Speaking in Vietlish can be fun, especially when my Viet-American friends and I drop a Vietnamese word into our English conversations to better capture or describe something that there’s no perfect English word for. When Vietnamese is associated with the language of growing up and how elders raised second-generation Vietnamese Americans like me, listening to Vietnamese makes us remember the experience of responding with the extent of one’s conversational Viet vocabulary, and substituting in complex English words, such as our college major or job when asked. Emblems of Vietlish in our age of social media are the popular reels of Theresa Vo (@treevo) and Tran Truong (@tranxtruong). There is something so seamless about listening to Theresa Vo speak Vietlish that makes my codeswitching brain enter a flow state. With Tran Truong, his Vietlish conversations with Momma Truong as he leads his mom through workout exercises, and announcing Vietlish motivational phrases to his fitness classes bring humor, warmth, and inspiration to his viewers.
But there are countless times where my parents and I have to resort to Vietlish as the makeshift bridge for what neither of us can communicate in Vietnamese or English only, out of necessity—like teaching my mom over the phone how to troubleshoot her tech issues. Working with someone through their IT problems is challenging enough without language barriers. With English fluency, the immigrant child takes on an undoubtedly frustrating, Herculean task of navigating their family through healthcare, housing and utilities, business, and legal paperwork, while keeping their parents informed with as much Vietnamese translation as they personally can, Vietlish filling the gap. To me, Vietlish is only effective when two people know the extent of each other’s vocabulary in English and Vietnamese (although sometimes saying the English word in a Viet accent helps). This establishes the cadence and how jargon-y Vietlish gets—that is, tôi sẽ nói bằng tiếng Việt đến khi nào tôi quên hay không biết the Vietnamese equivalent of a less common/very specific word. Sometimes an English word does make its way into the Viet American vernacular, like “receipt”, which makes the translation “biên lai” feel more foreign to the Viet American. Vietlish is the bridge that our diaspora haphazardly, humorously, creatively built to hold onto the old and dip our toes in the new, lived reality. If English or Vietnamese fluency is not attainable, at least both the elder and youth can pick up some Vietlish to communicate.
Vietlish as the written word is something I see less often (although many works that combine Vietnamese and English are out there, even if not formalized as a “Vietlish” publication; AJAR Press comes to mind as one example). The place for Vietnamese words in the majority of Vietnamese American literature seems to be reserved for the names of characters, places, food, songs, and the occasional terms of endearment in dialogue—“Con ơi,” “Anh ơi,” etc. Experimenting with Vietlish is the project of Timber & Lụa, a set of ten short stories by Vietnamese American experimental writers Lily Hoàng and Vi Khi Nào. Most of the stories are presented first in Vietlish with an accompanying list of translated Vietnamese words, followed by an English version and Vietnamese version of the story, side-by-side. The collection’s concept is brilliant, and as a Vietnamese and English reader (albeit less frequently in Vietnamese), I expected to feel at home with my two languages.
Timber & Lụa proved to be more foreign to me than anything I’d ever read. Vietnamese American stories in popular memoirs, books, and films generally revolve around Vietnamese refugees’ journeys of migration and assimilation, with themes of survival and resilience, intergenerational trauma, and family and cultural traditions—what has become legible markers of the genre. As a work of experimental fiction, Timber & Lụa is instead concerned with what exists on the periphery, a boundless future. Instead of Vietnamese-named human characters and families set in the Vietnam War or postwar era, a character named Chalk/CaCO3 falls in love with a robot whom she purchases on sale and names Vũng Tàu, and the robot sings the folk song “Qua Cầu Gió Bay” as they have sex. Another short story, “Dù Sao Đi Nửa/Anyways” features a bunny named Quả Cầu Tuyết bringing news that Cô Yuki the cat is pregnant, and poking fun at her denial with a performance of Trần Thiện Thanh’s famous song “Tình Có Như Không.” MIT scientist Armie of the 24th century, in the short story “Gallbladder Không Có Ink,” recalls that “The last time he was happy, he was eating bánh bèo with his cousin.” At some point in the story, he realizes he is God, then proceeds to “accidentally invent the ký hiệu for combating ấu dâm instead of evil.” Marybeth and Damien are the gender-fluid lovers of three (or four) short stories, and Damien becomes an actual dog in their love game. “Salt and Saliva,” the penultimate story, is written in English and Vietnamese only, but introduced with a two-sentence Vietlish version. Told in first-person, it is the most vulnerable note in the collection: “Though I must admit that I don’t miss the fear of kissing, French kissing, someone and mistaking their tongue for a hook or line or worm, fearing that they might tear my sublingual gland apart.” From one short story to the next, from one paragraph to the next, it is rarely clear what these characters’ motives are, and when a reader should take a metaphor literally. Perhaps this is the natural result of Hoàng and Nào initially co-writing sentence by sentence during their collaboration, surprising themselves and the reader with unforeseen, serendipitous plot points.
