from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

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Professor Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde

An Interview with Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde–scholar, activist, writer–touches upon the many journeys made in the production of her book:  Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora (Temple University Press 2012).  In doing so, she recounts a life of intrepid choices and harrowing sacrifices.  A life of the mind, a life consumed by art.

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Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde smiles at the webcam like the parent of a newborn. The release of Transnationalizing Viet Nam, a project involving twenty years of research, was a long labor. Covering a wide range of topics—pop music, internet communication, art, politics—Valverde’s study is well worth the time it took to write it. Yen Le Espiritu has called the work “a rich and nuanced study of transnational linkages between Viet Nam and its diaspora in the United States.” Indeed, this is perhaps one of the most important works on the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States in recent memory.

Valverde is no stranger to the Vietnamese American art community. She has worked closely with Association for Viet Arts and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Texiles, curating the exhibit Áo dài: A Modern Design Coming of Age which included over 100 áo dài from Vietnam. The exhibit received national and international recognition. As a scholar and writer, her work has been published in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, and Racially Mixed People in America (edited by Maria P. P. Root). She teaches at UC Davis.

Dr. Valverde was kind enough to set aside time in the middle of the winter holidays to speak with diaCritics about her book, her research, and the role of art in Vietnamese diasporic communities.

I was really intrigued by the cover of Transnationalizing Viet Nam. It’s a picture of a man holding a flag that’s a mixture of the North Vietnamese flag and the Southern Vietnamese flag. I was wondering if you could tell me if there’s a story behind the picture.

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Absolutely! I don’t know the exact dates to be honest, maybe 2008, 2009—somewhere around there; it seems like yesterday.

It was a protest in front of an exhibit, FOB II, which was an exhibit of 50 artists from Vietnam and the United States. It was curated by Lan Duong and her co curator who were reacting to the Madison Nguyen controversy and the year-long protest of the artist Chau Huynh. As an artist, one of Huynh’s mediums was quilt and so she created this quilt of the South and North Vietnamese flag to represent a marriage quilt because she is from a communist family in Vietnam; her husband comes from a south Vietnamese family, immigrated, was part of that group that married international brides. Huynh was actually an international bride and then an MFA art student.

James Du is the person holding the flag. He bought that flag from Huynh to stage a series of one-man counter-protests against certain anti-communist groups in the community who protested based on the idea that the art exhibit had communist content. James Du, he’s holding it up defiantly and people are pointing out, “Hey, do you know there’s a communist flag there?” Within minutes of this, they started beating him up. The police came and arrested him or put him in cuffs because they said they wanted to protect him. The photo is just a really dynamic split second thing before that altercation.

That flag and that image really represent the work of my book, which is to say that overseas Vietnamese are very much informed by what goes on in the United States policy-wise and in the society, in Vietnam policy and society, but also by anticommunist groups within the community. We, as overseas Vietnamese, are very cognizant of these triple dominations or triple influences, and even though we have these influences, we still manage to create linkages to Vietnam. My book documents the ways in which we do this through arts and media and politics and technology and so forth. That’s why that image was chosen.

I think it really captures the moments in your book when you talk about the anticommunist forces within the community. Since you did a lot of field research within the Vietnamese American community, did you encounter first hand any of those anticommunist forces?

That the book stands alone as the first and still the only text that is critical of the anticommunist groups–there were some dangers in the research.

Because I’m part of the community, I was able to do the research on all sides: the staunch anticommunists, very conservative organizations, more moderate groups, as well as those who are pro-business, pro-connection with Vietnam, and in Vietnam those within the government itself who looked at the overseas population as a threat. I had the whole gamut of the political hotbed. I think maybe that’s why the book took 20 years to do because you know, you can’t exactly come in and say “Tell us why you want to kill communist sympathizers.” It is after decades of trust-building and introductions and connections that then I’m allowed to have access and the participants are able to tell me truthfully their experiences. And then I was able to be critical of these forces; I think I was a neutral researcher, but then there’s a point when it’s really clear that anticommunists—they bring a lot of fear to the community. It’s not just the general population but it’s scholars as well who have told me they’re not going to write something like this because they don’t want to have the repercussions. They don’t want to have been denied access to the community. They don’t want their parents to be upset with them, their family members to be critical. There’s a lot at stake personally, familially, politically when you engage in the kind of research and scholarship that I chose to do. It was dangerous and it is dangerous still. And I don’t know what the repercussions would be in the long term.

That chapter in your book on Madison Nguyen and the anticommunists really surprised me. For me as a second generation Vietnamese American, “Little Saigon” would just be a name, but the way you researched into it, what you presented, readers could see the little nuances to it and I found that really interesting.

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Pro Little Saigon demonstrators.

Touching on that, you’ve said you’re mixed ethnicity. Your mother is Vietnamese, Spanish, French; your father is Vietnamese English.  Tell me a little bit more about how that affected your research—how did that influence you to go into this field and how has that influenced you in your fieldwork?

My original research interest was around mixed race issues, but then ultimately I would do work on the diaspora and the diaspora of Vietnam.

I have to say because I was cognizant of mixed race identity—the phenotypes, the ways in which (and I’ve written extensively about this) the community perceive a mixed race person of my generation (người lai, con lai, and all that). I was really hyper-aware of how one would perceive me, how one would perceive me with Vietnamese fluency, how one would perceive me with my gender and generation. I honestly played up a lot of that in order to negotiate spaces in order to build trust.

If I had been an older generation Vietnamese male or even a younger generation Vietnamese male or even Vietnamese female, there would have been a sense of “Maybe we can’t trust her because she’s too much a part of the community.” Or if I’m in Vietnam, they can’t trust me because I’d seem too much a part of the anticommunist diaspora. But since I sort of ride this unique space phenotypically, my language, my accent, my age, gender, I think I was able to negotiate a space where I at least appear very neutral, as neutral as I can be in a very hyper sensitive political dangerous zone.

Now how successful I was, it’s debatable. There’s a story I didn’t put in my book, I think it was 2006. I was in Hanoi and I was really proud of myself that I scored really high level interviews with ministers and so I was talking to one of my Canadian Viet Kieu friends who happened to be seeing someone at the US embassy at the time. She knew I was doing research and giving me connections. I came back and I was hanging out with her and she said, “Oh my god, I just got news that the Vietnamese government was wondering, ‘Why are you sending us this American girl who’s fluent in Vietnamese to spy on us?’” And I thought I was doing such a good job!

There are lots of stories like that, when you think you’re doing this magnificent job and then they have their own impression of who you are. I think I would rather be a white scholar from the US than a Viet Kieu, which they trust even less. At the time, it was really harrowing and frustrating but in retrospect, it’s really comical.

Because you did some of your research before 1995, before the relaxing of relations between the US and Vietnam, what challenges did you face in your pre-1995 research?

It was even worst because there was no diplomatic relations. Getting into Vietnam was difficult.  The US was not that supportive of researchers going back to Vietnam and did not make it easy. Vietnam did not give out visas. I snuck into the country on a tourist visa. I was very young—I was in my early 20s—and I was really determined to do research on Vietnam. I had to pick a university that would even allow it. There were two universities in the United States—Yale and the University of Hawaii Manoa—that allowed for grad students to even go back to Vietnam and it was not even guaranteed. So I snuck into Vietnam on a tourist visa and went to my sponsoring agency and begged them to extend the visa.

There was no US embassy at the time, but there was a consulate and I came by very naively and said, “Hey, I wanted to do Viet Kieu research, what can you tell me?” And they’re like, “We’re not going to help you, don’t come to us. We’re not responsible for you, you’re just this crazy Viet Kieu academic and you’re on your own, buddy!” That kind of stuff was the reality then.

I absolutely had to be secretive with the Vietnamese American community especially with those with anticommunist elements. There were very few people going back to Vietnam at that time and I myself had very conservative leanings. My research and my self-awareness of who I am was also an evolution. This is an evolution of a young person to an older person, an evolution of a scholar, evolution of a Vietnamese turning into a Vietnamese oversea diasporic individual. I came to Vietnam very conservatively, very ignorantly about so many things because of the media freeze and the isolation of Vietnam very intentionally by the US—coming, I had certain bias and conservative views. I knew I would only go to Vietnam for research, it wasn’t for tourism or for the thrills. I was going to do this out of academic integrity, but I had to be very secretive about it.

This whole process was almost like a covert operation. I know that sounds funny, but it goes counter to who we are as scholars especially because it’s so esoteric, the things we write, we really strive to get our work out. Building a name for ourselves is really instrumental, but this goes counter against what I needed to do to get information. So I never told people my research. I never told people who I was. I was asked to do interviews all the time to create a bridge or to be critical of the government. All sides were seeing how they could manipulate and use me as a propaganda tool. I declined. I never agreed to do pictures with any flags. I was doing a covert research operation for twenty years.

It was only when my book came out that I whole-heartedly had to own it, that I’d allow for things like this interview because at this point to keep it a secret would be kind of asinine. I’ve already committed, my name is all over the book, my criticisms, my views, my analysis, my ethnography—it’s blood, tears, sweat all in there and I wholeheartedly own my scholarship. When I have the opportunity to talk about this, I am now very, very open.

Your book came out in October, but have you received any criticism against it?

Now there seems to be great interest. I’ve had quite a few book talks and interviews. It’s very quick as you know these things take two to three years, but there is this urgency in wanting to be the first to review my book; I feel there’s an interest because of the nature of the topic as you pointed out.

My initial impression was that anticommunist groups within the community would absolutely hate it and hate me. In Vietnam, it would be the same because I am critical of the government and society and the oppression of dissident individuals or anybody. I don’t know how the community is taking it, but you know, as I talk about in my book, community is really broad. I think for the majority of the community, especially the intellectual group—they can be activists and so forth—they really embrace this research. Anticommunists– not so much, but people have been telling me it’s due in part to language so once and for all, hopefully, if my book is translated there will be time enough for them to hate me!

In Vietnam, however, I found it interesting that I have been very much well-received by individuals in Vietnam—scholars and government officials and media—I could only think of one reason and that is because even though I am very critical of the government, I also really balance the analysis of the triple domination. In that balanced analysis, I’m critical of other groups too: the US and anti-communist groups along with the Vietnamese government. So the Vietnamese government, they’re used to being criticized, but they’re never used to it being turn at other groups and being treated in an equal way. They view my work as extremely balanced in comparison to this rabid criticism of everything about Vietnam and the Vietnamese government.

I’m surprised there, I’d have to say. In some ways, I feel sorry they’re put into a position where any little fairness in terms of scholarly work they accept because there has not been in the past. There’s been this sort of white liberal “Vietnam is great, it was a revolution, it was legitimate” and all that, and then there’s other earlier, I call them orientalist, writings about the war and so forth. So there’s that very pro-North and pro-government and the vets coming in and talking about that, of course that part they accept.

But I’m overseas Vietnamese. I was born in Vietnam. I represent for them, in some ways, a shift in the possible mindset of the diaspora community which for them is quite crucial. We give $10 billion a year in remittances. We have hundreds of thousands coming back annually for tourism. We give in terms of gray matter or social capital or professional capital to them all the time so obviously, if it has a more neutral or accepting view of their “home country” then it’s beneficial. I think they see me as that someone for the first time represent an evenhanded voice. That’s my analysis anyway. I can’t get into their heads, but they’re out there giving me voice in national media. To me it speaks volumes.

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You also mentioned in your book that the generation of Vietnamese in the US right now is more free to be not sternly anticommunist. In your book, you mentioned a socialist Vietnamese diaspora group, for example. What do you see Vietnamese American activism and art going towards in the future because anticommunists are losing control in the Vietnamese American community?

I see it as an ongoing battle to be honest. I’m quite surprised, though I shouldn’t be because each year each generation you would think it would wane. Actually, at one point in my research, maybe a decade ago, even more recently, I’m like “Oh my gosh, once my book is out whenever it gets out it’s going be really dated because everything will be smooth out by then.” And lo and behold, it hasn’t!

There are still those groups who are extremely vocal—“Vietnam is still suppressing dissidents.” Anticommunists are still making and throwing things at Vietnamese nationals that come to sing or artists or writers. There’s still that tension that’s so pronounced: whenever there’s an exhibit, everyone is calculating—how much do we show of this kind of work because it could be perceived as communist.  It’s a lot of self censorship still.

I think with writers and artists—on the one hand, I see them as soldiers in the front line, making this change overtly and covertly. On the other hand, I see them being—because they’re in the front of the line—the first to be attacked. In this, I include bloggers and any other form of expression. It is so important on both sides to control cultural production and I mention that extensively in my book; it becomes a battle for identity and representation in culture in Vietnam and the diaspora. So the arts become really pivotal in this cultural war, and it’s sad because—you’re an artist, you’re a writer, you understand how important it is to express ourselves and how important it is to advance the arts and it feels so many times stifling when one has to live under this state of fear and self  or imposed censorship on all sides.

Then we’d have to become clever about it as artists are in former Eastern European blocs. There are ways language is used an interesting way or art is done in interesting ways—so we do that.  Or we take action and get beaten down in battles then come back up. But I want to say it is an exciting time, too because artists are soldiers for change and representation.

Even myself, I feel like I’m academic and yet I’m putting myself in this political situation. It’s kind of exciting because you feel like you’re taking a stand so your actions become very bold and in some ways empowering or you choose to be silent or you choose to do it behind the scene, but all these things are very methodical: the art becomes multilayered. That’s my take on it. I don’ know if that answers your question. But I think it’s tension-filled and exciting and creative on the one hand and potentially stifling on the other hand.

My final question would be what’s next for you as a scholar, as an activist. Your book is a wide range of subjects: you cover pop music, internet forums, politics, art. What’s next for your research?

Simultaneously, as I’ve been working on this book for 20 years, I have been looking at representation of women in Vietnam: how it’s translated in the diaspora, how these representations are sort of perpetuated by native and non-native scholars, writers, policymakers and so forth, and how it creates certain mythologies around Vietnamese women that have been really detrimental especially in terms of recent current events and state of affairs around gender politics and gender issues in Vietnam—anything from the sex trade to political representation, etc.

It’s really similar to my first book in that again it will probably put me in an unpopular light because I will be tackling two stereotypes: one of Vietnamese women as warriors and the other as martyrs. On the surface, these are two very positive things that males and females in the diaspora embrace as a trope and as a belief or philosophy around gender. But I’m here to really put a monkey wrench in that and say that it’s fabricated and it’s perpetuated and it’s detrimental  for the future of gender rights in Vietnam and diaspora. It’s a very political move, one that’s seeped in literary criticism, but also very much doing an interventionist project and what’s going on in  society right now. Again, offering information so people can decide what they want to do with that.

My third project, or what I’d like to call my third book, is looking at what I call national aesthetics and it’s this idea of nations making and remaking themselves through aesthetic production. This is the work I’ve done previously around áo dài as national symbols and cultural productions. My background is also in political science, so I’ll look at nation building. I’m very excited about that project. My second project is one that has been with me for just too long—like 15 years—I really need to get it out. The third one I feel like there’s room for new research there.  I’m very excited about that. Those are my projects for the future.

I’m really glad to get this one out. It’s like long labor: I’m glad it’s delivered. I really tried to do a paradigm shift and I’m hoping that will be an impact in that it will change the way we look at history…We’re not just boat people coming here and resettling  and then putting up our 3 striped South Vietnamese flag. We’re much more diverse and there’s so much more around our agency and our sheer will to connect to other people and each other in diaspora that needs to be really put out there because that’s really the vast majority of us.

Professor Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde received her B.A. in Political Science and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching, research and organizing interests include: Southeast Asian American history and contemporary issues, mixed race and gender theories, Fashionology, Aesthetics, Diaspora, and Transnationalism Studies. She authored Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora (Temple University Press 2012). This book explores the immense influence of the native and diasporic communities on each other in politics, culture, community, generations, gender relations, technology, news media, and the arts. Professor Valverde founded Viet Nam Women’s Forum (1996), a virtual community with over 300 women globally, and Our Voice (2008), a consortium of concerned Overseas Vietnamese that puts forward ideas and action plans that best represent their communities and promote development globally (2008). Professor Valverde was a Luce Southeast Asian Studies Fellow at the Australian National University (2004), Rockefeller Fellow for Project Diaspora at the University of Massachusetts, Boston (2001-02), and a Fulbright Fellow in Viet Nam (1999). As a passionate advocate for the arts, she curated the exhibit Áo Dài: A Modern Design Coming of Age (2006) for the San Jose Museum of Quits and Textiles in partnership with Association for Viet Arts, and consults for the annual Áo Dài Festival held in San Jose (2011, 2012).

Eric Nguyen has a degree in sociology from the University of Maryland along with a certificate in LGBT Studies. He is currently an MFA candidate at McNeese State University and lives in Louisiana.

 Would you go back to Vietnam–pre-1995–to perform research before the regularization of diplomatic ties?  What would you risk for the sake of pure scholarship, art and knowledge?

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Interview with Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde: We’re not just boat people

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

Recently diaCRITIC Jade Hidle met and interviewed artist Dustin Nguyen at the San Diego Comic-Con International, the biggest annual convention in the U.S. showcasing comic books and other popular arts. She asked Nguyen, who is very gifted with the pen and brush, about his motivations and development as an artist. A great introduction, if you’re not already familiar with his work.

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Dustin's work on the cover of the second of five issues in Vertigo's mini series, American Vampire: Lord of Nightmares

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At last summer’s San Diego Comic-Con International, I had the pleasure of meeting artist Dustin Nguyen. I recently had the opportunity to ask Dustin a few questions about his artwork. Check out his striking work in comics and beyond!

Jade Hidle:  This might seem like a cliché question, but I want to start basic for readers who might not be familiar with your work. How did you get started in art? And why have you gravitated toward comics (and toy design as well)?

Dustin Nguyen:  I think the simplest of answer is that I like to draw, and tell stories. Mostly comics because I like to draw alone and not be bothered too much.

JH: Right now, you’re exclusive with DC Comics and working for their Vertigo publication house in particular. For Vertigo, you’re illustrating the American Vampire: Lord of Nightmares mini series. The story and artwork feels much darker than its parent series, American Vampire. What drew you to this project? And what has it been like working with writer Scott Snyder?

DN:  It was great working with Scott, we’ve been talking about working together for some time now, and after I was done with Justice League Beyond, it felt like a good time to take in a mini series, also getting to explore a few different approaches to my storytelling and style.

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Dustin's work on the cover of the second of five issues in Vertigo's mini series, American Vampire: Lord of Nightmares

JH:  While you have a large body of visual art, you have also co-written comics for DC. Is
writing something that you want to pursue further? Do you see yourself writing and
illustrating your own comic or graphic novel?

DN:  I do, but probably not immediately, writing is a LOT harder than drawing, so I’ll be co-writing for a while still. Also, my day to day focus is usually trying to get better at drawing and painting. And the days always seem to get shorter, everyday.

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The cover of Dustin's 2012 sketchbook, available at http://duss005.com/contact/

JH:  In your 2012 sketchbook, you illustrate many iconic figures, from Jabba the Hut to
Batman to Delirium from Sandman. What are the challenges and rewards of putting your
own spin on such recognizable, familiar icons?

DN:  Most of the pieces drawn come at the spur of the moment. Either through a good song, or a recap of an episode of a show or movie I liked. The freedom of not being tied to a script for work, or having to worry about printing specs, a likeness to character, or costume correctness makes it fun.

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One of Dustin's takes on Spiderman and others

JH:  One of my favorite illustrations in your sketchbook is a tribute to the late, great Adam Yauch from The Beastie Boys. What artists (whether musical, visual, literary, etc.) do you draw inspiration from?

DN:  I think if I list a few, I’d look back later and piss myself off for not listing the other few, so I’d say almost anything and everything is my inspiration. I’m a kid of the ’80s and ’90s so musically, that’s where I’m at.

JH:  The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) is interested in how Vietnamese culture and identity informs artists’ work. To what extent do you feel that being Vietnamese American informs your artistic choices and career?

DN:  That’s a tough one because, as I do feel your culture and upbringing can heavily dictate your direction in life, once you do enter a career in art, especially a commercial art, you sort of immerse yourself in an entirely new environment. And it’s that step there, where you decide what sort of artist you want to be. The best I can tie to why I chose comics as a first, is Batman being the first popculture icon I can remember when I first came to the US.

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Dustin's variant cover for issue #1 of the Gates of Gotham series

You can view and buy more of Dustin’s artwork at his website:  http://duss005.com.

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Jade Hidle is a Vietnamese-Irish-Norwegian writer and educator. She holds an MFA in creative writing from CSU Long Beach and is working on a PhD in literature at UC San Diego. Her work has appeared in Spot Lit, Word River, and Beside the City of Angels.

Dustin Nguyen is an American comic artist whose body of work, for the past 10 years, includes flagship titles for both DC Comics and Wildstorm. His past projects include Wildcats v3.o, The Authority Revolution, Batman, Superman/Batman, Detective Comics, his creator owned project- Manifest Eternity, Batgirl, and Batman: Streets of Gotham. He is currently exclusive to DC Comics co-writing as well as illustrating Justice League Beyond and illustrating Vertigo’s American Vampire: Lord of Nightmares.  Aside from providing cover illustrations for the majority of his own books, his cover art can also be found on titles from Batman Beyond , Batgirl, Justice League: Generation Lost,  Supernatural and Friday the 13th, to numerous other DC/WS titles. Outside of comics, Dustin also moonlights as a conceptual artist for toys and consumer products, games, and animation. He enjoys sleeping, driving, and sketching things he cares about.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Jade Hidle: An Interview with Artist Dustin Nguyen

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

In this repost from BOMBlog, poet and editor Iris Cushing reviews Hoa Nguyen‘s most recent book of poetry, As Long As Trees Last (Wave Books, 2012).  Cushing calls our attention to “the pieces of image and story that make up [Nguyen's] poems [and that] prove to be more particle than fragment, each integral and necessary.”  Subsequently the writers discuss dreams, ecological (dis)order, mysteries and sound, among other things important to Nguyen’s poetry.

