Blood, a literary journal on race and experimental poetics. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley in Ethnic and New Media Studies. Her academic articles have been published in Amerasia Journal, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, and the anthology, Feminist Cyberspaces: Pedagogies in Transition. As a new media artist and digital educator, she is conceptualist and co-lead on From the Center, a feminist participatory HIV/AIDS digital storytelling project for women of color incarcerated in the San Francisco Jail. Please visit www.ourstorysf.org  Her second poetry chapbook, The School of Dreams is forthcoming.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! My Own Story—An Interview with Performance Artist Alex Luu