Timber & Lụa was a frustrating read, as the Vietlish was not as seamless as I thought it could be, which distracted from my enjoyment of the authors’ experimental topics and humor. The reader’s introduction into the short story collection was manageable enough as a two-page Vietlish story titled “Broccoli.” A feminine lover has a teasing, cryptic back-and-forth with her partner Damien (perhaps the same Damien in some of the later stories) when she tells him that she “tình cờ left my broccoli in your tủ lạnh.” Hoàng and Nào bring attention to the way the woman’s eyes “lật mở” (“flip open”) and “broaden with glee”—“Not like một thanh công tắc, closer to trứng ốp la being flipped over.” Two complicated similes to modify a description of how eyes open, perhaps distinguished by speed and precision and surprise (translations provided: “thanh công tắc = switchblade” which I believe was mistranslated, because this should mean light switch; trứng ốp la = sunny-side up eggs). Sometimes, reading the monolingual versions that follow provides more guidance for the reader—such as who is saying what, or more description for the metaphor to guide the reader from A to B to C. Of the woman’s eyes again, Hoàng and Nào write for the Vietnamese version: ”Rồi đấy cô mở mắt to ra như hai cánh tay vỗ cùng nhau với niềm hân hoan. Mở to không giống như con dao quân đội. Gần như một quả trứng ốp la bị lật lộn ngược.” In their self-translation, the writers introduce a third simile to express “broaden with glee” —the eyes open like two arms applauding with glee. And the eyes open wide, not like an army knife—so not sharply, as the fried eggs are round and fragile. There is a noticeable brevity in Vietlish and English compared to the Vietnamese version.
The three versions, with subtle differences, are not exact translations of the same story either, as ambiguity can be interpreted in infinite ways, now simply multiplied when incorporating two languages. As the lovers of “Broccoli” are metaphorizing about sex, the woman teases that she knows Damien has always wanted “a con chim inside of you—I mean—bên trong your refrigerator” (‘con chim’ is literally translated as bird, but Vietnamese people also use ‘chim’ as a euphemism for ‘penis’). There is no dialogue tag to identify that the woman said it, but it is suggested by the alternating paragraph breaks when the speaker changes, and because she left behind the broccoli in Damien’s refrigerator. In the Vietnamese version, however, there is a dialogue tag added to make Damien deliver this line, with Vietnamese masculine and feminine pronouns adding clarification:
“Anh biết em luôn luôn muốn có một con chim trong lòng chim em—ý anh muốn nói rằng—bên trong tủ lạnh của anh và anh chỉ còn lại một tàn tích của cây mãi mãi xanh,” anh Damien nói. Cô ép ra một nụ cười.
While inconsistent with the Vietlish/English version, it does add up when in the later titular short story “Timber & Lụa,” Damien’s lover named Marybeth fantasizes about growing a banana penis in her womb.
“Gallbladder Không Có Ink” features a character named Armie who contemplates about his gallbladder, but the short story seems to serve as the writers’ playground for the different meanings of “mật” in Vietnamese, as well as a similar-sounding word, “mực.” “Armie’s túi mật is full of bí mật,” opens the story. “How does it feel, this swelling of mật, this excess?” A few sentences later: “It seems the mực of his bí mật has more length to travel in and out of him.” And a few pages out: “Instead, he is bleeding and moves like a mực ống…has he really become a squid….yet, the nghĩa địa or black hole of his imagination says mực không thể bị mất.”