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Hoa Nguyen’s poems might appear fragmented at first—like pieces of broken china—as in Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.“Bread”:  “Next time I’ll crack/more pepper also knead/more cheese in there//(insert involuntary/ psychic activity)//I don’t believe the self-immolation tale/Can’t stay.”  But after spending time with one of her books, the pieces of image and story that make up her poems prove to be more particle than fragment, each integral and necessary.  The space between these particles is as meaningful as the space between stars.  The poems move according to an order that reveals its presence slowly, offering humor and beauty as rewards along the way.  Listening in on her particular language, a complex system can be heard at work; a way of being with thought and sensation as fully alive, unpredictable entities.Image may be NSFW.
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Nguyen’s lines often economize multiple senses into a single dense unit and feel effortless.  Like pomegranate seeds, these poems attract the both the eye and the tongue:  “What justice foreigns for a sovereign/We doom in nation rooms” (“Agent Orange Poem”) or “Hold and blow      tough as night/Hope-bow       tugged tight” (“After Sappho”).  A pragmatic streak appears amidst of these jewels.  Household errands and everyday vernacular intersect with the ecstatic:

To Do:

Mash the sea
Evolve love
Keen
Coo

(from “Rain Poem”)

Like Lorine Niedecker’s, Nguyen’s poetics are intimately involved with the Earth and ecology.  Reading her poems, I get a sense of continuity between the language and the material place where it lives.  As Long as Trees Last posits a world where nature is reality—not a utopian ideal, nor cruelly indifferent, but infinitely happening.  In their quietude and boldness, these poems confirm what Walt Whitman wrote in “A Song of the Rolling Earth”:  “… the truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so concealed either,/ They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print…”

I had the pleasure of corresponding with Hoa about the making of these poems.

Iris Cushing Dreams and dreaming are mentioned often in the poems in As Long as Trees Last.  Can you speak about the language, logic or diction of dreams as they appear in your poems?

Hoa Nguyen I find dreams compelling.  Sometimes my dreams are dreary things; other times they are instructive.  When an animal appears in a dream I pay special attention.

Alice Notley talks about using dream material and how dream logic does more than recombine language; dreams recombine reality.  She writes of how they are “fleshly vivid and real.”  I think I internalized the strategy of using dream materials from Notley and also Joanne Kyger, who uses everything—dream life, eating life, reading life, what’s out your window, what’s in the news.

In The Red Book, Jung writes, “Dreams are the guiding words of the soul.  Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?”

When I was writing As Long as Trees Last, I dreamt I was giving a party and showing a wizened old man about my home.  There were fluid metal sculptures on every wall, like lively alien alphabets, and I commented, “Isn’t it amazing that all this art has been left here for us?”

I think dreams can act as messages, as alien alphabets, that provide access to the apprehension of life’s grand patterns—and help me see me beyond me and into greater recognition.

IC The image of “alien alphabets” seems perfect.  Your poems create the sense of an underlying order that doesn’t follow expected patterns, but clearly exists nonetheless.  I notice ways in which the environment—animals, plants, oil spills, drought—appears in your poems, and wonder about your relationship to the ecological “order” of our planet.

HN I have pulled a tarot card to guide the response to this question, and received the nine of Wands.

The nine of Wands is a card also called Strength (not to be confused with the major arcana of the same name); it corresponds with the moon in Sagittarius and represents persistent movement powered by dreamy moon moxie.  The card symbolizes change and suggests that the most effective defense against potentially devastating change is one that is imaginative and mobile.

I like to think that my poems behave in that way—that the poems which address global disruption can act as mobile defenses or responses in the face of catastrophic change.

I am reminded of the song “World Destruction” by Time Zone circa 1984.  A song you can dance your ass off to.  How is that for mobile?

The lyrics are painfully applicable even now:

The rich get richer.
The poor are getting poorer.
Fascist, chauvinistic government fools.

and also “Mother Nature is gonna work against you.”

IC Your work urges me to read a runic or mystic significance into situations and stories.  In the poems in ALATL, that quality emerges as direct telling (as in the poem “Seeking,” which both explains a phrase and interprets its possible literal meaning).  A kind of mystic guidance also seems to occur in the way the poems are made.  That is, they seem to come from a place of listening and recording what is heard, in terms of sound quality and the images you’re creating.  I’m thinking specifically of something like “Tree Poem”:  “Who me—who me—it’s me and a rare/ ear turned.”

HN Robert Duncan talked about writing out of the mysteries.  He writes “We do not understand all that we render up to understanding . . . I study what I write as I study out any mystery.”  Which also brings me to Keats in his Negative Capability letter to his brothers where he suggests that poets should remain inside of mysteries without any “irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

I think that one of the ways I remain in that place, inside Negative Capability, is to be open to the coagulation of sound and to remain available to meaning as it accrues in the body of sound.  I love how Justin Helms puts this in his recent review of the book:

[The work in ATATL] opens the door to the coincidences of English, and so uses the energy of chance to convert music into sugar… not meaning, but a stored potential for meaning and intention.  Something prior to and necessary for meaning and intention; something that I can carry around with me that will drive the synthesis and movement of my interactions with the world.

IC I’m curious about the actual process of “remaining available to meaning as it accrues in the body of sound.”  Is there any sort of pre-planned procedure that creates that openness for you, in terms of making your poems (such as “chance” or “non-intentional” means of writing, a la John Cage)?

HN I use poetry to advance poems.  It looks like this:  I engage a text, study his or her writing moves and employ them.  This engagement can include outside assignments that are contemporaneous to the creation of writings.

While I welcome chance, in terms of synchronicity, it is more about sitting in a place using the senses, mental energies, and unknown forces.  I’d probably name this as coming after Spicer via Lorca.  Or to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, writing for me feels like visiting a place outside of me to retrieve songs that I can’t exactly call mine.

—

Iris Cushing is an editor for Argos Books.  Her poems have appeared in No, Dear, La Fovea, and the Boston Review, among other places.

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Please take the time to rate this post (above) and share it (below). Ratings for top posts are listed on the sidebar. Sharing (on email, Facebook, etc.) helps spread the word about diaCRITICS. Join the conversation and leave a comment! Have you encountered Hoa Nguyen’s poetry, read her other full-length books–Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey Press, 2009) or Your Ancient See Through (Subpress, 2002)? What kind of place do her images and words invite you to visit?

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please like, share, and comment on this post! As Long As Trees Last: The Poetry of Hoa Nguyen

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

An interview with Linh Dinh– a Vietnamese American poet and fiction writer, translator, photographer, and Pew Fellow- discusses the challenges of translating works in various languages, recurring themes of filth and grotesqueness throughout his works, and how politics is incorporated in art.

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 Linh Dinh is a rebel artist. I first read his short stories in undergraduate school; I was studying sociology, but found my way into a creative writing class that sparked my interest in fiction writing. 

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Linh Dinh

Dinh’s stories were exhilarating. They were unlike anything I had seen as a student reading Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Ann Beattie. Dinh’s stories weren’t in the minimalist style touted by the academy. Instead, his stories exploded. There were men buying overseas brides, accidental eunuchs, Vietnamese prostitutes with attitudes. There was a grotesqueness to his work not seen in the quiet domestic epiphanies of other fiction writers.

Bad husbands, angry stepmothers, prison, and prostitutes are among the subjects of his debut novel, Love Like Hate (Seven Stories Press, 2010), in which a south Vietnamese café owner seeks a Viet Kieu husband for her daughter. Unbeknownst to the café owner, America is as much a sullen catastrophe as the socialized disaster of postmodern Vietnam made of mismatched billboards, local takes on foreign foods, and nightclubs playing heavy metal. The novel is both an intimate portrait of Vietnam and an insightful commentary on the country post-war that’s now populated with many who have little memory of the war.

Dinh was kind enough to sit down for an interview over email about his novel, his broad range of work, and politics.

Your art encompasses many different mediums–at one point you did paintings, you’ve done poetry, fiction, photography, and not to mention your political essays and translation work. How did you get involved with so many different art forms? Which art form is your favorite to work in?

From childhood until I was about 32 years old I was convinced I was an artist. Writing began later, in high school, though I wasn’t entirely sure I was entitled to write in English. I came to the States at 11 years old, a rather awkward age to claim a second language, though this has also allowed me to hang on to Vietnamese. In college, while majoring in painting, I started to seriously think of myself as a poet. I also attempted my first translations at this time. I read Vietnamese folk poetry, then Ho Xuan Huong, then Doi Moi writers, particularly Nguyen Huy Thiep. My first book was an anthology of new Vietnamese fiction for which I translated half of the stories. To assemble this book, I had to take a trip to Vietnam, my first back in 1995, and this was only possible because I had won a Pew Fellowship for poetry and painting.

I gave up painting shortly after this for economic and strategic reasons. As I’ve said elsewhere, I didn’t want to risk failing at both writing and painting by having my attention so divided, although, subsequent years have proven that I’m perfectly happy and productive being chopped into two, three, or even more pieces. Right now I’m primarily writing political essays and taking photos, though, I still write an occasional poem, including one in Vietnamese about two months ago. Poet Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh kept emailing and calling me for a poem and I was rude enough to ignore her until one day I picked up my cell by mistake thinking it’s Press TV, the Iranian station, on which I’ve appeared many times. Finally cornered by Binh, I wrote a Viet poem I felt pretty good about, something I hadn’t done in years. When I lived in Vietnam from 1999 to 2001, my Vietnamese naturally improved, but I didn’t start to write in Vietnamese until I had gotten back to the States. Whether translating or composing, my work in Vietnamese has no doubt influenced my English writing, but how and to what degree, I’m not ready to pin down right at this moment. I have also spent nearly three years in Europe, so Italian and UK English have also had effects on me. About half of my book, Blood and Soap, was written while I was living in Italy for two years speaking and hearing nearly no English. I’ve translated some Italian poetry into English and Vietnamese, and if this wasn’t conceited enough, decided to translate some of my English poems into Italian. Crazy challenges are good for you, I believe, since they stretch your mind, but it’s also good to step outside of one’s language or languages, to refresh, tease, and question it. I’ve translated Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into Vietnamese, and published it. Most of these activities have not been remunerative, I should add, though I’ve lucked into a few grants along the way. At 49 years old, though, I live very precariously. As for what medium I enjoy most, it’s whatever I’m engaged at the moment. I’m a fairly compulsive person. I can’t help doing what I’m doing at each moment. Like most artists/writers, I could use a lot more time and money, but within my means, I try my best to stay productive. I block out most distractions. Thinking relatively well makes me happy.

What challenges have you faced as a translator? What is that process like for you—for example, how much liberty do you take with the text? Would you say it’s more of an act of creation or is it an act of going back to the intents of the creator? How does the process differ between translating someone else’s work and translating your own?

I try to be as faithful as possible to the original text, and I’ve gotten much better at this over the years. In the beginning, I was rather sloppy, I’m sorry to admit, but one learns as one goes along. I met poet Stephen Berg while still in my teens, and he would be very kind to me over the years, but from him I learnt how not to translate. Doing “versions” of other people’s poetry, Berg would take a lot of liberty, but that’s exactly what I don’t want to do, unless I’m translating one of my own poems, of course, in which case I’m not really translating but composing a parallel poem in another language. The task of the translator is to reveal to the best of his ability the author and not smearing himself into the work, thus distorting it. As someone who’s been translated by many other people, I know full well how annoying this can be. Before I wrote directly in Vietnamese, I was translated by seven or eight Vietnamese writers, and though they all meant well, and did what they thought was right, I wasn’t happy. Proofing translations of my work into Italian and Spanish, I’ve also made corrections in practically every line, every sentence. Of course, with a language one can’t decipher, one is completely at the mercy of the translator. A while back, I received an email from Sussu Laaksonen, “I read some Finnish translations of your work online, and as a writer and translator myself, I think it is my responsibility to tell you that I think these translations are of very poor quality and do not do justice to your work. They read like jokes. I think they should ideally be taken offline, and definitely not published in print if that is the intention.”

There are statistics that suggest that only three percent of books in the US are works of translation. This, of course, leaves many important writers off the radar of many American readers. What writers working in Vietnamese should we be paying attention to? Who’s doing important work? Whose work do you admire?

Many writers are off the radar, not just foreign ones. More distracted by pop media than ever and with so much junk on the internet people are reading less serious literature these days, and with the economy collapsing, most publishers are also in deep trouble. As for Vietnamese writers who should be available in English, I’m not as up to date as I used to be. I do have an anthology of new Vietnamese poetry coming out, however. Only a handful of the 27 poets included are known to English readers, and then just barely. Of these, only one, Phan Nhien Hao, has a full length collection in English, Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, which I translated. Nguyen Quoc Chanh is also well-represented in the anthology. He should be better known for sure. A few years ago, Chanh and I were invited to give a reading together in Berlin, and I’m happy to say that the Germans found out about Chanh through my English translation of his work. What we need are more translators from Vietnamese into English. Hai-Dang Phan is a good new translator. He wrote the intro to my anthology, by the way. As for fiction, Tran Vu has a collection in English, but most of his best stories haven’t been translated. It’s because they’re so difficult to translate well. Often, the easier works or writers get translated, while those who are more engaged with the language, who are richer, are bypassed. Tran Dan, one of the best Vietnamese poets of the 20th century, falls into this category. Personality also plays a factor, by the way. Bui Hoang Vi is a very interesting fiction writer, but he’s impossible to work with. He badmouths everyone and turns on all his friends, including me, so no one has translated him. I think he actually tried to translate a couple of his own stories with disastrous results. When I first discovered Vi while living in Saigon, I asked Nguyen Quoc Chanh, “These stories are great! How come no one has told me about this guy?” Chanh said, “Well, the guy is impossible. No one can stand him. He’ll talk to you one moment, but as soon as you turn your back, he’ll badmouth you.” Anyway, when it comes to translation, there are so many possible pitfalls, and few obvious incentives, yet I still think all writers should translate. It’s a great way to learn, very deeply, about language.

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You touched briefly on the state of the publishing industry and conflicts within the writing world. Changing gears a little bit, have you experienced any difficulties getting your work published as a Vietnamese American writer? As a Vietnamese American writer whose work doesn’t necessarily fit into assimilationist and post-war reconciliation narratives? As an experimental writer?

I haven’t worked very hard at getting published. Before my first book of any kind, I sent poems, stories and translations to literary journals, and got in a bunch, but not immediately, of course. Like everybody else, I was routinely rejected at first. In 1995, I met Dan Simon, publisher of Seven Stories Press, through Phong Bui, an old Philly friend who later became publisher of the Brooklyn Rail. We met in Brooklyn, as a matter of fact, in a bar, and I told Dan I was about to return to Vietnam for the first time. Dan then suggested that I do an anthology for him, and the result about a year later was Night, Again. My association with Simon has also resulted in Fake House, Blood and Soap and Love Like Hate, my three fiction books. As for poetry, I made my reputation in Philly through readings, mostly at the Bacchanal, a bar, but also because I managed to win a Pew Fellowship. From this local reputation, I was able to publish a chapbook through Philly’s Singing Horse Press, which was promptly praised by Ron Silliman, who had just moved to Philly. Later, Silliman hooked me up with Chax Press, now my primary poetry book publisher. Though I haven’t been passive, I haven’t been too aggressive in pushing myself or my work. My main focus, then as now, is to spend time doing the work itself. I don’t attend conventions. In fact, I hardly socialize with writers, in person or online. With my new passion of political writing, I simply sent articles to CounterPunch, Dissident Voice and Intrepid Report. Common Dreams used to publish me regularly, and I was very popular with their readers, judging from the comments, but it stopped featuring me, because I was too much for it, no doubt. One should never deform oneself to fit somewhere. Though I’ve been in the Guardian and New York Times a few times, I don’t really belong there, not because I suck, but because of what I say. Even with your best effort, it’s hard enough to say (nearly) all or (nearly) exactly what you have to say, what you must say, what you’re given to say, but if you’re not even trying to do that, if you’re too eager to pander, then you’re lost. You’re lost and worthless.

Do you see your political essays as a completely different genre of writing, or do you see it as an extension of your poetry and fiction? Can art and politics be separated?  Should they be?

First of, art is always political. Enter any modern art museum, you’ll be greeted immediately with Minimalist oils, the same that decorate corporate lobbies, and unlike zigzags that gladden brutes, these CEO-sponsored smears and stripes cost legs, nuts, torsos and even entire countries. Huge yet hazy, they awe, but don’t irk clients. Or take Abstract Expressionism. Content-free, mostly, it appears apolitical, but it coincided exactly with the hyper masculine posturing of the American state, or consider Language Poetry. With its constant meandering and quick shifts, it echoes television, so that too is political, since it reinforces the tranquilizing and flattening media tactics of our masters. I can cite a thousand other examples where art or literature serves the ruling class, or reinforces its ideas. Also, what you choose to talk about reveals your politics. My political essays, then, should not be seen apart from my fiction or poetry because not only am I political, like everybody else, I’m always consciously political, and I always foreground my social and political thinking in all that I do. Further, the artist or writer is increasingly marginalized in this culture, with each expected to stay meek and docile in his little ghetto, where his self-worth is propped up by a handful of others just like him, although the larger society pays no attention to him whatsoever. Writers and artists should strive to be public intellectuals, I believe. Obviously not all, because everyone’s temperament is different, but when most intellectuals shun the public conversation your society is in deep trouble, which is exactly where we are now. I should add that I approach my political writing with all of my passion and skills for whatever they’re worth and my engagement with poetry and fiction have clearly tinted and informed my political compositions.

Your political essays touch on various topics–the media, the election, the economy. What do you think is the biggest issue facing our society today? Or is it multiple, intertwined problems?

There are several main themes in my political writing. I keep emphasizing that the American government is not inept or clueless, but criminal that our rulers consistently facilitate war crimes abroad, and financial crimes and the erosion of liberties at home. These criminals that we keep electing do not serve us and have no interest in serving us. I have also been saying, for quite some time now, that the US is in irreversible decline, but that doesn’t mean we should be passive about this. Since 2005, I’ve taught a course called “State of the Union” at three different universities, Naropa, UPenn and the University of Montana. In this poetry workshop, students are asked to incorporate social and political issues into their writing. State of the Union is also the name of my photo and political essay blog. I started this in 2009, and have traveled to many states to observe and document, first hand, the economic and social unraveling of these United States. Of course, with my very limited resources, I can only do so much. If I had more money, I would be on the road all the time. My interest in societal collapse also shows up in my novel, Love Like Hate, but that book is also about rebirth, albeit a highly flawed one. In 2006, I spent 9 months in East Anglia, which gave me an opportunity to think more deeply about W.G. Sebald and his The Rings of Saturn, a meditation on personal and societal mortality. So decline is a major theme my work, but also violence, especially random or undeserved violence, and the gap or chasm between appearance and reality, hence my poems, stories or essays focusing on language.

I can see another theme in your work is filth and the grotesque. Your novel, for example, is filled with prostitutes, war, prison, etc. Yet it’s all told with a sense of endearing humor. You have said “I incorporate a filth or uncleanness to make the picture more healthy–not to defile anything.” Can you explain a little bit more on filth and healthiness in your work? Why is filth healthy?

We live in a consumer culture that, in order to sell, glamorizes everything, even extreme pain or squalor. Filth is photoshopped from the picture, or transformed and perverted into something irresistible, sexy and, ultimately, purchasable. The degradation that’s in my work, however, is not dressed up. By dragging degradation back into the picture, I’m making it more complete, and thus more healthy, and more sane. Sane comes from the Latin “sanus,” by the way, meaning healthy or sane. In contemporary Italian, “sano” simply means “healthy.” Anyway, by dragging dirt, death and squalor from behind the curtain, or under the table, into view, I’m merely showing what everyone of us is already aware of daily. In fact, several times daily. In any case, what I’m doing is hardly novel, but fairly generic when it comes to serious art or literature, because a work is not serious unless it addresses decay. That’s the covert or overt theme of each serious poem or story. If a work deals with time, it is already dancing with decay. As for prison in my writing, it is a metaphor for thwarted possibilities, which describes all of our lives without exception.

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Love Like Hate (Seven Stories Press 2010)

You said Love Like Hate is about a rebirth. That it takes place mostly in Vietnam–with only a few scenes in the US–has importance. If America is in decline, what do you think about Vietnamese society?

Love Like Hate covers the Vietnam War period, postwar economic collapse, then recovery triggered by Doi Moi, which means “Renewal.” During the war, a lot of money flowed into South Vietnam, so there was a kind of prosperity there, though the human suffering caused by all the violence from all sides was of course unspeakable. After the South collapsed, however, the country entered a new period of hardship, one result of which was the flood of Boat People fleeing the country. The vindictiveness, greed and incompetence of the Communist government played a key role, but it didn’t help that Vietnam was also attacked by China, a former ally of the North, to retaliate against Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia, which of course also cost Vietnam a lot of money and manpower. The US, meanwhile, imposed a trade embargo, while the Soviet Union cut back aid because the Vietnam War was over and also because its own economy was in trouble thanks to its entanglement in Afghanistan. From this nadir, so to speak, Vietnam could only go up, and thanks to Doi Moi, it has, but many problems remain. Vietnam has always suffered from despotic rule, whether under a king, a Colonial power, a foreign-sponsored puppet or, now, the Communist Party. Though commentators tend to frame Vietnam’s most serious problems as merely political, many of them, such as corruption, nepotism and violence towards the weak, are obviously social, and hence cultural in nature. A great writer like Ho Bieu Chanh obviously knew this, and thus the central aim of his 64 novels is to reform the Vietnamese character. He wanted to show the flaws, and also the virtues, of course, of Vietnamese, and often to shame them into behaving better. Moving forward, Vietnam can certainly improve, but not just politically, but culturally and socially. One can even say that unless cultural and social changes are made, it won’t matter much which party, or parties, are in power. The challenges that face Vietnam, a small country living in the shadow of a behemoth, China, is different from what threaten the US, a superpower, but what’s going to hurt them all, and the entire world, is the end of growth as we’ve been used to and come to expect. Economic growth has been predicated on the available of cheap energy, namely oil, and since peak oil is here, we’re witnessing accelerating financial and political collapse in many countries. We will all become poorer, that’s for sure, but the real threat is the coming dogfight over the remaining oil, natural gas and other resources. Thanks to oil, the twentieth century was a time of unprecedented growth, but also of heretofore unimaginable horror. During this messy banquet, Vietnam got more gore than food, and now that it has partially made it to the table, the party’s nearly over.

With society in decline, what should a writer–or any artist–do? What advice would you give to writers working today?

A writer must have the big picture in mind. He must recognize the crises affecting his immediate community, his country and also the world. He will misread details if he doesn’t understand the larger dynamics behind them. The fact that he’s under-employed, ready to divorce, semi-homeless or addicted to pornography, for example, are not private, isolated events but parts of the larger picture. The relevance and resonance of his work depend on his vision, so if he’s narrow, smug or oblivious, it will show. Simply put, the writer must understand what’s happening. (No kidding!) Though he must have a comprehensive overview of what’s happening, he must also pay attention to the particulars, of course, as they are manifest in his immediate environment. He must be close to the ground, and by this, I mean he must investigate, literally, where he is, and who he’s surrounded with. He must continually observe people, first hand, and hear what they have to say, and he must experience his world physically, by moving through it with his own body, and not settle for filtered and degraded versions as beamed through a screen. It’s also time for a revival of Regionalism, which has had a negative connotation for too long now. Let’s welcome writers who are intensely San Mateo, Allentown or Lake Charles, the way Ho Bieu Chanh was intensely Go Cong.

Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the U.S. in 1975, and has also lived in Italy and England. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004), four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003), American Tatts (Chax 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School 2006) and Jam Alerts (Chax 2007), and the novel, Love Like Hate (Seven Stories Press 2010). His work has been anthologized in several editions of Best American Poetry and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2006). He has also published widely in Vietnamese.

Eric Nguyen has a degree in sociology from the University of Maryland along with a certificate in LGBT Studies. He is currently an MFA candidate at McNeese State University and lives in Louisiana.                                                                                                                                                                  

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Interview with Linh Dinh: “Art is Always Political”

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

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From Kartika Review (Issue 15, Spring 2013), we bring Christine Lee Zilka and Sunny Woan’s in-depth interview with Monique Truong- Vietnamese American fiction writer and essayist, author of The Book of Salt (2003), Bitter in the Mouth (2010), and co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (1998)- which discusses how food plays a recurring theme in her books, her writing processes pertaining to physical setting and the actual physical act of writing, and her inspiration for Bitter in the Mouth.

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One of the most illustrious writers of contemporary Vietnamese American literature, Monique Truong inspires with her characters and her quiet, intelligent prose. She is a former fiction editor of The Asian Pacific American Journal and co-editor of the highly acclaimed anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose. Truong was born in Saigon and came to the States as a child in 1975. She attended Yale, then Columbia Law, and then in 2003 published her debut The Book of Salt, which won numerous awards. Then, in 2010 she published her sophomore novel Bitter in the Mouth.

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Bitter follows a young woman, Linda, growing up in the 70′s and 80′s in Boiler Springs, a small North Carolina town. Linda experiences memory and words through taste, a condition known as synesthesia. The story is part coming of age and part tragedy as Linda explores her past and comes to revelations about her family and herself.

Like Truong’s first book, The Book of Salt, a fictionalized narrative about the Vietnamese in-house cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Bitter in the Mouth is centered around food and eating. In one of our most exquisite interviews to date, the editors of Kartika converse with Monique Truong about her books and her writing rituals. Her responses, her thoughtfulness, and the astonishing beauty of her words caused us to fall even deeper in love with her work.

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KARTIKA REVIEW (KR): Food as theme? You have said in prior interviews that your books are not about food, and yet—yet they circle food and the sense of taste. How do you see them as not about food?

MONIQUE TRUONG (MT): As a writer, I’m interested in food and eating as performance, ritual, replacement, reward, punishment, pleasure, resistance, and as means of creativity and communication. Basically, everything but the food itself. If I write about a tree-ripened plum, its purple skin split by the sun, I don’t do so in order to make the reader desire the plum itself, but for what it represents within the narrative. (In life, for sure, I would desire the plum too. In literature, the plum is hopefully a bit more complicated than that.)

KR: Writing another race is difficult—and in Book of Salt, you wrote another gender and sexuality. What challenges did you face writing a gay character?

MT: My mantra while writing The Book of Salt: Love is love. Desire is desire. Sometimes the worst thing that we as writers and human beings can assume is that “other” people’s love is qualitatively different from our own and thus unknowable or inscrutable. The circumstances and the expression of that love may be different, but the love itself is not. I felt that if I was true to this, then I would be able to create a character with emotional integrity and resonance no matter the gender, sexual orientation, or historical time period.

KR: I have a confession—On a rainy afternoon while at Hedgebrook, I flipped through the journals of prior occupants of Oak cottage and discovered you’d stayed in the same cottage for your writing residency. I picked up Book of Salt and began reading, and came across a passage in which you described the rain falling on the roof—and the synchronicity between the rain falling on the roof of Oak cottage at Hedgebrook and the rain falling on the roof in Paris was undeniable.

 Some writers say they don’t write their physical setting into the novel—others say they have to travel far away to see the places in which they’ve lived. But there—there, I saw Hedgebrook, in real time. Did you write that passage while at Hedgebrook? To what extent does your physical setting seep into your writing?

MT: I think you mean this passage: “I, like all my brothers, was conceived in a downpour. What else was there to do during the rainy season? Hell, I suspect everyone in Saigon was conceived to the sound of water, carousing on the rooftops, slinking down the drainpipes.”

I’m pretty certain that I wrote that during my first residency at Hedgebrook (for three months during the spring of 2000). I’m not sure how not to write my physical setting into my novels. The pervasive rain in Washington state was the rhythm to which I wrote many chapters of Salt, especially the ones about Binh’s mother.

That’s another example of how my physical setting found its way into my narrative. Hedgebrook is a writing residency for women, and three months of talking primarily with women and hearing the stories of their lives and their mother’s and grandmother’s lives made me acutely attuned to the constraints and the acts of rebellion that were nonetheless possible for women throughout history.

Of course, many of these acts of bravery and defiance were not on the public stage but within the domestic space. Binh’s mother to me became one of these rebellious women. She was brave and defiant to have loved the schoolteacher. I’m not sure if I would have written her the same way if I had been writing elsewhere.

KR: Alice B. Toklas’ cookbook was the inspiration for Book of Salt—what was the inspiration for Bitter in the Mouth?

MT: I saw a segment about synesthesia, a neurological condition that causes the mixing of the senses, on a television show. There was an interview with a British man who experienced tastes when he heard or said certain words. That was the seed of Bitter for me. I knew that this condition would allow me to write about food and flavors again, but from an unusual angle.

KR: In Bitter in the Mouth, experience is expressed through the sense of taste. What is it about the sense of taste over the other physical senses (sight, touch, hearing, etc.) that seems to pull your writing toward it? Although for the protagonist of Bitter it is a health condition, for the reader it is a different perspective on story. What inspired you to tell that particular perspective of story?

My sense of taste is my dominant sense. I favor it, and it favors me right back. I’ve an incredibly good memory for flavors and can combine them in my head and experience them in the abstract. I think many avid home cooks and chefs can do this too. My memories are also often accompanied by the clear tastes of the foods that I ate during these discreet moments in time. For example, I’ve a friend from college who introduced me to dry-cured olives. Whenever I think of her, I’m overwhelmed by the briny, faintly buttery flavor of those black olives and can see them sitting in a little dish on her table.

Linda’s synesthesia is her secret sense. Secrets and hiding in plain sight are themes that are explored in many other ways in Bitter. But before all of those are revealed, I wanted to invite readers to identify with Linda. Yes, her condition is rare and unusual, but I do think it’s easy or tempting to imagine that we can understand it. The flavors that she experiences when she hears or speaks certain words are those of the American dinner table in the mid 1970s and onward. Many of these flavors are courtesy of processed, canned, and mass-marketed foods. These flavors, in reality, are common denominators.

Linda, though, is not common. She is rare. By Chapter 2, she already has provided readers with one of the keys to the novel: “I could claim, for example, that my first memory was the taste of an unripe banana, and many in the world would nod their heads, familiar with this unpleasantness. But we all haven’t tasted the same unripe fruit. In order to feel not so alone in the world, we blur the lines of our subjective memories, and we say to one another, ‘I know exactly what you mean!’”

KR: One incidental theme in Bitter in the Mouth is the tension between truth and story (for example, the grandmother), objective history versus subjective. You have mentioned in prior interviews that all history (and the law as well) is story. Do you think that’s one of the rationales for choosing first person point of view in both Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth, your notion of the objective existing only in the subjective story?

MT: I’m a firm believer that how a person tells her story is as revealing as the story itself. The first-person voice is, for me, the best way to explore all the how’s. What Linda tells you first about herself and what she withholds until later, for instance.

I also prefer the first-person voice because it allows me to inhabit a character-specific vocabulary and relationship to language, which are other manifestation of subjectivity. A character can attach an unusual meaning to a commonly used word, twisting it slightly or entirely, and it’s up to me to reveal to the reader the idiosyncrasies and what they may mean.

KR: What is the physical act of writing like for you?

MT: I wrote both my novels at many different residencies and also in my writing room in Brooklyn. Wherever I am, I place my desk right next to a window. On the desk, I set up a simple visual tableau related to the story that I’m working on. A set of tiny silver-plated salt and pepper shakers for The Book of Salt. A ceramic ashtray in the shape of North Carolina for Bitter in the Mouth.

Sometimes, I’m convinced that I have to be wearing shoes or I can’t write. I try not to write while wearing my PJs and never just my underwear (sorry, over sharing). This is all certainly related to my need to escape the house or building (and my manuscript) in an emergency. I’m not joking. Feeling in control and prepared is necessary for my process, especially since what’s happening on the page/screen is so often the opposite of that.

I believe strongly in the ritual as opposed to the routine of writing. Ritual and routine are not the same.

Ritual (a long walk beforehand, a cup of roasted rice tea during, an salutary nod to my literary heroes, Gertrude Stein and Marguerite Yourcenar, whose works in various forms occupy a place of honor on my writing desk right now) is about the physical, intellectual and emotional transition that needs to take place before I can shed my day-to-day self and become my writing self.

Routine is the numbing repetition of an act: laptop, daily word count, and deadlines.

KR: Stories versus novels: with which do you feel more comfortable, and why?

MT: I love the short story, but I haven’t written a short story in decades. In my novels, I’m always hoping to achieve the emotional economy, tautness of language, and gestural symbolism that are present in the best of them.

KR: In what way/s has your law background informed your fiction?

MT: The law taught me precision. Find and use the word that means exactly what you want to convey. Do not compromise or there will be ugly consequences.

KR: What advice do you have for beginning or emerging writers?

MT: I recommend that they travel, not just while they are emerging but during the whole of their writerly lives. I also recommend that they take off their headphones or ear buds when on the subway, bus, train, etc. In other words, eavesdrop. Everyday people say amazing and odd things. The other day I walked by a group of older African-American men on Sixth Avenue, and one of them was adamantly repeating this phrase several times: “God and Hilary Clinton…” I should have stopped and listened to the denouement, but I was in a hurry.

That too: Don’t be in a hurry. You end up missing things.

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from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

It’s that time again! The San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival is having their second biennial film and video showcase featuring Vietnamese filmmakers in Viet Nam and the diaspora. diaCRITICS managing editor and DVAN intern, Estela Uribe, had the pleasure of sitting down with Isabelle Pelaud, Executive Director of DVAN, and Julie Thi Underhill, diaCRITICS managing director and San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival director to share with us their vision and inspiration behind the festival, the types of stories coming out of the festival, and which films they are excited about showing. A general introduction to the festival, below, is followed by the interview then the complete program. The San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival is the latest commitment of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, the arts organization that hosts diaCRITICS.

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The debut San Francisco Diasporic Vietnamese Film Festival, as some of you might remember, took place on April 23, 2011, at San Francisco State University’s Coppola Theater. With a slightly changed name, this year’s San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival occurs on April 27-28^th at the historic Roxie Theater (3117 16th Street, San Francisco Mission District) located in the Mission district of San Francisco.

This 2-day film festival will launch with an Opening Night Gala ($10, 7:30-10pm, April 26) at Artists’ Television Access (992 Valencia St, San Francisco Mission District), including food, drink, mingling/mixing, music, and short poetry readings by Bay Area poets Việt Lê (also a filmmaker featured in the festival), Genny Lim, Bonnie Kwong, Paul Ocampo, and Tracy Nguyen—an exciting line-up of innovative and powerful Bay Area writers.

The San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival at the Roxie Theater expects over 2,000 attendees, watching over 20 films from many countries, including Việt Nam, Cambodia, Japan, Canada, France, Czech Republic, and the United States. The festival will feature narrative, documentary, and experimental films and videos by filmmakers such as Cuong Ngo (Pearls of the Far East), Hong-An Truong (Adaptation Fever series), Nguyễn Trinh Thi (a retrospective), Phương Thảo Trần and Swann Dubus (With Or Without Me). A director’s Q&A on Saturday night includes Việt Lê, Duc Nguyen, and Tony Nguyen, whose films are all showing at the festival, with their introduction. Trần Anh Hùng’s Norwegian Wood is the Opening Night feature. Each screening is $10, which may include multiple films or events. To view the program please visit the festival’s website, and for tickets visit the festival’s EventBrite page.

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The following interview was conducted by DVAN intern and diaCRITICS managing editor Estela Uribe, with Julie Thi Underhill and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, the director and supervisor of the festival, answering questions.

What is the vision for the San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival?

There is an incredible amount of quality film and video being made by Vietnamese people around the world, and since the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network is international in scope, the festival is one of our best ways to bring the works of the global Vietnamese community to the Bay Area. Although southern California has the Vietnamese International Film Festival, northern California had nothing to the effect, until our festival premiered in 2011. After our first festival at the Coppola Theater at SFSU, the audience literally refused to leave. The first question after the last screening, as the audience sat there in their seats not leaving the theater, was “When will this happen again?” So it was clear to us then, after a packed theater throughout the day, that there is an audience demand for Vietnamese film and video in the Bay Area. We decided to organize the festival on a biennial basis, and alternate with DVAN’s literary festival, to give our staff a rest in the off years for each program. This year we increased the film festival from one day to two, to allow for more extensive programming, and we moved the festival to a more centrally-located theater, the Roxie in the Mission, which is close to the 16th and Mission BART station for easier access through public transportation. And this year, unlike in 2011, we’re having a kick-off party at the Opening Night Gala at Artists’ Television Access, to give everyone a chance to get together and connect or reconnect, to eat, drink, and celebrate another great program of films. Our mission is generally to increase exposure to Vietnamese filmmakers wherever they live, supporting work of all genres and subjects, and to sustain a Bay Area audience that is interested in these kinds of films. Yet we want to have fun in the process, and we do, even as the festival requires a tremendous amount of work.

Why is it the San Francisco “Global” Vietnamese Film Festival and not the “International”?

There is another festival in Southern California called the Vietnamese International Film Festival, which we mentioned before. ViFF offers support and advice to DVAN and has recommended films to us. We are indebted to them in a variety of ways. At the beginning, ViFF requested that we not use “international” so there is no confusion between our two film festivals. So we decided first to use “diasporic” in 2011, and then to use “global” from here on out, since “global” includes the diaspora across the globe and the communities in Việt Nam. The word “global” is also more inclusive than our previous word “diasporic,” which was perceived by some as being too academic, since not everyone understands that “diaspora” means “dispersed.”

Any figures on the numbers of Vietnamese in the diaspora?

There are about 3 million people of Vietnamese descent living in the diaspora. In contrast, there are about 89 million people living in Việt Nam today, comprising over 50 ethnic groups.

Which countries are Vietnamese concentrated in, and which American cities/areas?

The Vietnamese are spread out across the globe, mostly in the U.S., Cambodia, France, Laos Australia, and Canada. According to the 2010 census, there are approximately 1.8 million Vietnamese in the U.S., concentrated in cities like San Jose, Garden Grove, Westminster, Houston, San Diego, and other locations with over 10,000 Vietnamese Americans.  Actually, Santa Clara County in the south Bay Area has over 125,000 Vietnamese. We anticipate that our audience will come from the surrounding areas including San Jose to attend our festival, since there is nothing else like it in Northern California and since their chances for seeing Vietnamese films on the big screen in Northern California are otherwise very tiny.

Are the war and refugee experiences still a predominant concern for the filmmakers and audiences?

Yes, but at the same time no, because our films are not limited to that topic. A lot of the time when people address Việt Nam in this country, they normally refer to the American war in Việt Nam. The words “Việt Nam” are almost synonymous for the war in this country, even as many of us agree that “Việt Nam is country not a war,” as the saying goes. Although the memories of war are still evident in communities affected by war, war is not the only thing on our minds, nor should it be. We express our connection to war or our disconnect from war, on our own terms. This means that our filmmakers have enlarged the conversation about war in significant ways.

As for films that address war in some capacity, we are screening five films that expand previous conversations about war as part of the history and memory of Việt Nam. Hong-An Truong’s Adaptation Fever series is an experimental video installation trilogy that investigates difference in relation to time, history, and memory through overdubbed narration in Vietnamese and French, and with some English subtitles. Hong-An Truong, a Vietnamese-American filmmaker, constructed each film using found footage of Việt Nam from during its French Indochina period. Her films are very compelling and haunting, even as they have elements of elusiveness and evasiveness, especially linguistically. These powerful short films left our programming committee in discussion for quite some time. We also saw one of them last October at the Troubling Borders exhibit of Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora at the Sweeney Gallery at UC Riverside, and found it lingering on our minds for days.

There’s also Tony Nguyen’s Enforcing the Silence, a documentary that investigates the 1981 murder of Lam Duong, who founded the Vietnamese Youth Development Center. The center is still there today, in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. In his investigative documentary, Tony Nguyen contemplates how tensions during the war spilled over onto U.S. soil, with five murders of Vietnamese-American journalists in the 1980s and 1990s. Lam’s life and death within this context is part of a history we don’t ever hear anything about, even within Asian American studies, a field that really got its start in the Bay Area. So we see this filmmaker expanding, in remarkable ways, the conversation about the ongoing effects of war on the Vietnamese-American community, in San Francisco and beyond. Although the American war officially ended in 1973 and the North Vietnamese took over the South in 1975, we still have a lot of political tension and strife in our diasporic communities. This film allows us to understand those tensions better, perhaps so that we can move beyond them, even as the film also hopes to help solve the mystery behind Lam’s murder.

And then there’s Duc Nguyen whose newest documentary, Stateless, centers stranded Vietnamese refugees in the Philippines after the closing of refugee camps left these refugees without legal status, barely surviving on their own with no place to call home. This film is very interesting to us and we expect it will attract a solid audience. We like and admire Duc Nguyen’s previous documentary Bolinao 52, about Vietnamese boat people whose stories are harrowing—stranded in the South China Sea on a damaged boat for so long, weeks, some were forced into cannibalism to stay alive. As with Bolinao 52, Duc Nguyen’s newest film also tells a hidden history of evacuations gone wrong, which few people know about. It especially complicates the tidy narrative of rescue by a benevolent asylum country that often characterizes the refugee flight from Việt Nam. Showing a sneak preview of Stateless is an honor for us, plus to have Duc Nguyen in person for a director’s introduction and for the Q&A on Saturday.

And a pioneer of Việt Nam’s independent cinema, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, made Chronicle of a Tape Recorded Over using an exquisite corpse method—first used by dadaists in the 1920s—as the filmmaker journeys over the American War’s notorious Hồ Chí Minh Trail asking her subjects to contribute to an assemblage film. And her Song to the Front takes a historical but rarely seen classic Vietnamese war film from 1973 as its central source, turning it into a small vignette that decomposes the aesthetic and romantic elements. Like Hong-An Truong, Nguyễn Trinh Thi is revisiting the archive and fashioning new conversations and interrogations from what she’s found there.

What are other stories coming out of the Global Vietnamese community, which you are highlighting?

The Vietnamese in Việt Nam and in the diaspora have developed new terminologies and engagements with their identities and with the world, even as we see parallels between our experiences and other people’s. So even the perspective of Vietnamese-Americans can be very transnational. Here’s a great example. Lin+Lam’s 2004 video essay Departure discusses modernization and foreign interventions through transportation methods. Made by two Vietnamese-American collaborators, whose short film Unidentified Vietnam No. 18 we screened in 2011, Departure is told in five different native languages by five women who recount interconnected histories of urban environments that have undergone transformation—Taipei, Shanghai, and Hanoi—all former colonial cities.

Our festival also shows films that center often-marginalized themes like queer desire, love, family, and/or kinship—in Việt Lê’s Love Bang!, Nguyễn Đình Anh’s Uncle & Son, and Leon Le’s Dawn—and the sexual awakening in teens in On Duty with Shu Qi from the Best of Yxine Film Festival, and heroin addiction and HIV illness in northwest Việt Nam, in With or Without Me. Four of those five films were shot in Southeast Asia—in Cambodia and in Việt Nam. And some films we’re screening are very much a hybrid and transnational creation between artists of many countries and identities, including our Opening Night feature, Trần Anh Hùng’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. This movie was filmed by a Vietnamese-French director on location in Japan, home of the story’s author, then set to a score composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who is British. Which brings us back to music, something Murakami works into all his novels, this one no exception. Jonny Greenwood is British like the Beatles, whose song lends the title of novel and film. It’s interesting, all the connections and collaborations, crisscrossing the globe.  Norwegian Wood is a deeply affecting story of mourning and love set within the social upheavals in late 1960’s Tokyo, and a real treat for fans of either Trần Anh Hùng or Haruki Murakami.

Can you spotlight some screenings that you’re really excited about?