It can be fun to play around with these Vietnamese homonyms and almost-homophones while thinking about how the connections and meanings that construct a Vietnamese word would carry over in English. The book provides the following translations on the side of the page: “túi mật” is gallbladder, “bí mật” is secret, “mật” is honey. If the reader considers túi and mật separately, túi is pocket/pouch, and mật can also mean bile—the gallbladder is a pouch of bile. Split bí and mật—bí meaning stuffy, mật also meaning confidential—and keeping confidential information in describes a secret. The three different meanings of mật have distinct Sino-Vietnamese origins. Mực is a separate word, also with multiple meanings and origins—squid as well as ink. So “mực of bí mật” is the squid of his secrets (as the translation commits to). But in Hoàng and Nào’s world where anything is possible, what if we read it as “ink of too much honey,” or “ink of his secrets,” or “squid of his excess bile”? In the last sentence, Hoàng and Nào switch the diacritical marks of bí mật to turn “secret” into the Vietnamese word bị mất, “missing”.
It is not new for Vietnamese American poets to lean into wordplay, but critic Som-Mai Nguyen is woefully tired of diasporic writers asserting “unearned authority” about their culture because they possess “exotic cultural knowledge” (i.e. they can make some observations about their Mother Tongue and start essentializing the culture): “Some linguistic coincidences make poetry available via ‘the possibility to (mis)understand something into existence,’ but other puns are just puns, tropes just tropes.” Considering that language is the core of Timber & Lụa, is it ignorant or innovative for Hoàng and Nào to put these different mật and mực in the sea of words, like a chemical reaction, and see how they react?
A reader must suspend disbelief to immerse in fiction. For the way Timber & Lụa handles Vietnamese, I wonder if the reader’s lack of Viet knowledge and open curiosity for Vietnamese, will serve them, rather than detract. I felt that knowing Vietnamese and having my relationship and expectation for a certain type of Vietlish made the book frustrating to get through, while certain gripes I had may be non-issues for an unfamiliar reader taking our writers and translators’ words for it. Indeed, I am struck by the imbalance of each writers’ experience with written Vietnamese when they first set out to do this project—Hoàng was learning Vietnamese through Duolingo, while Nào has a strong foundation with experience translating. Given the imbalance, when it came to the self-translations, the writers entered sentence by sentence into Google Translate and ChatGPT which served as the “ground floor” for their translations, especially when it came to getting a sense for grammar structure. I am sure that these authors were thoughtful as they crafted the final versions of their translations, but one does wonder what is lost or gained in the decision to use AI, even as the starting point for translation.
To consider Timber & Lụa as Vietnamese American literature is to re-examine what formal boundaries we have inadvertently placed and recreated in this category. Which stories by people of Vietnamese descent are guaranteed to sell, according to the publishing industry? How many Vietnamese words would be considered too much to be palatable in a book about Vietnamese Americans? What themes about refugeehood and Asian family dynamics satiate the Western reader’s appetite, and how does experimental Vietnamese American fiction resist that? In her analysis of Lily Hoàng’s experimental work Parabola, English scholar and professor Michele Janette argues that Hoàng’s content and form represents “her refusal to be an ethnic consumable”, emblematic of what literary critic Palumbo-Liu dubs the “failure of delivery”:
For Palumbo-Liu, ethnic literature is often read by majoritarian audiences in order to “deliver” lives of others for consumption. Even when sympathetic, Palumbo-Liu argues, such textual travel into the literary lives of others is inextricable from the imperialist legacy of deliverance from barbarism and thus ultimately serves to affirm rather than dismantle the reader’s original privilege. Palumbo-Liu, in response, champions texts that fail to deliver—that disrupt this circuit of narcissistic consumption.
The challenge of reading Timber & Lụa may represent this intentional, symbolic “failure of delivery”—on the other end, it can also feel inaccessible and alienating, to both the English and Vietnamese speaker. Timber & Lụa abounds with difference, which readers may not know what to do with. Naturally, following Nào and Hoàng will bring us closer to achieving narrative plentitude of Vietnamese American stories.
Timber & Lụa forced me to un-learn and re-learn the act of reading, how to not be a passive reader. I only wish that the reader could get a bit more hints to delight in the authors’ joy of co-writing in Vietlish. But perhaps the reader’s venture to find connection—our relationship with the characters, what happens to them, the sound and spelling of two languages, and their relationships to each other—is us thinking in Vietlish together with Hoàng and Nào.
Timber & Lụa
by Lily Hoàng and Vi Khi Nào
Red Hen Press
Cathy Duong co-hosts cà phê book club, a monthly book club that meets in coffee shops across north Orange County, CA (IG: @caphebookclub). She enjoys traveling to Little Saigons, playing V-pop on her ukulele, and analyzing diasporic Viet literature.