It’s really hard to choose among them, because the whole program is very solid. We are definitely excited to be showing Norwegian Wood, by one of the most respected and best-known filmmakers of Vietnamese descent. Some of Trần Anh Hùng’s movies that might already be familiar to our audience are Scent of Green Papaya, Cyclo, and Vertical Ray of the Sun. Haruki Murakami is a globally known author, wildly popular, who refused  to allow anyone to adapt his book until Trần Anh Hùng approached him.

Another film of particular interest is Enforcing the Silence by Tony Nguyen, which we talked about earlier. diaCRITICS editor Viet Nguyen reviewed it in 2011. The film speculates upon journalist Lam Duong’s murder in 1981 in San Francisco, after he reprinted articles from newspapers in postwar Việt Nam, then under Communist control. This film is essential viewing in San Francisco in particular, because it illuminates an important history for the local Vietnamese community. Tony Nguyen along with Việt Lê and Duc Nguyen will be doing a Q&A on Saturday night, so the audience is in for quite a treat having the directors present to discuss their filmmaking practices and motivations, and their next projects.

First time director Cuong Ngo, a Vietnamese-Canadian, has made a beautiful film with an all-star cast, Pearls of the Far East, about women’s frustrated search for love in Việt Nam. Its actors have starred before in The White Silk Dress, Vertical Ray of the Sun, Moon at the Bottom of the Well, The Clash, The Rebel, and Joy Luck Club. We’re happy to return these talented actors to the big screen in San Francisco—this film has great intergenerational appeal. It’s our first film by a Vietnamese-Canadian, too. And the second generation will be moved and amused by Mark Tran’s All About Dad, which tackles the theme of Vietnamese-American parental conservatism and rigid expectations with originality and humor. It screens as a double feature with Leon Le’s short film Dawn, which won three important awards at the Yxine Film Fest (YxineFF) 2012.

PROGRAM FOR THE SAN FRANCISCO GLOBAL VIETNAMESE FILM FESTIVAL

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The San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival (April 26-28, 2013) is a biennial film and video showcase centering Vietnamese filmmakers in Việt Nam and the diaspora—reflecting the transnational nature of Vietnamese people today. The San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival (SFGVFF) is the first and only festival of its kind in the Bay Area. With an Opening Night Gala ($10, 7:30-10pm,  April 26) at Artists’ Television Access (992 Valencia St), the SFGVFF runs from 2:30pm to midnight each day, April 27-28, 2013, at the historic Roxie Theater (3117 16th Street) built in 1909 in the Mission district of San Francisco. The festival expects over 2,000 attendees.

Over 20 films from all over the world—including Việt Nam, Cambodia, Canada, France, Japan, Czech Republic, and the United States—will be showcased at our two-day festival. This year, the SFGVFF features narrative, documentary, and experimental films and videos by Cuong Ngo (Pearls of the Far East), Đỗ Quốc Trung (On Duty With Shu Qi), Duc Nguyen (sneak preview of Stateless), Hong-An Troung (Adaptation Fever series), Leon Le (Dawn), Lin+Lam (Departure), Mark Tran (All About Dad), Nghiêm Quỳnh Trang (Un Interrogatoire), Nguyễn Đình Anh (Uncle & Son), a retrospective by Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Phương Thảo Trần and Swann Debus (With Or Without Me), Tony Nguyen (Enforcing The Silence), Trần Anh Hùng (Norwegian Wood), Trần Dũng Thanh Huy (16-30), Trần Ngọc Sáng (Go Playing With Ice), and Việt Lê (Love Bang!). The festival is pleased to feature introductory talks and Q&A discussion with filmmakers/directors Việt Lê, Duc Nguyen, and Tony Nguyen.

Each screening is $10, and may include multiple films or events. Tickets available at EventBrite.

Our festival is sponsored in part by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Walter & Elise Haas Fund, Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, and San Francisco Arts Commission.

The San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival is proudly part of the 16th annual United States of Asian America Festival.

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PROGRAM OF EVENTS
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FRIDAY APRIL 26 — ARTISTS TELEVISION ACCESS —
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Opening Night Gala

Doors open                                       7:30 pm
Doors close                                     10:00 pm

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The biennial San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival inaugurates, with a party, its 2013 showcase of filmmakers of Vietnamese descent from all over the world. The Opening Night Gala, held at Artists Television Access (992 Valencia Street in the Mission), offers you the chance to mix and mingle with filmmakers, film-lovers, spoken word performers, poets, and visual artists who’ve dropped by to celebrate northern California’s only Vietnamese-focused festival of films. Trailers for excellent films and videos playing over the next two days, at the nearby Roxie Theater, will be screened during the Opening Night Gala. The open mic invites Bay Area wordsmiths (of all persuasions) to read poems and perform spoken word. Music and refreshments (including cognac, chocolates, and entrees) are provided by the festival’s host organization, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, whose aim is to promote Vietnamese artists from across the globe, including the generations born in the diaspora. Please drop by to celebrate their launch of the 2013 San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival, because everyone loves a good beginning. The event is $10 but includes food, drink, and merriment, thanks in part to Opening Night Gala sponsors Martell Cognac, Le Colonial, Hodo Soy Beanery, Rau Om, Sugar Bowl Bakery, and 1000 Fine Events.

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SATURDAY APRIL 27 — ROXIE THEATER —
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Hong-An Truong — Adaptation Fever series  |  Lin + Lam — Departure

Doors open                                     2:25 pm
Introduction by Việt Lê                   2:40 pm
Screening begins                          2:45 pm
Screening ends                             4:00 pm

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Hong-An Troung’s ADAPTATION FEVER (2006-2007 | US | experimental video installation | 20 min) is a trilogy that both appropriates and disrupts the archive. ‘The Past is a Distant Colony,’ ‘A Story in the Process of Self-Alienation,’ ‘It’s True Because It’s Absurd,’ and ‘Explosions in the Sky’ were each constructed using found footage of Viet Nam during its French Indochina period, to explore questions about the politics of representation and the construction of difference in relation to history, time, and memory. The split screen and juxtaposition become a simple technique whereby the “real” and by extension, its historical referent, are permanently deferred objects, further diminished through the overdubbed narratives in Vietnamese and French which are only briefly summarized in English subtitles. Playing with the idea that nostalgia can be evoked without memory or experience, and also by the co-dependent relationship between the West’s present and the Other’s desire for that present, this video appropriates archival images as a way to consider translation, postcolonial subjectivity, and sentimentality. With an introduction by Việt Lê, curator and director of LOVE BANG! (screening later at 4:30.)

After that, Lin+Lam’s DEPARTURE (2004 | US | video essay | 48 min) considers modernization and foreign intervention, through transportation methods. Shot from the exploratory perspective of moving car, cycle, and trains, the video travels through three former colonial Asian cities: Taipei, Shanghai, and Hanoi. In recognition of language hierarchies and the politics of translation, five women narrate interrelated histories of urban environments under transformation, in their native languages—Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, English, Shanghainese, and Vietnamese.

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Việt Lê — Love Bang!  |  Nguyễn Trinh Thi — Retrospective

Doors open                                    4:15 pm
Screening begins                          4:30 pm
Screening ends                             5:45 pm

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Việt Lê’s LOVE BANG! (2012 | Cambodia | music video | 5.5 min) is a sexperimental music video exploring the Southeast Asian popular culture scene with a fantastic vision of queer love. Lê’s sensational trilingual hip pop song (Vietnamese, Khmer and English) also reveals contradictions in modernity and memory of Southeast Asia’s fraught history of war and trauma. “Hip pop” is a fictitious cross between pop and hip hop. The disjunctured video features a queer, star-crossed, time-traveling war-time love triangle. Sounds complicated? Love is! Filmed in Cambodia, Lê collaborated with many talented artists to realize his retro sci-fi pop vision. Working during the summer of 2011 with Phnom-Penh based musician and music producer DJ Peanut, he recorded a new song which samples Fleetwood Mac’s Riahannon (1975) and the iconic Thanh Lanh’s Vietnamese and French rendition of Cher’s 1966 hit Bang Bang. Cambodian rapper RJ co-penned the Khmer rap lyrics and soulful singer Dollar sang the bittersweet hook. After several reworkings of the song, using different singers and numerous recordings in Peanut’s studio, they got the sound they wanted. LOVE BANG! is the first installment of a video/ photographic trilogy executed and exhibited in Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh, and Los Angeles. These three global cities are contradictory characters, metaphors, and mirrors for the lovers. The project addresses the intersections of trauma, memory and modernity. The new songs pay tongue-in-cheek homage to Vietnamese and Cambodian tunes as well as Western pop songs, which are ever-present on the streets of the two countries.

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Followed by a retrospective by Nguyễn Trinh Thi, a pioneer of Viêt Nam’s independent cinema, featuring LOVE MAN LOVE WOMAN, SPRING COMES WINTER AFTER, CHRONICLE OF A TAPE RECORDED OVER, and SONG TO THE FRONT (86 min total). In LOVE MAN LOVE WOMAN (2007 | Việt Nam | documentary | 52 min), through Master Luu Ngoc Duc, one of the most prominent spirit mediums in Hanoi, and his vibrant community, Trinh Thi explores how effeminate and gay men in homophobic Vietnam have traditionally found community and expression in the country’s popular Mother Goddess Religion, Đạo Mẫu. Using footage from the public funeral of an important poet who was banned for decades in Vietnam, SPRING COMES WINTER AFTER (2008 | Việt Nam | experimental film | 4 min) is connected to the political and historical situation of the country, provoking some questions still impermissible to be asked publicly in present-day Việt Nam. What if one can play history in reverse and then replay it again? CHRONICLE OF A TAPE RECORDED OVER (2010 | Việt Nam | single-channel | 25 min) uses ‘exquisite corpse’, a method by which each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, as the filmmaker journeys over the Việt Nam War’s notorious Hồ Chí Minh Trail. Along once-contested roads, the filmmaker asked local villagers to contribute their tales while the camera was observing their present-day life, merging past with present, reality with fiction, in her effort to assemble a piece of collective history, a history told by the people from the bottom up. And SONG TO THE FRONT (2011 | Việt Nam | single-channel | 5.25 min) takes a historical Vietnamese war film from 1973 as its central source. Re-editing ‘Bai ca rat ran (Song to the Front)’, produced by the Vietnam Feature Film Studio and directed by Tran Dac, Trinh Thi has turned this rarely seen black and white classic feature into a small vignette that decomposes the aesthetic and romantic elements of this social-realist melodrama.  At the core of her work, a progressive exploration of her personal vision, Nguyễn Trinh Thi pays attention to gestural details, to the expressive faces of people who expose themselves and emerge out of the backdrop of a chaotic world. Her gaze is silent, anxious, humanist.

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Tony Nguyen — Enforcing the Silence  |  Q&A with Việt Lê, Duc Nguyen, and Tony Nguyen

Doors open                                     6:10 pm
Director’s introduction                    6:25 pm
Screening begins                           6:30 pm
Q&A                                                 7:30 pm
Ends                                                 9:00 pm

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Tony Nguyen’s ENFORCING THE SILENCE (2011 | US | documentary | 60 min) speculates upon the unsolved 1981 murder of Lam Duong, who once founded the Vietnamese Youth Development Center in San Francisco and published a liberal newspaper that reprinted stories from communist Việt Nam following the Việt Nam War. On July 21, 1981, the 27-year-old was shot dead outside his apartment. Local police have never convicted his murderer(s). Yet within days of Lam’s murder, news spread that a shadowy, anti-Communist group had claimed responsibility, sending a chilling message to Vietnamese refugees everywhere—stay in line with your political views or risk death. Between 1982 and 1990, five more Vietnamese Americans—four of them journalists—were violently killed, many believe for political reasons. Vietnamese journalists are the largest group of immigrant journalists murdered on U.S. soil, claiming five lives out of the ten immigrant journalists killed in America since 1981. All the Vietnamese murders were linked to a terrorist group in the Vietnamese American community, but police and federal officials have yet to solve any of the cases, including Lam’s. Thirty years later, new filmmaker Tony Nguyen unlocks the mystery of Lam Duong’s life and death, and uncovers truths that Vietnamese Americans have never publicly explored. For the first time on film, Lam’s loved ones, federal investigators, and present-day journalists speak out about their experiences and reveal the risks that Vietnamese Americans have faced for exercising their first amendment rights in the U.S. Mixing personal interviews with startling historical and present-day footage, ENFORCING THE SILENCE provides a disturbing in-depth look at a war-torn community that continues to struggle to find its place in a democratic society. As the U.S. finds itself entrenched in conflicts in the Middle East, this film offers fresh insight into the long-term costs of war.

This screening includes a panel/Q&A with filmmakers/directors Tony Nguyen, Duc Nguyen of STATELESS, and Việt Lê of LOVE BANG!

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Trần Anh Hùng — Norwegian Wood — Opening Night Feature

Doors open                                   9:15 pm
Screening begins                         9:30 pm
Screening ends                           11:45 pm

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Trần Anh Hùng’s NORWEGIAN WOOD (2010 | Japan | drama, romance | 133 min) illustrates Toru Watanabe’s deeply conflicting emotions during an already volatile time of global instability, set in late-1960s Tokyo. Students around the world were uniting to overthrow the establishment and Toru Watanabe’s personal life was similarly in tumult. At heart, he was devoted to his first love, beautiful and introspective Naoko, a bond forged by the long-ago tragic death of their friend. Watanabe lived with the influence of death, until an outgoing, vivacious, supremely self-confident girl, Midori, entered his life, forcing him to choose. Based on the bestselling novel by Haruki Murakami, this film ultimately concerns a young university student’s encounters with love, death, and loss in 1960s Japan, as he is torn between his desires for two very different women. Filmmakers hoping to adapt the celebrated novel repeatedly approached the reclusive Murakami, who refused to permit an adaptation until asked by acclaimed Vietnamese-French director Trần Anh Hùng (CYCLO, THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA, VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN.)

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SUNDAY APRIL 28 — ROXIE THEATER —
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Duc Nguyen— Stateless

Doors open                                    2:30 pm

Director’s Introduction                   2:45 pm
Screening begins                           2:50 pm
Screening ends                              3:50 pm

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Duc Nguyen’s STATELESS (US, Philippines | 2012 | documentary | 57 min) follows Vietnamese refugeees stranded in the Philippines for nearly two decades after the closure of refugee camps. Caught at the low tide of compassion fatigue by the international community, evidenced by the closure of refugee camps in Southeast Asia, the refuges found themselves without a home country. The arriving asylum seekers were forced to repatriate to their origin countries. These particular group of Vietnamese refused to return. Thus, they survived on borrowed land and carved out an existence on the fringe of society. Without legal rights, they could not be employed, own properties or conduct business in the Philippines. In 2005, U.S. immigration officials returned to Manila to look into their cases. STATELESS depicts the tribulation of the unwanted refugees who survived on a glimpse of hope to find a home. It reveals the struggle and resiliency of the asylum seekers as they patiently hang on to the dream of a permanent home. Heart wrenching and inspiring, their stories demonstrate the will to sacrifice almost everything to gain the right to be called a citizen. This is a sneak preview screening, just ahead of full completion of the film. Filmmaker/director Duc Nguyen will be present for a director’s introduction, after appearing on Saturday April 27 (7:30pm) for the filmmaker/director Q&A with Việt Lê of LOVE BANG! and Tony Nguyen of ENFORCING THE SILENCE.

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Phương Thảo Trần & Swann Dubus — With or Without Me

Doors open                                 4:00 pm
Screening begins                        4:15 pm
Screening ends                           5:30 pm

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Phương Thảo Trần and Swann Dubus’s documentary WITH OR WITHOUT ME/ TRONG HAY NGOAI TAY EM (2011) is an intimate and sensitive portrayal of two heroin addicts strung out at the edge of the map of Điện Biên province. Thi and Trung live in the lush, rice-terraced mountains of Việt Nam’s far northwest. Like many young men living on the main heroin route from Laos to China, however, they’re both addicts who’ve contracted HIV from sharing dirty needles. Both struggle with addiction and illness throughout the film, as they wrestle with the possibilities of living or dying. WITH OR WITHOUT ME was made  with the support of Medical Committee Netherlands Vietnam (MCNV). The film has screened at film festivals in Germany and Italy.

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Cuong Ngo — Pearls of the Far East

Doors open                                    5:45 pm
Screening begins                          6:00 pm
Screening ends                              7:45 pm

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Cuong Ngo’s PEARLS OF THE FAR EAST (Canada, Việt Nam | 2011 | drama | 103 min) threads the inner lives and forbidden loves of seven Vietnamese women, with breathtaking scenes filmed throughout Việt Nam. Adapted from award-winning stories by Minh Ngoc Nguyen, produced by award-winning filmmakers Igor Szczurko & Tom Yarith Ker, Cuong Ngo weaves a vivid, timeless and unforgettable tapestry with characters brought to life by a gorgeous cast of acclaimed talent from Việt Nam, U.S. and Canada. Seven interrelated short films depict women who are unable to attain love, focusing on their feelings of loneliness and unrequited sense of longing. The film crosses generations, reflecting the different stages of love, beginning with a pair of children and ending with a lonely retired actress. Ngo draws attention to women in Việt Nam and their emotional battles with desire and repression. The star-studded cast includes actresses Truong Ngoc Anh (THE WHITE SILK DRESS, 2006), Nhu Quynh (VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN, 2000), Hong Anh (MOON AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL, 2009), Ngo Thanh Van (THE CLASH, 2010, THE REBEL, 2007), Minh Ngoc Nguyen, and the legendary Kieu Chinh (JOY LUCK CLUB, 1993).

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Various Yxine Filmmakers — Best of Yxine Film Festival — Five Shorts

Doors open                                   8:00 pm
Screening begins                          8:15 pm
Screening ends                             9:35 pm

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From the Best of Yxine Film Festival! Nguyễn Đình Anh‘s UNCLE & SON (2012 | Việt Nam | drama | 15 min) shows a boy’s tragic decision to bring a better life to his uncle, with unforeseen consequences. The film is full of emotions, typical of the folklore of Southern Vietnam. It also invites thinking about social prejudice and lack of empathy for humans who are different. Nghiêm Quỳnh Trang’s UN INTERROGATOIRE (2011 | Czech, France, Việt Nam | psychological drama | 15.5 min) uses flashback to show the memories, deceptions, and realities underlying a young newlywed Vietnamese student’s residency permit interview in France, after she marries a young Frenchman. The filmmaker gradually leads viewers into Minh’s puzzling and troubled inner world. Đỗ Quốc Trung’s ON DUTY WITH SHU QI (2012 | Việt Nam | drama | 22 min) addresses the sexual awakenings of teens in a straightforward manner. These initial contacts, whether surprising or daring, honest or cheeky, are only the foundation for two lonely individuals—a weird guy and an infamous hot girl in high school—to find their way to each other, in defiance of everything. Trần Ngọc Sáng’s GO PLAYING WITH ICE (2011 | Việt Nam |  drama | 11.5 min) revolves around three generations of ice deliverers, within the engaging landscape of the south. The film also poses several questions regarding the role of passion at work – one thing that is gradually fading away in the feverish urbanization of a changing city. Trần Dũng Thanh Huy’s 16-30 (2012 | Việt Nam | action | 17 min) follows young boys selling betting results—16:30 is not only their starting time for work,  it is the time TV stations broadcast lotto results.

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Leon Le — Dawn  |  Mark Tran — All About Dad |  Closing Night Short & Feature

Doors Open                                 9:50 pm
Screening begins                      10:05 pm
Screening ends                         11:20 pm

Leon Le’s DAWN (2012 | US | drama | 10 min) depicts two prejudiced presumptuous strangers, with much in common. After Tye perceives a racist glance from another passenger on the commuter train, a confrontation ensues. While disputing their differences, Tye discovers that what they share in common is actually what angers him the most. Both are forced to directly face their presumptions of each other and through the experience are left with a greater sense of the interconnectedness of human beings. DAWN won three important awards at the Yxine Film Fest (YxineFF) 2012, including the “Golden Heart” prize for best film in the international competition category, “Best Directing,” and a “Rainbow Heart” as the best feature on LGBT issues.

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Mr. Do has raised his kids to be good Catholics and to live up to his unrealistic expectations, in Mark Tran’s ALL ABOUT DAD (2009 | US | drama | 80 min). His son Ty is abandoning pre-med to chase a less practical dream, while Linh is keeping her fiancé’s Buddhist background a secret. However, they aren’t the only kids with secrets in the Do family. It’s time Dad faces the truth that his children have grown up. Delightfully hilarious, yet mixed with great tenderness and humanism, ALL ABOUT DAD addresses the familiar theme of old world father vs. new world kids with deftness and originality.

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Estela Uribe, a student at San Francisco State University, is a DVAN intern and managing editor of diaCRITICS.

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is Associate Professor in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She authored This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature and co-edited Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora. A more comprehensive list of her publications is available here.

Julie Thi Underhill is a filmmaker, photographer, poet, and essayist. As a Cham-French-American (grand)daughter of conflicts in French Indochina/Việt Nam, her artistic and academic work addresses colonialism and war. She is in Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, and many other collections. Her website has a complete list of publications.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival 2013—Interview

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

Who are the “Công Binh” and the “Lính Thợ”? Here in this post, director Lam Lê talks about his most recent documentary that reveals and retells the elided history of these Vietnamese Indochinese workers conscripted to war-time labor in France during World War II. Where French history has erased and forgotten them, Lam Lê writes these men back into history and memory with his Công Binh: La longue nuit Indochinoise.

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French Trailer of Công Binh

Summary

On the eve of the Second World War, twenty thousand Vietnamese people were forcibly recruited in French Indochina and shipped to France to work in weapons factories, replacing workers sent to the front. Mistaken for soldiers, they were stuck in France after the defeat in 1940. During the Occupation, these workers – called “Công Binh” – were left at the mercy of the Wehrmacht and lived like pariahs. They pioneered rice cultivation in the Camargue. Wrongly accused of betraying their native Việt Nam, they were all actually strongly committed to Hồ Chí Minh, rooting for the Independence in 1945.

The film interviews roughly two dozen survivors, both in Việt Nam and in France. Five died during the editing of the movie. They talk of their day to day life in a colonial situation. The film portrays a page of the history between France and Việt Nam that has shamefully been erased from our collective memory.

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Quotes by the Công Binh 

On the working and living conditions in the camps: 

“We were given capes. We looked like chickens with broken wings. The shoes were too big for us. We were pathetic when we walked. We looked like a row of penguins.“

“We had no mosquito nets. We had nothing to eat, however, we were a feast for the mosquitoes! But we planted the rice, our feet in the water. And when I ate a bowl of this rice, the rice we harvested, what joy. It was the first bowl of rice ‘made in France’ I ate since arriving on French soil.”

On why they had never told their story before

“What use to stir up the past? I wanted to first ensure a good future for Juliette, my wife, for my family in this country,” said Nguyên Van Thanh, alias ZAN 3, who stayed on in France after the war.

“I would never have thought someone would be interested in this story. Especially in France! After all, it is not very glorious for the Republic of Human Rights, it would be like self inflicting a whipping, right? But I realized that it was important to pass this memory on to our children.“ said Nguyên Van Thanh.

Interview with director Lam Lê

Could you explain the title “Công Binh”?

“Công Binh,” in Vietnamese literally means: worker-soldier. This is the exact name to be given to the 20,000 Vietnamese conscripted to go to work in factories in France during the Second World War. I insist on the use of this word because the misunderstanding about their situation is due to the fact that these men were wrongly “named.” In Việt Nam, they were known as “Lính Thợ,” etymologically: soldier-worker. It is a very pejorative term that implies “collaborators of the French Army.” I, like many Vietnamese for a long time, had a very distorted and false image of the Lính Thợ, believing them to be traitors to their native country, or that they had consorted with the French. These unfortunates were clearly forgotten by French history, but also by Vietnamese history that had always considered them traitors, while France had stolen their youth…. They were conscripted in the countryside. Often, they did not know how to read, they did not know what to expect. Families were forced to give up at least one son. My father, luckily, was not enlisted. We lived in the city, he was able to escape through the cracks.

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How did you become interested in the history of these men?

I met one of them. Total coincidence. In the early 1980s, I had a difficult time finding an elderly Vietnamese refugee in France to play the role of a resistance fighter in my previous films Rencontres des nuages et du dragon (1980) and Poussière d’Empire (1983). Surprisingly enough, I found an old man who did not mind playing the role. He had settled in France just after the Second World War, and was very secretive about his past. He told me much later that he had been a Lính Thợ. In fact, he was ashamed and was embarrassed that I knew. He knew what the word implied in Việt Nam. Such a shame considering he was a hero to his fellow Công Bình, a staunch supporter of Hồ Chí Minh! When I heard about the book written by the journalist Pierre Daum on the subject (Actes Sud in 2009), I immediately contacted him. He had used a master’s thesis written by a French-Vietnamese student on the subject in the 1990s and delved further in his research. It triggered something. I knew it was time for me to tackle this film. I am not a journalist, nor a historian. I am a director: I wanted to tell this story, but with my Vietnamese subjectivity and vision. Brandishing this identity I wanted to bring my viewpoint, as a Vietnamese, to this story. Ultimately, Công Binh, la longue nuit indochinoise is not just another documentary, but a movie like all my other fiction films. It is one of my most intimate films.

Do you talk about yourself in it?

In a way. These men were twenty years old when they left Việt Nam, oftentimes saying they would never again see their country. At the same age, I too left Saigon, then under U.S. domination in the late 1960s, that is to say, without hope of return. The Communist victory over the entire country was inevitable. I know, in my gut, what it means to be exiled. Like them, I have nothing of my past, no class pictures, no school books, nothing of my Vietnamese childhood. We are Memory’s uprooted. What is at stake here is transmission. I love this quote Pasolini used as an epigraph for his film: “History is the passion of sons seeking to interview their fathers.” As for the men in my film, nobody had interviewed them. They have always hidden their tragic story from their children because what mattered was the future, not the past. I have hours and hours of filmed interviews with these men. They opened up to me utterly. We developed a very strong relationship built on trust, a father-son relationship. They quickly realized they needed to pass along this memory. They are all nonagenarians. I also discovered that I felt invested with this mission. For me, this film is the legacy that I did not receive from my own father whom I left at eighteen, the legacy I want to leave to my son born in France, I who do not have any memories to transmit, no pictures, no family albums.

These men are the last survivors of this past. Their words needed to be collected urgently…

During the editing, five of my witnesses died. So, yes, I felt like I was running against the clock. I have already shown the film to the Công Binh still valid who live in France. This past fall, I organized a special preview showing during a commemorative day in Sorgues, where at the time, there were 5,000 Công Binh living in several camps, with a prison exclusively for the Indochinese. It was important for me to show this film to them, to their children and grandchildren who came from all corners of France. I will also go to Việt Nam as soon as possible to show the film to those I met there.

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Since Poussière d’Empire, it seems that you have been grappling with colonial issues.

I was born in 1948 in North Việt Nam. I belong to a generation that experienced colonization directly, a generation of Indochinese “natives.” As a child, I remember being slapped by a colonist child in the street, just like the story told by one of the Công Binh in the film. It was common at the time. In Hà Nội, where I grew up, we did not have the right to go into colonists’ neighborhoods. At the swimming pool, there were segregated time periods. My parents wanted us, the children, to succeed. The only solution was to work hard and pass a competitive examination in kindergarten to earn admission to the “French” school. And then, to stay among the top of the class in hopes of obtaining a passport to study in universities abroad. Our only hope was France, the country that enslaved us. A cruel paradox. I followed the same path as my two elder brothers. One graduated from Ecole Polytechnique and the other Centrale [two of France's most selective universities]; both required attending preparatory classes for the Grandes Ecoles…. and yet, in our heads, we continued to feel inferior. You remain colonized in your head. In Việt Nam, to say you are going abroad, you said “đi xứ người,” literally “go to the land of men”. Can you imagine that? That means we, the Vietnamese, considered ourselves less than human. We were taught that we were not full citizens, merely natives.

How do you explain that Algerian remembrance is much more “vindicated” with an abundance of books, memoria, and movies. Compared to Algeria, former Indochina seems to have been erased, forgotten.

The Algerian and Indochinese problems are cousins. It should not be forgotten that is was after Điện Biên Phủ that the French colonial empire crumbled and that the Algerian separatist leaders were trained by the Indochinese guerrillas! Of course, Algeria was closer. Indochina was so far away. And then there is also perhaps a cultural factor. Vietnamese mentality, eager for modernity, tends to erase the past. It is a country focused on the future. Many young people I interviewed there do not know for example that France had once colonized the country. I do not know if this is good or bad. As for second-generation Vietnamese immigrants who have settled in the West, their parents were not interested in claims and demands. They chose invisibility, they were desperate to fit in, to be discreet, to erase the past. This was the case for the Công Binh, who never demanded to be paid for their years of quasi-free, hard work, who never spoke of their inglorious past to their children, and whose history is only recognized now, over sixty years later…. It was high time, especially for their children, to learn of this past, to reclaim this memory.

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Do you think that France is struggling to cope with its colonial past?

Yes, of course. There are actually very few films on France’s real colonial past. It remains a taboo. When compared with the enormous amount of American movies on the war in Việt Nam, it’s true that there is a problem.

When my film Poussière d’Empire was released in 1983, it was one of the very evocations of colonial Indochina from the point of view of the colonized. And the fact that I killed off Dominique Sanda, the French star of the production, in the middle of the film was quite shocking. For me, it was logical in terms of the historical truth of France in Indochina. After France’s defeat at Điện Biên Phủ (symbolized by the death of Dominique Sanda) at exactly the halfway mark of the film, it was the colonized’s turn to take up their history. I realized I had touched a nerve by metaphorically killing the French Empire. Over the past thirty years, the situation has certainly changed, but not so much in the end. The former president of the French Republic still requested the benefits of colonization be taught in schools.

Isn’t that placing certain cultures higher than others? This shows that nothing has been resolved.

All trailers and images are copyrighted by ADR Productions, 2012.

—

Lam Lê was born in 1950 in Vietnam and came to France in 1970 to pursue his university degree in mathematics in France’s most elite and competitive institutions. He later studied painting at the Beaux Arts in Paris. He started his professional career as a theater set designer at the Atelier de l’Epée de Bois, which he co-founded at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes. Lâm Lê moved on to cinema, first as an assistant on features with directors such as Jean-Pierre Mocky. He made a name for himself with his storyboard for Garde A Vue (Claude Miller). He has worked with a number of directors, such as Jacques Perrin on Microcosmos.

He has written and directed a number of films; but his first was a mid-length feature that he wrote and directed in 1980. Rencontre Des Nuages Du Dragon (mid-length feature selected for the Cannes Festival in 1981) would be the first work in his Indochinese trilogy. He followed it up with the full length feature, Poussière D’empire, starring Dominique Sanda and Jean-François Stévenin (selected for Venice in 1983 and Berlin in 1984). This poetic movie is the first French feature authorized in Vietnam and opened the doors for other French films on Indochina. In 2005, he directed, 20 Nuits et Un Jour de Pluie, the last film of his trilogy.

His latest effort, Công Binh : La longue nuit Indochinoise, is his first documentary and signals his return to Vietnamese subjects.

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Please take the time to rate this post (above) and share it (below). Ratings for top posts are listed on the sidebar. Sharing (on email, Facebook, etc.) helps spread the word about diaCRITICS. Join the conversation and leave a comment! Is this your first time hearing about these “Công Bình” and “Lính Thợ”? What do you think of this elided history?

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Công Binh: The Forgotten Indochinese Workers in France

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

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As many of you know, diaCRITICS periodically reposts blog entries from other blog sites. We are excited to share with you an interview conducted in March 2010 by Eric Brightwell of Amoeblog who questions some important figures from the new wave scene back in the ’80s about their love of new wave, how they got into the scene, and their take on it being referred to as “Vietnamese New Wave”–the defining cultural moment for young Vietnamese in America. The music that the young Vietnamese Americans listened to can still be heard today wherever Vietnamese gather all over the world, including in Viet Nam, where stores can still be found playing definitive bands like Modern Talking.

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Clik here to view.Last November, Keep on Music threw a New Wave + ‘80s Reunion at Bleu in Westminster. This isn’t new wave in the sense that a lot of people use the term, but rather a mix of Italo, Eurodisco and other ‘80s dance music that notably found considerable popularity with Asian-Americans in the 1980s. I was only turned onto the scene four years ago, by Ngoc Nguyen, who is a Vietnamese New Wave super fan (especially of Sandra).

Flash forward to the present and near future: May 26. On that day, Keep On Music’s having a Back to the 80′s. An International 80′s Concert/Party at the Avec Night Club in Huntington Beach. Unlike last time, I won’t miss this one and neither should you! Luckily for us newbs and the uninitiated, some key figures of the new wave scene graciously agreed to sit down with me and answer some questions about the Asian/Vietnamese new wave scene for Eric’s Blog.

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Eric’s Blog: First of all, thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed by Eric’s Blog. To start, would you mind introducing yourself and perhaps saying a bit about where you’re from, where you grew up and all that? Also, if you’d like to mention what you do for a living, engage in a little self-promotion, then here’s your chance.

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Clik here to view.Ian Nguyen: This is Ian Nguyen, the founder of Keep On Music and the DJ for the Reunion Party on 3/27. I came to California in November of 1980 from Houston, Texas, just in time for a fun decade Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. . I’ve been living here since. Besides mixing music, backpacking and skiing, I work in the advertising field as a creative director. My past clients include Toyota, State Farm, AT&T, DIRECTV, etc…

Sean Nguyen: My name is Sean Nguyen and I am from Westminster, California. I was born in Saigon, Vietnam but pretty much grew up in Southern California. I have two careers, the Clark Kent one which is an insurance broker (this one pays the bills) and the other, the Superman one, which is an owner of a synthpop/electro-pop record company in the ‘90s called Strangers Thoughts Records.

Lucy Tran: Hi! my name is Lucy Tran. I’m from Orange County. Grew up in Santa Ana most of my life. Worked in the heart of Little Saigon as a Medical Assistant/Medical Records Dept. at a little popular place called Magnolia Surgery Center. Been there for 21 years now. Practically grew up there also and consider everyone there as my second family. Doctors and staff there are great. They put up with me through all these years. What can I say? I love you guys, even with all  the headaches you cause me!! …and my sister, Cecilia Tran, who pretty much was the one who turned my life around and got me into the medical field.

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Clik here to view.Jim Nguyen: My name is Jim “Linh” Nguyen. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. I moved back to LA mid-2008. Prior to that, I was residing in Palo Alto – right next to “Mat Sach”/Facebook headquarters — for a couple of years. I miss my second home and friends that were my family up there! You guys know who you are!  I want to especially thank Chi/Big sister Jade Luu. She let me stay with her and her family for a couple of weeks until I got my own place and got settled in the “Yay’er!” area. Heart you guys!

I have my hands tied up pretty full now. I’m launching a new startup called JimNetics as their CEO (Chief Entertaining Official) with my business partner Jeffer Fifi Pham: tattoo artist and CIO (Chief Integral OG) for JimNetics, along with directing and managing our other main branch: Tattoos By JimNetics. JimNetics originally started out as an idea and a site, my Christmas gift to myself that I can share with the world. It’s an internet site that currently has content about inspirational, philanthropic/humanitarian, art, tattoos, humor/comedy, current events, feng shui and a little Buddha Head influence to boot. We have a few major exciting things that will be additions to the JimNetics family, JimNetics Urban Wear, JimNetics MotoSports (co-directed by my brother Johnny aka “Happy” from San Fernando Valley Branch Ruff Ryders Bike Crew), JimNetics TAG (Talent Acquisition Group — co-directed by Sr. HR corporate recruiting and staffing specialist Leilani and staffed with consultants Amy Quach and Mae Barlis). We will have hand made custom jewelry by designer Nikki “Mai” Quach, who’s on board and has a home on JimNetics, and then we have Thao Ho, whom I found on Twitter as @Thaozilla (she’s friggin’ hilarious). She will have a home on JimNetics as a resident comedy humor relief specialist. Lastly, Fresh Styles, by JimNetics Hair will be directed and managed by cousin Mike Huynh, aka “Smokey like Chris Tucker Smoke Dogg from Friday,” and JimNetics AAA Medical Billing Services for doctors and their offices, family operated based out in Houston.

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Clik here to view.EB: How and when did you first become exposed to the music we lovingly refer to as new wave?

IN: Believe it or not, before I got addicted to new wave music, I was a heavy metal head banger, playing drums lol. The first few new wave songs that I heard were “Words” from F.R. David, Rational Youth‘s “Saturday in Silesia,” and of course, “Hey Hey Guy” from Ken Laszlo. I got hooked since, so I decided to give up my drumsticks for a pair of turntables and a mixer.

SN: I actually started listening to new wave as a whole back in 1979/80 with the pioneer bands such as Depeche Mode, OMD, Devo, The Buggles, Blondie, etc. and have actually never stopped. My first exposure to Asian New Wave is “Love in Your Eyes” by Gazebo and “Only You” by Savage. I fell in love with both songs and started collecting everything I could get my hands on.

LT:  I was thirteen and in 8th grade at Carr Intermediate. I was inspired by hanging out with a group of freshman boys from Valley High who would later be known as Santa Ana Boys. I would later attend college, house parties and even clubs at the age of fourteen. Back in the day, parties were made at University halls: UCI, Cal Poly, Long Beach and Cal State Fullerton. The roller skating rink was hot also.

JM: I got exposed to new wave when I was a little kid, when my uncles migrated over to the states from Vietnam.  There were seven of them, my mom’s brothers, all of whom were musical and instrumental — meaning they actually played and put together a garage rock band (only in the family though) and I was influenced listening to classics such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Scorpions, Tesla, Guns’N Roses, Metallica, White Snake and Def Leppard.

One or two of the uncles listened to other genres such as our beloved ’80s new wave music. I secretly would listen to their songs and albums because I was such a disciplined kid and didn’t want my parents to think these two uncles I am referring about were influencing me in a negative manner because some of them really lived playboy life styles! Regardless, I kept listening to classics such as Modern Talking, CC Catch and Joy.

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Clik here to view.Jeffer FiFi Pham my best friend from high school influenced me further with the new ’80s alternative music from New Order,Pet Shop Boys and Bad Boys Blue. Of course Johnny O, Stevie B, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Boy George, The Cure, OMD, Gina T and Sandra, WHAM! and George Michael were major classics I picked up on my own. Over the years I got busy with the normal hustle and bustle of life — the corporate work lifestyle — and stopped listening to them all together. I recently picked up on mainstream widely — today’s electronic dance musicians, especially trance, have big time favorites, artists such as Tiësto, Ferry Corsten, Above and Beyond (Chi/Big Sister Jade Luu influenced), Deadmau5 and Kristina Sky, to name the few of many.

EB: If you would, tell me a little about the club and party scene back in the new wave heyday as you experienced it.

JN: LOL, I never went to one since I was a little kid locked up secretly listening to ’80s new wave while the OG’s of the time, like Big brother Ian and Big sister/notorious, Luscious LOL Lucy where partying hardy. I didn’t even know how it was like or even fathom how it could have been, but seeing photos of them and hearing about their past stories sure does bring a lot of smiles.

SN: I was a teenager in the ‘80s so I didn’t get to hit all of the clubs, but I went to many house parties which were mostly a bunch of people getting together and sticking in a new wave tape or two. If we were really lucky, a person that owned two Technics record players and a mixer would come over and spin their records. Regardless, everyone just loved the music so they really didn’t care whether or not it was mixed well. I remember hearing some really bad mixes but the songs were so great, you really wouldn’t care. There were a few clubs that I remember I managed to make it to including The World in Beverly Center and Florentine Gardens. The rest is a blur, but I know I got around to a few others that were really fun. It was the ‘80s, everything was fun.

 LT: Back in the day, clubs were easy to get into. We had fake IDs that were available through the check cashing places. All it took was the guys to either know security or pay them to let us in. We used to buy one ticket, open the back door and a bunch of us would run in. Boy, those were the good ol’ days.

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Clik here to view.IN: What can I say? The party scene back then was just fun – despite occasional troubles here and there. What do you expect? We were teenagers. New wave music was booming among the Asian youths; there were many college parties organized by Vietnamese Clubs from UCI, Cal State Fullerton, etc. But the most fun were the house parties (mostly held in someone’s garage with cheap disco lights from Radio Shack and home stereo speakers.   We just could not get enough of new wave parties; sometimes we even drove to San Jose for a school party. New wave music was heard at every coffee shop and in every car in Orange County.

EB: Although I’ve occasionally heard of new wave being more broadly referred to as “Asian New Wave,” the core audience seems to be heavily Vietnamese and I’ve more often heard it referred to as “Vietnamese New Wave.“ It even seems that most of the cover artists, with the exception of Cally Kwong, are Vietnamese singers (e.g. Anh Thu, Bac Dzinh, Cao Lam, Đặng Thế Luẫn, Đon Hồ, Giana Nguyen, Le Anh Quan, Lien Khuc, Lynda Trang Dai, Ngoc-thu Thi Nguyen, Nguyen Thanh, Phuong Nguyen, Thu thuy, Tommy Ngo, Trizzie Phuong Trinh, Vina Uyen My, etc). What do you make of that?

LT: Trizzie was a friend of ours. I knew Linda Trang Dai before she was known. She dated my brother when she was a senior and working at South Coast Plaza. Both they and all these singers were inspired by the one band who brought new wave music to the stage in concert. That band was known and is still very popular today, as THE UPTIGHT band, whose live music and perfect English and knowledge of new wave music brought us new wave concerts we would never forget. They are our memory of the best party in the ‘80s era.

IN: I think new wave music was also really popular among the Chinese and Korean audiences in LA areas at the time (Most of the record shops that carried new wave records were in LA). As I remember, when it was later introduced to the Vietnamese audiences, it became more popular than ever, especially with the Vietnamese Night Clubs. Bands and artists such as The Uptight and Lynda Trang Dai were among the first who did cover songs. Up ’til today, Vietnamese singers are still doing new wave covers for popular concerts such as Paris by Night etc…

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Clik here to view.SN: The Vietnamese crowd heavily embraced this music. As regular new wave became a lifestyle for many people in the ‘80s, Asian New Wave became a lifestyle for many Vietnamese. We walked, talked, and acted new wave. From the hairdos to the style of dress, a lot of people were just in love this kind of music. This, of course, was also very contagious to the Vietnamese record companies and young Vietnamese singers at the time who also liked this music and saw it as something that would be great to record and sell. Other new wave singers during that time would included Thanh Mai, Tuyet Nhung, Thuy Vi, Giang Ngoc, Trung Hanh and Lilian.

JN: From what I remember I didn’t really listen to Vietnamese new wave artists because I always preferred the original Euro, Italo and American artists / groups. I did listen a few times to Lynda Trang Dai and Tommy Ngo back when then they were married along with some Đon Hồ and some Trizzie when I’d go shopping with my parents back in Chinatown and Phuc Loc Tho (Asian Garden Mall). I was like, it’s cool and everything how they are doing major cover songs paying “homage” to the OGs of Euro / Italo Americana, what us Asians more widely accepted by the Vietnamese younger youth as new wave Music. It was cool, but not what I stuck with. I got major love and respect for the famous popular Vietnamese Ca Si / Singers making the effort and attempt because they did make history in the making by helping spread new wave to the main stream.

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Clik here to view.EB: What was the impetus for the first Keep on Music New Wave + ‘80s Reunion? Were you pleased with how it went down?

IN: After twenty plus years, I finally saw one of my old friends, Phuong Mercedes, again. During one of the get togethers, she showed me the photo albums she kept all these years that contained many pictures of our new wave era. I also got to see other long lost friends such as Lucy (who is the true ‘80s Queen). At the same time, I had the opportunity to be the guest DJ for Limelight’s new wave night at the Shark Club. I also met many new wave fans there. Knowing that new wave and ‘80s music had made a comeback, we decided to have a small reunion for old friends. That was when the idea of “Keep On Music, A New Wave & 80′s Costume Reunion Party” came about. Word spread around fast among friends, so a big turnout showed up for the reunion party. The result was fantastic; we had a full house that night. Many came who had not partied for more than twenty years; there were even friends who flew in from other states and cities. At the beginning, this was supposed to be a one time event, but due to popular demand, Keep On Music on Facebook was born and a second reunion will take place on 3/27.

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Clik here to view.SN: The people who had grown up with this kind of music have reached a point in their lives where they want to relive some of their brilliant pasts. As mentioned, Asian New Wave was more than just music; it was a way of life.

LT: The first ‘80s reunion was just a gig to get people to a lounge to hear the new wave music. Good advertising and word of mouth ended up with an overwhelming number of RSVPs so it had to be moved to a larger venue. That event turned out very fun and memorable. A lot of people we knew from high school came out. People who would never have had come out on a normal basis were there. Friends from out of state came. People from cities as far as San Jose, San Fran, Vegas and San Diego came. The party was a great turn out. Enemies of the past became friends of the present. Friends that were present were friends from the past. This second one will be even better, because I, Lucy Tran, will be MCin’. I am the symbol of the ‘80s….haha..JK…

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Clik here to view.JN: I wasn’t there for the first reunion back in November last year. I didn’t know brother Ian back then either. While they had this going on, at the time I was having two major surgeries to remove both left and right thyroid glands and was even more home-ridden. I didn’t go out for an entire year because of these medical issues that I was going through. As of recent times, after all the surgeries and radiation treatments I started to become more active online and accidentally got on the Keep On Music Facebook fan page. I checked it out, briefly skimming, saw some old songs that I remembered liking and was thrown back in time. I don’t remember much of my childhood but once I started listening to all these old songs I remembered pretty much everything I did at that very moment as a kid… And that to me, it’s amazing, especially how I’m still recovering slowly and surely but with this music and the reaction from Keep On Music, it’s actually been very therapeutic and heartfelt — especially with all the new friends I met, including mainly brother Ian, who is just bomb with his mad DJ skills and professional sense of direction as a creative director and sister Lucy who is just so funny and lovely, she has major yolks (jokes). =o) From photos that I saw from the first event and from another good friend brother Tom Nguyen of Just One Pack. (He’s currently traveling around the world and last I checked he was just out of Chile before the earthquakes hit. By the way, my condolences to the victims of both the Chile and Haiti disasters.) This is his travel blog and he shares his pretty awesome adventures.

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Clik here to view.EB: Are you surprised at how long-lasting the love for the music has been? Have you seen a lot of younger people keeping the new wave flame alive?

IN: Personally, I don’t think new wave music was ever gone. After the ‘80s, I did move on to DJing other music genres such as trance, house and techno – but new wave music has been with me all these years. I think new wave music is embedded deep in our blood. And yes, new wave and ‘80s is back, but this time around it is much more meaningful to me and others because it reminds us of our youth and good memories; everyone who lived through the ‘80s would feel the same way as I do. What surprised me the most is to see the younger audiences also sharing the same love for new wave music. Jim Nguyen, our PR person for KOM and DJ Alpha from Limelight are the two best examples. Both of them are in the early thirties, too young to know what the ‘80s was about.  But both share the same experience, they were introduced to new wave music by their uncles and developed the taste for this wonderful music genre.

SN: I am not surprised because this music is very special and will withstand the test of time. From the beautiful vocals to the mesmerizing synths, if you lived through this period, it will always be a part of you. Today’s music seems so controlled and the creativity and personality of the bands and songs just get lost in the shuffle. I honestly have not met anyone from the younger generation that I feel will keep the flame alive. Even the DJs that are spinning new wave today seem to lack the feel for the music. I mean, they are playing the songs, but I don’t feel the passion and love for the music. It makes all the difference in the world.

LT: The new wave music will never die out. The ‘80s were the best era. It brings back so many memories of high school. We have so many stories to share – so many memories to make us still young at heart. The young people today may know the new wave music because of maybe their parents or maybe just hearing it at Sharks. But the only thing they lack from it is to have actually lived that era, where fun and house parties were safe. Today, no house party is safe. No fights are with fists. No group has a name that would be known… no hangout joints to meet at. Ours was Mission Control. And only I have that picture of it. Did you see it on our K.O.M. site? That picture is priceless!

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Clik here to view.JN: I was totally shocked honestly when I jumped on the Keep On Music Facebook fan page. I was like wtheo? Is this pho realz? I saw lots of people commenting and knowing me, since I’ve been living under a rock within the past year I forced myself to become social again and started commenting after some of my old time favorites. After commenting I began to know and associate myself with brother Ian and sister Lucy. I am still somewhat ill, not recovered 100% to full time physical health, but even prior KOM, my spirits have been lifted in the past three months.

After this recent visit to the family for Tet, one my good ol’ trance / club- hoppin’ / back-in-the-day best friend, chieu choi Vivacious Cyndie Vu and one of her youngest kids accompanied me to Orange County to surprise the KOM crew and affiliates. Boy, it was cool and awesome how the shoot was done, very nice and cool studio that looked very modern and hip with editing rooms and in the back, a green screen where I just walked to in the middle of their shoot where I took pictures and recorded some pre footage of the entire experience while I was there, including seeing all of Lucy’s old toys and memorabilia that her father still kept in storage. She busted out a Bob’s Big Boy like squeeze dude, ET phone home Aladdin lunch box, Smurfette lunch tray and of course our fearless leader and director, Gizmo from Gremlins.

please like, share, and comment on this post! The Vietnamese New Wave Revival

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

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Andrew X. Pham has had an interesting career. An engineer by training, he left his job to bike along the West Coast, where he caught a plane to Japan and eventually landed himself in Vietnam, his birth country, where he explored his roots. The memoir won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the Oregon Literature Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Since then, Pham has written a biography of his father, a cookbook, and a collection of essays. In addition to being a writer, he’s been a rice farmer, a food critic, and has now started Spoonwiz, an insightful and decisive dining resource that connects users with a trusted network of experts and savvy diners.

Pham is full of smiles as he is full of stories and wisdom. He was kind enough take time out of his busy schedule for a video interview about his career, his craft, and his current projects.

Have you subscribed to diaCRITICS yet? Subscribe and win prizes! Read more details. 

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You started as an aircraft engineer, then you left to become a writer—you went on a journey on the west coast and then you flew to Japan and then Vietnam. This resulted in Catfish and Mandala. What sparked that journey? How did you get started writing?

It took awhile. I went to undergrad, I did aerospace. At graduate school, I did both an MBA and an aerospace masters in orbital mechanics, but I quit in the middle of it as I wrote about in Catfish and Mandala. I really thought about my life after my sister passed away. I thought about what I wanted to do and I went about doing it, which was basically writing and traveling and trying a different life. Because it was hard and because I wasn’t qualified to do it and I had no talent whatsoever, I thought it was a good try.

Were you always interested in writing or was it something you just thought of doing?

I always wanted to write, but I think I was a better artist, a better painter. I always thought I was going to be an artist, but you know being an Asian guy with your parents and family and all that. And I’m really good at math and I’m really good at the technical stuff too, so it kind of just fell in my lap and I just went to school. Actually aerospace engineering—especially what I like, orbital mechanics—was very interesting, but I think my talent really lies in art and writing.

I enjoy writing because it’s, in some ways, the lowest form of art because everyone has access to this. You do not need a paintbrush or a canvas to write. It’s the largest common denominator: words belong to everyone. And certainly, English words didn’t belong to me being an immigrant. I certainly didn’t take any English classes in college. I thought that was the most challenging thing I could possibly do.

Did you learn anything from your engineering days that carried on to your writing?

Well, engineering and a lot of stuff, even writing, is about organizing and editing. In engineering, you basically have a blueprint of what you want to do and there’s a reason and logic of  how you walk through the steps to create something or to check on a process. Writing is a lot like that, I think.

What else did I learn from engineering? I didn’t like having a boss. That’s one thing I decided: I really didn’t like having a boss. When I went to work at United Airlines, I remember there was this big wall leading to the cafeteria and there were all these photographs on there of all the upper management, all the VP, all the directors, all the big wigs.  And then I saw there was one woman and one black guy. The rest of them were white. I was thinking, “Hmmm…The chances of me getting up there is pretty damn slim.” Corporate culture is—especially a company like United—is really old school. After a year or so, I certainly did see the challenge. I felt like I would just be a tiny cog in a big machine. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything important and if I didn’t come to work, no one was going to miss me. If I quit, they’d find some other guy. I thought life should be a little bit more than that.

So you went to writing.

Yeah. And even if I didn’t publish, I certainly would have enjoyed myself. And I did. It was good fun. It was good fun.

You’ve written that when you first gave your manuscript of Catfish and Mandala to an agent. The agent accepted it but he or she said they wanted to move it towards what was happening in Asian American literature at the time and you said you didn’t want to go with that agent because you didn’t want to change your manuscript so much. Do you think there’s a lot of pressure for Asian American writers to conform to particular narratives?

It used to be a lot more, but now I think Asian American writers have more choices. You should read Chang-Rae Lee. He wrote a couple of books and you can see the progression of his characters. His first protagonist was Korean American. I’m not sure about the last one, but he took on a lot more mainstream characters. I do think writers in general—regardless of race—you do have more choice now than you did before about what you write.

I simply didn’t want to go that way because I thought this was a really personal journey. To change it that way, to make it more marketable, make it more publishable, I wouldn’t have been true to the work. It took me a couple of years to write. The trip itself took me a year and it took me a long time to work up the courage to do it too. The book isn’t just a book, it’s about a whole chunk of life and it’s about all the people in it. It’s about some really deep themes not just for me but for others, for Asian Americans. I didn’t really feel like going the other route. It was a hard choice, but it didn’t take me long to decide. It was a very gut reaction of “No.”

In addition to being a writer, you’ve also self-published two e-books, A Culinary Odyssey and A Theory of Flight. What led you to the path of self-publishing? Would you recommend it to other writers?

About two years ago, I finished a book and I kind of had a bad experience with a new editor at a publishing house. It really made me think about the inequities of the writer-publisher relation. It made me pause. It made me look at publishing and the rights of writers in regard to their work as well as what they can do with their art. I started reading my publishing contract and I read up on all the rights the publishers demanded. I found so many cases where the writers are basically screwed quite badly.

So I said, you know, just for the heck of it, I’ve been meaning to put this cookbook together. But cookbooks these days, they don’t really make money, only if you’re a celebrity chef or somehow you hit the bestseller. A lot of companies don’t publish cookbooks anymore. But I wanted to do this thing and I had put it aside simply because I knew publishers would not make money on it so they’re not going to want it. So, hey—what the heck—I’ve always written for me so this was a book for myself.

The other work, one of my publishers offered to publish it a while ago. They made changes to it, again, to make it more marketable. I promptly said no. But the thing about writing is that once you’ve written something, for me anyway, I’m done. The creative instinct is gone and I’m kind of satiated. It sat at my computer for seven years and I never thought about it again. Then about two years ago, I said, “Hey, this stuff is good stuff. It’s some of the best stuff I’ve ever written, to me anyway.” So I decided to self-publish it. Although if I changed it, they would have published it years ago, I didn’t want to do that. It’s not something I do.

In addition to those works, I know you’re also working on a novel called The Japanese Officer: A Love Story. It’s based on your grandmother’s life. Can you tell me more about that work? Also, how does writing nonfiction compare to writing fiction?

I think fiction and nonfiction are very similar technique-wise.  It’s just about good writing. I actually wrote a fantasy novel, that was my very first book. That took about four and a half years. No one published it. I still have some version of it lying around.

My first instinct was to write fiction. I think Catfish and Mandala came out because there was something in me that had to be dealt with. I wrote The Eaves of Heaven because I knew people of my father’s generation were moving on, passing on, so it was important to preserve what they knew, what they remembered, their traditions, and their voices. No one really captured that generation. You see a lot of stuff before and then a lot of stuff after by younger people like myself and eventually your generation, but you don’t really see much about his generation—the every man, the Vietnamese American that went through all the wars. I felt like it was something I had to do.

I feel the same about The Japanese Officer. My grandma’s story is quite powerful.  She was captured and raped by some French officer and she had a son as a result of that. My uncle is half-French, half-Vietnamese. He’s still alive today in Vietnam. So it’s about that.

It’s more challenging because I’m trying to do it in her voice, in her mind. She passed away when I was forty years old.  I know a lot about her life. It wasn’t like I didn’t know her at all. I do have a lot of material.

Furthermore, I think writers have a fixed number of books in them. Some people know, some people don’t. But I’ve known from a long time ago how many books I’m going to write and I’m getting to the end. I have one more and I’m done! In a way, I’m taking my time. I like to savor it. I never really made much money from writing, but it did give me a chance to have a lot of fun. It gave me a chance to live on a shoestring budget and do pretty much whatever I want to do. For that, I’m appreciative of the craft. So yeah, the book is about my grandmother’s life. It’ll take a while, but that’s what they do.

I’m looking forward to it. I’m a big fan of your work and I’m interested in reading your fiction.

Well, it’s not really fiction, but it is fictional. They call it an “autobiographical novel.” So it’s kind of based on real events and real people, but it’s fiction in that you have to come up with dialogue and description and you have to crawl into their heads. But it’s pretty much based on true life events.

What advice do you have for writers who are starting today? Why should they be writing? What’s your bigger philosophy on the role of writing in society, and art in general?

Don’t do it! Go out and have some fun. This sucks, don’t do this stuff!

They all say, “Oh yeah, I’m writing for the better good of mankind blah blah blah…” But you just have to do it for yourself because that’s basically what you do.  If you’re a runner, you’re going to run. Even if there’s not a race, you’re going to run. That’s what you’re built to do, that’s what you’re god-given talent is. You’re just going to do it. That’s what writing is.

I just don’t know how publishing is going to go. It changes so much within the time that I’ve been in it. I think it’s unfair to tell writers that you’re going to make a lot of money and you’re going to have fame and all this stuff. Just do it and really enjoy the journey. If you’re not enjoying the journey, if it doesn’t make you excited, if you don’t wake up in the morning looking forward to sitting down to write, then don’t do it because life is way too short. I think a lot of people like the idea of being a writer, but they don’t actually like the work. It’s just nasty work: you’re sitting there, bleeding all over the computer and you’re hating yourself. Sometimes you feel brilliant, sometimes you feel worthless, and there’s years and years of work that you then throw out. If you don’t like that part, there are a lot of better ways to spend your time.

I think that’s really good advice and I like that you live by it too. On your website, you said you’re not only a writer, but a food critic, instructor, traveler, rice farmer. I love the life that you live! It’s so varied. It’s good advice.

You know, it’s a weird world that we’re moving into right now. You don’t know if you’ll make any money or which way publishing is going to go. Some self-published writers make a lot of money, and other really good writers are struggling. I’m actually launching a little start up right now. It’s for writers. You’ve probably seen it on my site. It’s called Spoonwiz.

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Can you tell me a little bit more about Spoonwiz?

It’s a food site. I came up with this idea when I was going through self-publishing. I did a lot of study on the market and the publishing model. If you really look at e-publishing and online content, the writers make no money in the food space. I remember I used to write as a food critic at a newspaper. We used to get paid $500 for a review. They pay about $50 now, which is to say, they don’t pay anymore, so most people don’t write anymore. Food critics, restaurant critics— they don’t write anymore. They quit, or they move on to different businesses, different professions. Also, all the reviews on Yelp—you generate all this content and Yelp makes money, but you don’t make money.

Our platform is to give the author ownership of their materials, we don’t restrict them like Yelp or newspapers because if you write for a newspaper or magazine or even an online blog—they own your material. They can republish it, reuse it a hundred times and pay you nothing. That’s not us, you own your stuff. We’re a venue for writers to write about food and to keep the ownership of their articles and we give them shares in the company, at least initially anyway. It’s more of a cooperative for writers. According to our market study, there’s a market for what we offer.

What’s next for you?

Just this Spoonwiz. We’re looking for a copyeditor and a managing editor. That’s our big project right now. But other than that, launching this thing and see how it goes. So far, I’m getting a lot of attraction from professional writers and bloggers in the food arena. It’s exciting. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never owned a rice farm before, never lived on a sailboat before. Life is pretty short so you ought to do stuff you’ve never done or stuff that you’re curious about. I think having a start up is a once in a lifetime thing.

So your advice for people in general would be just do what you want?

Just be passionate about what you want.  If you’re not passionate, if you’re not willing to make sacrifices for it, then don’t bother. Because starting Spoonwiz, I also realize there’s a lot of people who say stuff—like “Yeah , I want to be involved,” but then the time comes and they don’t do it. For me, when I say something, I see it to the end. I just don’t give up. It’s very hard for me to give up. I don’t think it’s possible for me to give up.

After twenty years of speaking to writers and wannabe writers and aspiring writers—I used to tell them “Yeah, be a writer, follow your dream” and so on. These days, I just leave them alone. I mean, if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it. You don’t need to ask me. Like I said, a runner’s going to run. They don’t go around asking people, “Should I run? Should I buy a pair of running shoes?” They just run. Even if you don’t have shoes, you’re going to run in your bare feet. And I think that’s the way it is with writers. You don’t need to ask for permission. Words belong to everyone.

Andrew X. Pham is an independent writer, instructor, culinary professional, and engineer. He holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. His first book, Catfish and Mandala (1999), won the Kiriyama Prize, the Whiting Writers’ Award, Quality Paperback Book Prize, and the Oregon Literature Prize. It was also named a Guardian Prize Shortlist Finalist and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His second book, The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars (2008)—an innovative biography written as a memoir—was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Times Favorite Books of 2008, a Washington Post Top Ten Books of the Year, a Oregonian Top Ten National Books of the Year, and a Bookmarks Magazine Best Books of 2008. Andrew also translated Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diaries of Dr. Thuy Tram (2008) with his father. His poem “A Vision 9/11”—an architectural design rendered in prose (NPR, 17 Oct. 2001)—inspired multiple winning WTC designs. Andrew has also self-published two books, A Culinary Odyssey: A Southeast Asian Cookbook Diary of Travels, Flavors, and Memories and A Theory of Flight: Recollections, a collection of essays on life, love, loss, flight, and travel. He is working on the last book in his Vietnam trilogy, The Japanese Officer: A Love Story, an autobiographical novel based on his grandmother’s life (Knopf). He divides his time between California and the wooden bungalow he built on the Mekong River (on the Thai-Laos border) with his partner and two dogs.

Eric Nguyen has a degree in sociology from the University of Maryland along with a certificate in LGBT Studies. He is currently an MFA candidate at McNeese State University and lives in Louisiana.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Interview with Andrew X. Pham: “Words Belong to Everyone”

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

KATE HERS AND LINH SONG WIN IN OUR SUBSCRIBER DRIVE! diaCRITICS wants to add 100 new subscribers! The 25th, 50th, 75th, and 100th subscribers (and those who referred them) get their pick of prizes. Kate Hers is our 25th subscriber and has chosen Cinema Interval by Trinh T. Minh-ha as her prize. Linh Song, Vietnamese adoption activist, referred Kate to diaCRITICS and will be receiving Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art by Nora Annesley Taylor. If you enjoy reading our posts as much as these winners do, then we encourage you to subscribe!  And if you want to refer people and are on networked blogs, you can invite all your friends on Facebook to join via networked blogs! We are well on our way to our 50th new subscriber.

 Have you subscribed to diaCRITICS yet? Subscribe and win prizes! Read more details.

 A little more information about Kate Hers and Linh Song comes below.            

Kate Hers

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Kate Hers in Tibet

 Where are you from?

 I am a Korean born American visual artist living and working in Berlin, Germany for the past 3.5 years. I grew up in Detroit and learned how to drive when I was 14. I make my own homemade Kimtschi. Check it out at www.rheefoodlab.org .

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 Can you tell us more about your visual art?

I am a visual artist and cultural producer who works in the field of social art practice. My work seeks to rethink and reshape notions of transnational and cultural identity, often through different modes of communication and public/private interventions. My projects manifest often in multiple mediums including: performance, sound, drawing, video, Internet blogging, installation, and in commodities such as food products, posters, zines, flash cards, and games. To check out my works, visit www.estherka.com

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

One of my favorite Vietnamese Diasporic works is by Hong-An Truong called Explosions in the Sky from the Adaptation Fever (2006-2007) installation.

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Kate chose Cinema Interval by Trinh T. Minh-ha, a leading feminist theorist and film-maker whose works include the influential film Surname Viet Given Name Nam and book Woman Native Other

“An image is powerful not necessarily because of anything specific it offers the viewer, but because of everything it apparently also takes away from the viewer.”
–Trinh T. Minh-ha

“In her writings and interviews, as well as in her filmscripts, Trinh explores what she describes as the “infinite relation” of word to image. Cinema-Interval brings together her recent conversations on film and art, life and theory, with Homi Bhabha, Deb Verhoeven, Annamaria Morelli and other critics. Together these interviews offer the richest presentation of this extraordinary artist’s ideas. ”

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Linh Song

Linh Song is a social worker based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  A second generation Vietnamese American, Linh has been active in the nonprofit world as the founder and director of Mam Non Organization, a group that provides support to families with children adopted from Asia.  Her professional work has also included ethical considerations and policies in international adoption through a DC-based NGO, with strong criticisms on Vietnamese adoption practices.  A mother to two, Linh remains current with Vietnamese diasporic work through diacritics and avidly follows a friend’s work, Rich Streitmatter-Tran (who is the original diacritic; see his site diacritic.org). As her prize, Linh chose Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art by Nora Annesley Taylor.

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Clik here to view.“Painters in Hanoi engages with twentieth-century Vietnam through its artists and their works, providing a new angle on a country most often portrayed through the lens of war and politics.”

“Drawing on interviews with artists, cultural officers, curators, art critics, and others in Hanoi, Taylor surveys the impact artists have had on intellectual life in Vietnam. The book shows them within their own complex community, one fraught with tensions, politicking, and favoritism, yet also a sense of belonging. It describes their education, the role of the government in the arts, the rise and fall of individual artists, their influence as active players in the politics of place and gender, the audience for their work, and how tourism and the international art market have influenced it.”

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Please take the time to rate this post (above) and share it (below). Ratings for top posts are listed on the sidebar. Sharing (on email, Facebook, etc.) helps spread the word about diaCRITICS. And join the conversation and leave a comment! Have you read Painters in Hanoi or Cinema Interval? If so, tell us about it! 

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please like, share, and comment on this post! KATE HERS AND LINH SONG WIN IN OUR SUBSCRIBER DRIVE!

RIYA DE LOS REYES WINS IN OUR SUBSCRIBER DRIVE! diaCRITICS wants to add 100 new subscribers! The 25th, 50th, 75th, and 100th subscribers (and those who referred them) get their pick of prizes. Riya de los Reyes is our 50th subscriber and has chosen The Quiet American by Graham Greene and Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam by Andrew X. Pham as her prizes.  If you enjoy reading our posts as much Riya does, then we encourage you to subscribe!  And if you want to refer people and are on networked blogs, you can invite all your friends on Facebook to join via networked blogs! We are well on our way to our 75th new subscriber.

Have you subscribed to diaCRITICS yet? Subscribe and win prizes! Read more details.

A little more information about Riya de los Reyes comes below.

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Where are you from?
Singapore.

Tell us something else about yourself. 

I am originally from the Philippines, but my family moved to Singapore in 1998 and we have been living here for the past fifteen years. I am not Vietnamese, but I am part of a diasporic community. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. I am currently doing marketing for NUS Press, the academic publishing arm of the National University of Singapore, where I graduated with a degree in History in 2011. I am also an amateur/aspiring curator with an interest in the general history, culture, politics and art of Southeast Asia as a region, among other things.

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

My favorite Vietnamese work of art is Harmony in Green: Two Sisters by Le Pho (1938, Vietnam). It depicts an idealized/romanticized painting of two sisters, but also the seamless and silky blending of Eastern and Western art techniques. I remembered reading about it in a book and I found it interesting because I figured it was referencing the Trung sisters, who famously fought against the Chinese invaders and symbolized independence and courage, and yet the painting betrays an acceptance of a different kind of foreign influence. Regardless of what it symbolizes, I find the painting beautiful and the colors soothing. The painting has recently been acquired by the National Art Gallery, Singapore.

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Harmony in Green: Two Sisters by Le Pho (1938, Vietnam)

On a personal level, the painting also reminds me of P.S. Kroyer’s Døtrene Benzon, which I bought in Skagen, Denmark as a postcard to send to my mother in Singapore. It was a souvenir to remind her of my sister and I, her only children. I was studying in Denmark for a semester then and my sister began her medical studies in Germany; it was the first time we had been apart from my mother for an extended period of time. My father travels frequently for work, so there was a period when my mother was all alone in Singapore once my sister and I left to study overseas. I know that the postcard is one of my mother’s most prized possessions.

Did someone refer you to subscribe to diacritics? 

I came across diaCritics while doing research to publicize our soon-to-be-published book, It’s a Living: Work and Life in Vietnam Today, for which the author (Gerard Sasges) will be doing a book tour on the West Coast in the coming months.

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Clik here to view.Riya de los Reyes chose The Quiet American by Graham Greene, who was an English writer, playwright, and literary critic. Much of his works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world.

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,” Graham Greene’s narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous “Quiet American” of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas.

Originally published in 1956 and twice adapted to film, The Quiet American remains a terrifiying and prescient portrait of innocence at large.

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Clik here to view.Riya has also chosen Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham, who writes and lives on the Thai-Laos border in a traditional wooden farm bungalow he built on the Mekong River. He teaches writing and occasionally leads bicycle tours in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.

Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey—a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam—made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland.

Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Winner of the Whiting Writers’ Award
A Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the Year

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You’ve heard the critics rave about it and you’ve read diaCRITICS’ positive review. Now, diaCRITIC Genevieve Erin O’ Brien presents an exclusive interview with Trieu Tran, the the co-author and the star of the one-man show, Uncle Ho to Uncle Sam. Get to know Trieu Tran, his personal journey, his writing process, and his inspirations, and  through the man himself.

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Genevieve Erin O’Brien: First of all congratulations on your one-person show “From Uncle Ho to Uncle Sam,” such an important story to be told.  When I was undergraduate, I took a course about “The Vietnam Experience,” taught by the esteemed, now deceased, Walter Capps at UC Santa Barbara.   This popular class focused on the Vietnam War and yet failed to include any voices of Vietnamese Americans, who were undoubtedly impacted by the “Vietnam War/American War”.  I complained about what I saw as a severely myopic academic presentation of the impact of US involvement in Vietnam.  In response, for the last lecture of the quarter, the professor managed to track down a local Vietnamese woman who shared her experiences as a refugee.  For other Vietnamese Americans like me, it is so rare that we see and hear our stories reflected, and furthermore, we face increased challenges when we tell our stories and speak our truths.  I’d like to ask, are the stories you share in your one-person show all true, and secondly what compelled you to share your story?

Trieu Tran: The play is autobiographical.  It is all authentic blood and sweat out there on the stage. Though I use my own personal life, it’s a story about immigrants, refugees and of all displaced people looking to belong.  My director and co-writer Robert Egan and I were working on a play in NYC a couple years ago. We would share cigarettes during rehearsal breaks. We got to know one another and Bob became fascinated with my story and felt I had stories that needed to be told. We worked on it together, it was developed at the Ojai Playwrights Conference which Bob runs. It caught the attention of Kurt Beattie who is the Artistic Director of Seattle ACT, who gave us our world premiere there last year.  I feel blessed to be able to tell our story. Put faces and names to the other side of the Vietnam Wall Memorial.

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Your performance is relentless, one story after another, 90 minutes of increasingly dramatic vignettes comprise the heart of your one-person show.  What stories got left on the “cutting room floor” so to speak?  What story do you wish you could have included in the show, but for whatever reason were unable to make room for?

In your show you tell some harrowing tales of your boat escape as a refugee, enduring multiple attacks by pirates, and also of the violence perpetrated by your own abusive father.  You even quote the words an old white-haired woman who shared the boat journey with you “Life is never fair, there will always be blood.”  I know my own extended family speaks very little of the refugee camps and their experiences as boat people.  In the face of speaking the truth about such violence, how has your family responded?  What has been the response of the Vietnamese American Community?

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I loved hearing about Michael Jackson, Bad Boy Blue, Modern Talking, hip hop and other musical and cultural influences as you were growing up.  For me as a mixed-race Vietnamese/Irish American I always felt simultaneously on the inside and outside of both American and Vietnamese cultures.  Tell me more about your struggles coming to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada and later emigrating to the Boston, MA in the US?  What tactics did you embrace to fit in, adapt or to stand out as you were growing up?

TT: That is all in the play. Come see the show!

“I wanna be a part of this new world… I wanna belong to this America,” you exclaim in your performance, referring to the variety of communities of color and the American melting pot that you so rightly remind us that “has yet to melt.” How did you feel being embraced and rejected by other communities of color – African American, Italian American, Puerto Rican, etc…  What about your experiences within the Vietnamese American community or other Asian American communities, like the Khmer Reds gang you refer to in your story?

TT: That is also in the play.  Again, come see the show!

You refer to both Richard III and Tupac as major influences in your life, can you share more about how Shakespeare and Tupac gained a place on your cultural and intellectual altar?

TT: I love Shakespeare. His stories like our stories may seem larger than life, maybe too big for the theatre. But it is life, it does resonate and that is what makes theatre compelling.  I’ve always been really, really fascinated with the character of Richard III. I felt like it’s kind of similar to my life, or the life of anybody searching for identity. I remember the first time I saw it and I read it, I was surprised to find I related to Richard. Here’s a guy who was born deformed, but he’s on the battlefield. He’s fighting and killing everyone with his brothers, and then the war ends and his sickly brother becomes king. Nobody thanks him. Nobody says anything, they just push him aside like he’s nothing. He’s a nobody just because of the way he looks or the preconceived notions that people have of him. I feel like all Richard wanted was to be loved. He just wanted respect. I feel like that parallels a lot of immigrants or displaced people without a country or without a culture. For me, personally, growing up in America, it doesn’t matter how much I achieve or how much notoriety I attain; a lot of people will always look at me as not American or as a nobody. Or as an Asian, or a chink, or a gook.

Hip-hop itself gives us a voice. Nobody sounded like Tupac prior to him and after him. I was living in the city; before Pac, gansta rap came out and it was like, “Yeah, this is kinda about us.” Tupac came on there and he brought poetry with it. He kind of brought that intellect. He really talked about life in the city: the violence, the hardships, racism, social problems, all the injustices, and themes of pain and aggression. There was an art form to it and a positive message to it. Pac lived it. That’s why I wanted to put hip-hop in the show; I wanted to show audiences that hip-hop is not all bad men. It’s not just I’m in the hot tub drinking and smoking my blunt with the honeys. While in jail, Pac wrote “Dear Mama,” the homage to his mom and all mothers in the city facing poverty and hardship…. To me, this play is my “Dear Mama,” in a way. This story deals a lot with me searching for my long-lost father and trying to come to an understanding of him, but I hope this piece is also a homage to my mom. She was in her early 20s with three kids; she snuck them out of Vietnam while having to deal with the Vietcong, Thai pirates, and my crazy, abusive, alcoholic father. She brought us to the city and worked two jobs; she was on welfare, but she never complained, never took a vacation. Not only did she put food on the table, she was a mom and a dad and taught us about love and integrity. My heart and my soul is my mom.

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For me as a performance artist, when I talk to people about my work or facilitate workshops, I remind people that although this kind of work is therapeutic, it is not therapy.  During the process of writing this show you have uncovered a number of ugly truths about the refugee experience and the less oft spoken of side of the Vietnamese American experience, violence, both in Vietnam and in Canada and the US.  “From the VC [Viet-cong] infested jungle to the concrete jungle” you illustrate a life growing up on welfare in section 8 housing, your father’s alcoholism and abuse, seedy drug world, gang-life, and sexually predatory academic mentors among other heavy and intense topics.  What came up for you personally as your started to put a voice to your own story in the process of writing and developing this show?

TT: At the beginning Robert Egan and I had no idea what shape or form the play would take.  It was only when I gained trust in Bob as a mentor and collaborator that I was able to open up. That allowed me to discover the voice of my father, which eventually led to what you see and hear onstage.  I am still on the journey, night after night.  And that is why at the end of the play, I ask that of the audience.

How do you think we can begin to undo the inherited trauma of violence (military, physical, sexual, etc…) in our families and communities?

TT: End the cycle of blood. Forgiveness, Love, peace, understanding, and compassion are the weapons we all must embrace.

What did you do to take care of yourself?

TT: Taking my Boston Terrier- Captain to doggie park, drinking tons of water, cardio and good deodorant helps my preparation for the show.

How has the model minority stereotype of Asian Americans impacted you?

TT: Well, I didn’t go to MIT, Harvard or Stanford.  And I’m not a doctor or lawyer. I’m an artist.

I recently returned from Vietnam and have traveled back and forth a number of times over the years as an adult. I have found that it has shifted my relationship to my family, my communities, and myself.  Have you had the opportunity to travel back to Vietnam?  If so, what was the experience like for you?  If not, why and do you plan to ever return?

TT: I hope to return to Vietnam for a long visit. Visit relatives, ask questions. Bridge the gap.  Now is just about finding the time and resources to make that trip a reality.  The idea of coming back to Vietnam as a tourist doesn’t sit well in my heart.

You also play Joey Phan on HBO’S Newsroom, and have played other roles in films and on TV.  As an actor, how is the stage different for you than the screen?  Can you also address what it is like as a Vietnamese American actor in the industry?  Do you face typecasting?

As actors, we are all just happy to book jobs. Work consistently and earn a decent living.  It’s a tough business for everyone. I am very fortunate to have been able to work on projects with great artists. Tv and Film are much fun to be a part of. The Newsroom is an amazing show. I’m a fan of it, even if I wasn’t in it.  Aaron Sorkin is an amazing writer and the entire cast is one of the most talented ensembles I have been a part of. My training is from the theatre. That is always home for me.  Nothing is as immediate as theatre.  I approach all roles the same, I try to find truth in all I do.

Are there opportunities to challenge how Vietnamese Americans and Asian Americans are represented in the media?

TT: It’s always an uphill battle for Asian American actors.  The roles are very limited and yes do often come with stereotypical roles.  That’s why it’s important for Asian artists to create our own work, share our stories.

Your mom must be so proud. I know she was in the audience when I saw the show last week, how did she respond after seeing the performance?

TT: She wanted to know why we left out “Light shimmers on mother’s long silky black hair…” a moment in the play that was in the original version.

Thanks again for taking the time to talk with us, share your experiences and for your courageous and intense one-person show.

This weekend is your last chance to catch this amazing show in Los Angeles.  Get your tickets now.  Details below.

http://www.redcat.org/event/trieu-tran

Presented by Center Theatre Group as part of DouglasPlus

Trieu Tran and his family barely escaped Vietnam when he was six years old, but his perilous adventure was only beginning. An attack by pirates, a cold reception for refugees in Saskatchewan, a turbulent home life with an abusive father, poverty, Boston gang life and sexual assault. Written by Tran in collaboration with the work’s director, Robert Egan, Uncle Ho to Uncle Sam is a fight for survival against insurmountable odds, a story of redemption through education and art and ultimately an overwhelming act of bravery.

RUN TIME: 90 minutes

LOCATION: Kirk Douglas Theatre
9820 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90232 | Map

PARKING: Free event parking after 6pm in the Culver City Hall garage off Duquesne Avenue.

Tickets: $25 general seating or $15 for L.A Radar festival pass holders.

Last remaining shows:

WED 10/2 - 8:00 pm

SAT 10/5 - 8:30 pm

SUN 10/6 - 4:00 pm

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Genevieve Erin O’Brien is a Vietnamese/Irish/American artist, community organizer, and popular educator. She holds an MFA in Studio Art/Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. O’Brien uses performance, video and installation to explore notions of “home” and “homeland.”

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Please take the time to rate this post (above) and share it (below). Ratings for top posts are listed on the sidebar. Sharing (on email, Facebook, etc.) helps spread the word about diaCRITICS. And join the conversation and leave a comment! Did this interview offer you a better understanding of Trieu Tran? Do you share the same writing process? Where do you derive your inspiration when writing?

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We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People (East EP) is a hybrid music-literary project, by author/songwriter Dao Strom, a 6-song EP album accompanied by a book of prose and poetry fragments, images, lyrics, and text arrangements on Vietnam – as a late-century mythology, a war, a word, an exodus, an inheritance/disinheritance. In this exclusive interview with diaCRITICS’ Kim-An Lieberman, Dao Strom shares how she developed the idea for a multimedia text that re-imagines what a contemporary “book” can be. 

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Dao Strom (The Sea and the Mother)

Dao Strom’s newest project, We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People, is a multimedia effort in every aspect. Incorporating poetry and prose as well as photographic images, a visually rich book comes bundled with a CD of original songs performed by Strom. Both parts echo and reinforce key motifs. Together, book and CD concoct a decidedly feminist blend of myth and autobiography that simultaneously traces the origin and migration tales of the Vietnamese people – from the prehistorical roots of Au Co to the modern history of women, mothers, and daughters in war – with the story of Strom herself travelling from Vietnam to the United States and throughout the landscape of the West Coast. Even within the printed book itself, Strom frequently plays with typography and fragmentation, using white space and unconventional punctuation to explore the visual capacities of text.

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Also unconventional is the path that Strom took to creating We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People. Instead of seeking a traditional publisher as she had for earlier books, Strom worked with a small independent press, experimented with crowdsource funding, and offered a limited number of artistically handbound special editions. She finished the songs first, letting the music guide the way to the finished project. Further, she considered how the traditional expectations of a book, with rectangular pages and continuous prose, might be limiting the shape of her narrative - and then made choices to break from those expectations in order to tell the story as she envisioned it.

Strom has shared with diaCRITICS several of the ideas and thoughts that led her to create We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People. Here, she offers more specific detail on the process of making a multimedia text that breaks with bookish traditions. We are all readers in the digital age, surrounded by e-devices and a constant mishmash of electronic media fighting for attention with traditional forms of printed text. Strom offers us new ways to imagine what a contemporary “book” can be.

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We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People (Dao Strom – The Sea and the Mother)

In your feature series for diaCRITICS, you’ve spoken at length about the ideas, stories, and experiences that inspired We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People. More broadly, what writers and musicians inspire your work?

Dao Strom: There are many, but in coming toward We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People, the literature of W.G. Sebald was a big influence – for his use of photographs interplayed with text, for his semi-autobiographical narratives that often involve a narrator walking through a landscape (with a history of trauma, usually), and for his addressing of the subtle darker repercussions of past events on the current culture. The poetry of H.D. spoke to me – for its deep feminine mythos, its prophetic and metaphysical qualities. Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate: An American Family Photo Album is one of my favorite recent books I’ve encountered – for its exploration of the meeting points of cultures, text and imagery, its implications about identity and representation, for her use of the Edward Curtiss narrative and photos – which is so layered and resonant especially for myself living in this region (Pacific NW) where Curtiss spent time “documenting” Native tribes. On the music side, it runs a wide gamut, from acoustic/roots/folk to more experimental sonic textures: Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, Sigur Ros, Olafur Arnalds, Mogwai, Mark Kozelek, to name a few favorites.

How does composing music differ from writing poetry/prose? Or do you find the processes to be very similar?

DS: They are different – music being more visceral and physical and emotional; prose/poetry being more conceptual and cerebral, perhaps. Prose is arduous and taxing, mentally, in a way that music is not – with music I’m able to just let ideas develop as they will, even if it takes ages; I don’t push it too much. Many songs I’ve written have happened more instinctively, spontaneously, than prose – which I tend to write and write and sculpt and cut and re-write and wrack my brains over. But I’m trying to learn how to listen to my instincts there more too. One distinguishing element for me with music is that it perhaps pushes into a more emotional, simple, also at times spiritual space – whereas prose writing can sometimes get bogged down in the content and intellect of its subject matter; it doesn’t rise up to that next level. So maybe with putting the two together I’m trying to liberate myself from some of my own content, if that makes sense.

We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People is multimedia to the core, incorporating music as well as text/poetry and photographic imagery. As you got started, did one of these elements come into focus first? Why did you feel it was important to integrate all of these pieces together for this particular project?

DS: I finished the songs first actually. I had begun writing songs in relation to Vietnam/war/mythology with the ambition of making (what I’ve called) a “song-cycle” – essentially, a concept album; as pretentious as that sounds… I had in mind that there would be a related book too, but I was also working on a larger book – so all of that writing was going on at once. I think at first I thought it was just going to be a book of prose (text). But then I started experimenting. I learned Adobe InDesign and I took a cue from Debra DiBlasi (of Jaded Ibis Press) speaking about the future of literature, its many possibilities, the need for a totally radically different approach to narrative – in a video I viewed she spoke about how all other mediums of art (visual art notably) have evolved to address the fact of technology and our modern methods of communication/media IN THEIR FORMS, as well as in content. Meanwhile, the literary arts – this concept of the book – remains adhered to a form of black type on white pages, on rectangular sheets of paper, etc. The possibility that this is not enough to contain our many possible stories anymore is appealing to me – it speaks to me. I had been struggling with the conventional idea of a ‘novel’ and what ‘fiction’ is supposed to look like. I’d been frankly bored and frustrated by most everything I read, in terms of new literary fiction books. Hence, the attraction to hybrid forms and experimentation. I also always carry with me the advice I heard from James McPherson at the Iowa Writers Workshop: he told me that my history was an unconventional one; hence, maybe the shapes of the stories I wrote should also be unconventional. As a person of the particular background I have, I feel like this is part of my due as an artist. And maybe the multiple mediums of this project reflect something about the multiplicity of “voices” – even within oneself. So I kind of let myself loose in the process of laying out the book; I took fragments of prose from all the other writing I’d been doing, and played with their shapes and fonts and look on the page. When I just let go the idea of linearity and allowed myself to arrange the prose in fragments, it all started to make a lot more sense.

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Dao Strom (last.fm)

You’re offering the chapbook/EP in a beautiful limited-edition hardbound format. Even the standard softbound copies are carefully shaped and crafted to fit together with the accompanying CD. As compared to your previous books, which you’ve published through fairly traditional channels, what did you learn from this more hands-on approach to the process of bookmaking? 

DS: I’ve learned a lot about taking my art into my own hands from all of this – literally and figuratively. I feel that we live in a world where the human and individual endeavor is constantly facing threat of being consumed by the machine – systems, mass production, everything turned into commodity, etc. So my small extra efforts with this particular project are my way of anchoring my art in a more soulful, hands-on approach.

During the final push to publication, you turned to crowdsource-style fundraising (via Indiegogo) to help get your project completed. Did this experience work well for you? Would you recommend crowdsourcing to other writers/musicians? 

DS: I will be frank in saying this was a very challenging thing to do, maybe especially for me, since I don’t like self-promotion, am quite introverted and private, and am not especially comfortable with asking for money. It was trying on the level of putting myself out there in a position of ‘need’ & wondering whether or not my project would appear to have merit enough to people. I was so grateful for the support it received & also relieved when the asking period was over. I would recommend it, though, as it does foster community and it teaches artists how to advocate for themselves. It also makes us start to rely on each other – real people making, funding, sharing art – rather than staying in a mindset that believes it is necessary to look to some bigger agency in order to manifest your art in the world.

A “triangle” shape, as well as the concept of “triangulation”, figures importantly throughout the chapbook. Why? What triangles or triads do you hope to highlight within the narrative? 

DS: The triangles resonate with me for reasons also esoteric to me, and hard to articulate. I want to leave it open to the viewer/reader’s own interpretation… But I will cite that there is significance to triangles in certain cosmologies, esoteric and more traditional. For me, the triangle has alchemical power too (transformative, opens portals between places – nonphysical and physical). I think the shape is dynamic and there were times when I felt it should point upward, or down, and I followed those impulses. The triangle moves things, it has a more dynamic energy, I think, than for instance a square – which holds things or creates structure. I think the idea of “triangulation” also speaks to my own attempts at “triangulating” – & maybe thus making sense of – the relationships between points (be they geographical or events on a timeline) in my own & the collective history. I feel like there are patterns our experience draws across the landscape; I’m interested in trying to decipher this too.

You’ve mentioned that this is the first half (“East”) of an intended duo (up next: “West”). Can you tell me more about your plans for Part Two?

DS: I am planning a “West” segment for this project. There are songs I’ve been writing that may fall into this category – more having to do with the mythos of the Western landscape: the Americas, as well our ideas of westward progress and dislocation. But I don’t think I will stick to a totally literal interpretation of what West is or was – I am leaving room for the concept to take me where it will. I don’t adhere the concepts of “East” and “West” to culture or history or politics alone; there is a part of me that is also philosophical about it – for instance, how can I examine them as metaphors, as duality, as poles of human experience? … I have been speaking to a small publisher, Jaded Ibis Press (the one I mentioned above), and it looks like the larger whole project will see publication somewhere down the road. I intend to explore the multimedia/ebook format more intensively in the creative period ahead.

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Dao Strom (vietnamlit.org)

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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.

Dao Strom is the Oregon-based author of the the novel Grass Roof, Tin Roof and the short story collection The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys. She is also a musician with two albums, Everything that Blooms Wrecks Me and Send Me Home. More info here.

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If you are familiar with Nhà Sàn Studio in Hà Nội or Sàn Art in Sài Gòn, don’t miss out on the New Space art foundation in Huế. Two prominent Huế artists well-known in Vietnam and founders of New Space share their story here. It could be seen as an update on the art atmosphere in Việt Nam, or rather another voice from Huế, depending on where you stand. Scroll down for the English version that follows the Vietnamese one.

Nếu bạn đã biết Nhà Sàn Studio ở Hà Nội và Sàn Art ở Sài Gòn, đừng bỏ qua Trung Tâm Nghệ Thuật New Space Arts Foundation ở Huế. Hai nghệ sĩ Huế có tiếng tại Việt Nam và cũng là người sáng lập ra trung tâm chia sẻ câu chuyện của họ như sau. Có thể xem như họ nói về môi trường nghệ thuật hiện tại ở Việt Nam, hoặc là một quan điểm khác về vấn đề làm nghệ thuật của những nghệ sĩ ở Huế này – tùy theo quan điểm của chính bạn ra sao. Bài tiếng Anh theo sau bài tiếng Việt.

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Tác phẩm sắp đặt Chén Và Đũa “1945″, hoàn thành năm 2011. © NSAF.
Still from “Bowls and chopsticks ‘1945’” (2011), installation art. © NSAF.

Làm nghệ thuật như Thanh-Hải 

Chỉ nhìn thấy Thanh-Hải, nhiều người Việt Nam có thể đoán ngay họ là nghệ sĩ. Tại vì họ nhìn “giống nghệ sĩ” lắm! Từ cách ăn mặc cho đến điệu bộ nói năng, họ bộc lộ cá tính rất mạnh. Giọng nói to, nói rất nhanh, nói chuyện vô cùng thẳng thắn, ý kiến mạnh mẽ. Sau 30 phút nói chuyện với họ, người ta chỉ có thể nói: một là ‘ghét’ họ, hai là thích họ. Những người trẻ tuổi thành công có cá tính mạnh thường khi tạo ra cảm giác “xấc” như thế cho người đối mặt. Nhưng có thích hay ghét họ thì cũng không thể chối bỏ những điều sau đây.

Được biết đến như là Anh em nhà họ Lê, hoặc một số bạn bè thân quen gọi họ ngắn gọn là Thanh-Hải, hai anh em sinh đôi này, Lê Ngọc Thanh và Lê Đức Hải, rất đam mê nghệ thuật. Thay vì có tiền thì mua xe xây nhà, họ đổ tiền vào việc thành lập trung tâm nghệ thuật ở Huế. Họ sẵng sàng bán đất bán nhà để duy trì trung tâm nghệ thuật của họ. Họ làm việc cật lực, không than thở. Cái chính là họ không có đủ thời gian để làm những chuyện muốn làm, lấy đâu ra thời gian mà than vãn. Ngược lại, cũng vì tính họ không thích than vãn, cho nên họ dành thời gian để làm nhiều việc hơn.

Thanh-Hải đã đi nước ngoài nhiều lần để trưng bày, trình diễn tác phẩm nghệ thuật của mình: Thái Lan, Nam Hàn, Singapore, Đức, Pháp v.v. Và họ đã học được nhiều chuyện hay. Vì vậy không ngạc nhiên mà Trung Tâm Nghệ Thuật New Space Arts (NSAF) do Thanh-Hải thành lập năm 2008 đang phát triển rất tốt. Trung tâm được quản lý theo mô hình hiện đại giống như những trung tâm nghệ thuật khác (arts foundation) trên thế giới: họ có chương trình nhiệm trú (residency). Nghệ sĩ Việt Nam hoặc nghệ sĩ đến từ khắp nơi trên thế giới đều có thể nộp đơn đăng ký tham gia chương trình này.

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Không gian cho nghệ sĩ nhiệm trú trong khuôn viên 700m2 tại làng Lại Thế, Phú Thượng (cách cầu Trường Tiền 2,5 km). © NSAF.
Artist residency at Lại Thế village, Phú Thượng (2.5km from Trường Tiền bridge). © NSAF.

Theo Trương Thiện, một nghệ sĩ đương đại trẻ và giảng viên của trường Đại Học Huế, người thường xuyên tham gia vào các hoạt động của NSAF thì “trung tâm nghệ thuật NSAF là một môi trường giáo dục tốt. Các sự kiện ở đây đều có nhiều sinh viên tham gia. Thường khó có thể tiếp cận nghệ sĩ nước ngoài. Vì những lo ngại về chính trị chẳng hạn, trường đại học có thể từ chối một mối giao lưu. Trong khi đó, New Space Arts hoạt động tự do, các thủ tục trở nên dễ dàng hơn. Thông qua họ, sinh viên và nghệ sĩ Việt Nam được tự do tiếp xúc, trao đổi với nghệ sĩ nước ngoài.”

Đến thời điểm này, nguồn tài chính dùng để duy trì hoạt động của trung tâm là tiền của gia đình Thanh-Hải, cũng như từ tiền bán tác phẩm của họ. Họ nói rằng: “Khi nào hết tiền, vợ không cho làm nghệ thuật nữa thì đóng cửa trung tâm.” Là nói đùa hay nói thật? Hãy đọc những phát biểu dưới đây của họ để thấy cách họ suy nghĩ như thế nào, rồi các bạn tự đoán xem.

Trong lúc trò chuyện, Thanh và Hải thường hay nói cùng một lúc. Cho nên những câu trả lời dưới đây được xem là đại diện cho cả hai.

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Nghệ sĩ Việt Nam muốn được thế giới công nhận thì cần những gì? 

Sức lao động, tác phẩm. Một điều không tốt bây giờ về nghệ sĩ Việt Nam là họ trông đợi nhiều vào tài trợ để làm tác phẩm. Chúng tôi làm mấy chục tác phẩm rồi, đều là lớn cả, nhưng không chờ đợi xin ai tiền. Không nhất thiết phải có tiền mới làm được tác phẩm. Ví dụ tôi đang làm một bộ phim dài 36 tiếng. Là chuyện không tưởng. Không thể có tiền là làm được chuyện này vì biết bao nhiêu tiền mới đủ. Nhưng tôi vẫn làm được. Tôi đã thực hiện được trên 20 tiếng rồi. Ngày nào tôi cũng làm việc, rồi bạn bè, người quen giúp. Vấn đề chính là phải làm việc, có ngày tôi quay 60GB. Cho nên không chỉ là tiền. Nhiều khi có tiền cũng không làm được chuyện.

Làm nghệ sĩ không phải dễ, phải nỗ lực rất nhiều, phải có thời gian, phải có lịch sử. Và đừng nghĩ rằng phải có tiền, rồi sau khi có tiền mới làm nghệ thuật. Đây là ý tưởng viễn vông, vì nghệ thuật mình không làm thì nó chết đi. Phải liên tục liên tục nỗ lực làm. Ngoài công việc kiếm sống, phải có thể xây dựng được những concept [khái niệm], công việc để làm song song, để kiếm tiền và làm nghệ thuật song song. Ví dụ Trương Thiện, cũng làm nghệ thuật đương đại, làm những tác phẩm không đắt hoặc không tốn tiền. Nếu người nghệ sĩ biết cách làm việc, cái quan trọng không phải là tiền.

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Tác phẩm video art “Màu đỏ” (2011), 3 canh màu, 12 phút. © NSAF.
Still from “Red” (2001), 3-channel video, 12 minutes. © NSAF.

Khán giả đến với New Space Arts thay đổi như thế nào từ 2008 đến nay? 

Càng ngày càng nhiều người đến. Người Huế rất yêu nghệ thuật, nhưng nghệ thuật đương đại như video, trình diễn (performance), sắp đặt (installation) khán giả ít thích. Thỉnh thoảng chúng tôi tổ chức đêm thơ, đêm nhạc, giới thiệu sách mới. NSAF rất đa ngành nghề, cái gì cũng có trong chương trình sự kiện. Những hoạt động về văn hóa làm thay đổi xã hội chúng tôi đều làm, không nhất thiết phải lựa chọn nghệ thuật cao. Tất nhiên chất lượng tác phẩm phải tốt thì chúng tôi sẵn sàng tài trợ để buổi giới thiệu thành công.

Quan hệ với báo đài? 

Ở Việt Nam, thường có sự kiện thì phải có phong bì cho báo đài. Nhưng chúng tôi chưa bao giờ làm điều này, vì chúng tôi làm việc từ quỹ gia đình, không có tiền cho báo đài. Nhưng chúng tôi có một nhóm báo chí yêu thích công việc của mình. Họ viết bài mà không đòi hỏi gì. Tình bạn được thiết lập. Khi họ làm nhà mới thì mình tặng họ bức tranh, như là thể hiện tình bạn, chứ không mua bán trao đổi gì.

Quan hệ với chính quyền? 

Không gian làm triển lãm ở đây chính là do nhà nước tài trợ. Các cuộc triển lãm tất nhiên đều có giấy phép. Có một lần không được cấp giấy phép là vì một họa sĩ vẽ tranh đề tựa là “Mùa xuân Ả Rập”. Do đó là người tổ chức phải có sự kiểm soát về phía mình để triển lãm được thành công. Sự hiểu giữa con người có giới hạn. Mình phải làm sao để hai bên điều hòa với nhau.

Có nhiều nghệ sĩ than phiền về chính quyền, các anh nghĩ sao về điều này?

Họ tự làm mệt bản thân mình, chứ cuộc sống quá tươi đẹp. Có điều anh phải lao động, chứ không thể ngồi không rồi nhân gian rơi thức ăn xuống cho mình. Một điều nữa là mình phải coi lại bản thân mình, coi mình là ai. Nghệ sĩ Việt Nam hay than vãn, nào là tôi nghèo, tôi không có tự do, tôi nghĩ đó là BS.

Ở Việt Nam có bị kiềm kẹp, không được tự do bộc lộ tư tưởng? 

Tôi nghĩ có nhiều trường hợp người ta dùng xì-căng-đan để nổi tiếng, dùng chính trị để làm nghệ thuật. Thật ra trong hơi thở cuộc sống đã có chính trị rồi. Mình sống trong xã hội, nằm trong hệ thống, yếu tố chính trị đã nằm trong tác phẩm. Người khác tôi không biết, chứ tôi làm những điều tôi yêu thích, tôi thấy bình thường.

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Dự án video art và sắp đặt “The Game” (2013), video 3 canh màu, 12 giờ. © NSAF.
Still from “The game” (2013), video and installation project, 3-channel video, 12 hours. © NSAF.

Muốn đi học gì ở nước ngoài? 

Học đủ rồi. Muốn đi chơi. Muốn đi Mỹ học lái máy bay. 38 tuổi rồi. Còn khoảng 12 năm làm nghệ thuật thôi. Rồi về hưu.

Tại sao Mỹ? 

Ở đó an toàn hơn, tỉ lệ học viên chết ít.

Muốn đi chơi ở đâu? 

Lào.

Thích môi trường nghệ thuật ở đâu?

New York, Paris. Nam Hàn. Cái khổ là ở đâu cũng tốt hơn Việt Nam.

Trong việc hoạt động nghệ thuật độc lập, ở Việt Nam cũng khó khăn như ở nước ngoài? 

Tôi nghĩ ở Việt Nam có điều kiện hơn. Cuộc sống rẻ hơn. Nhưng nghệ thuật là một cuộc chơi, phải dám chơi dám chịu.

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Thanh (áo xám) và Hải (áo đỏ).
Thanh (in grey) and Hải (in red).

Mối giao tiếp giữa các anh với những nghệ sĩ gốc Việt sang Việt Nam sống và làm việc như thế nào?

Thật ra họ là người Mỹ chứ không phải Việt Nam. Họ có dòng máu Việt Nam, nhưng mọi thứ từ tư tưởng, đào tạo, suy nghĩ, ước mơ v.v… là Mỹ. Họ không mang trong người hơi thở Việt Nam. Họ được đào tào tốt, họ có thể hiểu nghệ thuật Việt Nam, tác phẩm của họ rất tốt, và họ có thể hiểu văn hóa Việt Nam. Sự hiểu không phải đơn giản. Nên họ là người hoàn toàn khác chúng tôi, họ không phải là người địa phương.

Anh muốn nhìn thấy hướng sáng tác trong nghệ thuật của nghệ sĩ Việt Nam đi về đâu?

Độc lập cá nhân là quan trọng nhất. Một nghệ sĩ làm việc độc lập, không cần đoàn thể, tổ chức, nhóm gì cả. Nếu họ hiểu mình là ai, sinh ra từ đâu thì sẽ không nặng nề. Nhẹ nhàng, vui cười thôi.

Tìm hiểu thêm về Thanh-Hải và New Space Arts Foundation: http://www.newspacearts.com/

Anvi Hoàng sinh trưởng tại Việt Nam, sang Mỹ học cao học và rồi tìm thấy niềm vui trong việc viết lách tự do. Anvi viết thuần thục cả tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt. Viết để tung hô văn hóa Việt Nam và viết về sự thay đổi. Anvi thích khám phá thế giới ‘chân trong chân ngoài’ mà cô đang sống, và thích nước. Cô sống ở thành phố Bloomington, thuộc tiểu bang Indiana.

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Still from “Bowls and chopsticks ‘1945’” (2011), installation art. © NSAF.
Tác phẩm sắp đặt Chén Và Đũa “1945″, hoàn thành năm 2011. © NSAF.

Thanh-Hải making art in Huế

Known as the Le Brothers Thanh-Hai, or Thanh-Hải as some of their friends call them, these twin brothers, Lê Ngọc Thanh and Lê Đức Hải, make quite a pair. They collaborate and thrive in union as the best twins can be. They talk loudly and make bold statements that could be deemed offensive to many. After a short conversation with them, one could possibly feel the ‘hate-them’ or ‘love-them’ vibe. But ultimately, their goal is to bring art to Huế people and beyond, and they are doing great at that. Their accomplishments dovetail their stories.

Thanh-Hải’s passion for art is piercing nonporous surfaces. Instead of saving money to buy a car or build a big house, they pour it into the first art foundation in Huế. They are willing to sell the properties they have to maintain it. They work extremely hard without a complaint – mostly because they don’t have enough time to do what they love doing, let alone sitting around and complaining. Conversely, it is not in their personality to sit around and complain, that’s why they have more time doing things they like. Even before their graduation in 2000, they attracted attention of the artists in Huế and became well-known in Vietnam soon after that.

Thanh and Hải have been abroad many times for their exhibitions and performances: Thailand, Singapore, France, Germany, etc. And they have learned valuable lessons. That is why it is not a surprise to see New Space Arts Foundation (NSAF) founded by them in 2008 doing so well. They have a residency program open to artists all over the world. Up to this moment, 81 artists have been in residence at NSAF.

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A group exhibition at NSAF, 15 Lê Lợi, Huế. © NSAF.
Khai mạc một triển lãm Nhóm tại NSAF, 15 Lê Lợi Tp Huế. © NSAF.

So far, the foundation is funded by their family money and from sales of their art works. Laughing, Thanh-Hải said, “We would close down the foundation when we run out of money and our wives stop supporting our artist career anymore.” Are they joking? Read their responses below to judge for yourself how serious you think they are. During the interview, Thanh and Hải often talked at the same time. The answers that follow the questions, therefore, represent both of them.

What does it take for Vietnamese artists to be recognized outside Vietnam? 

Labor, art works. What is unfortunate about Vietnamese artists these days is that they depend on grants to make art. We have finished dozens of works without asking money from anyone. One does not necessarily need to have money to make art. We are making a 36-hour long video – an impossible thing, you may think. But we are doing it. We have more than 20 hours already. We work everyday. Our friends help us as well. The key is hard work, some day we film 60GB. So it is not just money. Sometimes money does not bring you art.

It is tough to be an artist because one has to work really hard. It takes time to build up. One cannot think that money is a must in making art. Art dies if you don’t make it. So you have to constantly work on it. Besides making a living, one must be able to create concepts and projects to go along. If an artist knows how to work, money is not that important.

How has the audience to New Space Arts changed over time since 2008? 

More and more people come. Huế people love art, but contemporary stuffs like performance, installation, video art are not their favorites. So we weave in music, poetry and book nights. Any activity that brings about changes is included in our events, not just high art. We simply make sure the works are of high quality to support them.

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Still from “Into the sea” (2011), 3-channel video, 21 minutes. Collective work. Highlighted work at Singapore Biennale 2013. © NSAF.
Tác phẩm video art “Chạm tới Biển (2011), 3 canh màu, 21 phút, tác phẩm highlight tại cuộc triển lãm Singapore Biennale 2013. © NSAF.

What is your relation with the press like? 

In Vietnam, you often have to bribe the press for coverage in cases of events. We have not done that because we operate on family money and we cannot afford that. On the other hand, we have a group of journalists who like what we are doing. They write about us without asking for anything in return.

What is the relation with the government like?

Our exhibition space is provided by the government. Of course we need a permit for each exhibition. One time we didn’t get it because one painter titled their work “The Arab Spring.” Because of issues like this, as organizers, we have to do the checking to make sure the exhibition can go smoothly. Mutual understanding among human beings is limited. We have to act in a way that bridges the gap between the sides.

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Many artists are complaining about the government. What do you think about that?

I think they buy trouble to themselves. Life is so wonderful. You just have to work hard and not sit around waiting for things to fall from the sky. You also need to know who you are. Vietnamese artists have a habit of complaining about being poor and lack of freedom. I think that is BS.

Do you think you are suppressed and without freedom to express yourself in Vietnam?

I think in many cases people use scandals to achieve fame, using politics to do art. The fact is politics is in the air we breathe. We live in the system and politics is embedded in our works. I don’t know about others, but I do whatever I like and everything is fine.

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Still from “The game” (2013), video and installation project, 3-channel video, 12 hours. © NSAF.
Dự án video art và sắp đặt “The Game” (2013), video 3 canh màu, 12 giờ. © NSAF.

If you have a chance to go abroad again, what else do you want to study? 

We have studied enough. We just want to learn to fly an airplane in the US. We are 38 now. We have about 12 more years to make art. Then we retire.

Why the US? 

It is safer there. The number of student casualties is low.

Where do you want to go for a vacation? 

Laos.

How difficult is it to be an independent artist in Vietnam? 

I think it is actually more comfortable here in Vietnam because the living cost is lower. But after all, art is a game where you have to be willing to take risk.

What is your reception of artists of Vietnamese descent who live and work in Vietnam?

Honestly, they are American. They carry the Vietnamese blood line, but everything about them – from their dreams, their education, their thoughts – is American. They don’t breathe the Vietnamese air the way we do. They may understand Vietnamese culture, they may understand Vietnamese art, they are well-trained, their art works are of high quality. Yet, understanding is not a simple thing. They are completely different than us. They are not local.

Where do you want to see Vietnamese artists head to in the future?

Independence is the most crucial issue. An independent artist does not need to join any organization or group. If they understand who they are and where they are from, they don’t feel heavy. They just smile and go through life.

Find out more about Thanh-Hải and New Space Arts Foundation at: http://www.newspacearts.com/

Anvi Hoàng grew up in Vietnam. She came to the US for graduate studies and have found happiness in writing. She makes it one aim to celebrate Vietnamese culture in her writing. A bilingual writer in English and Vietnamese, Anvi enjoys exploring the in-between worlds she is in, and loves water. She lives in Bloomington, IN.

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from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

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The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center are proud to present the Fourth San Francisco Diasporic Vietnamese Literary Festival on Saturday, April 19, 2014 at the African American Art and Culture Complex (762 Fulton St, SF.)

In the approaching weeks, we will highlight our writers and artists with a Q&A and a tantalizing taste of their work. We hope you will enjoy getting to know our fabulous roster of writers and artists, and join us in celebrating their work in April!

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Our first spotlight is award winning author Bich Minh Nguyen (who also goes by Beth) and recently published her novel Pioneer Girl by Viking. She is also the author of the novel Short Girls, which received an American Book Award, and the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, which received the PEN/Jerard Award. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications. She teaches in and directs the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

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Q&A

1. How important is community and location to your identity as a writer and your writing process?

I grew up in a town in the Midwest where I often felt isolated and out of place; probably as a result, location is a significant part of my identity as a writer. I always return to characters who aren’t sure about where they are or where they belong. In terms of community, I’ve always found it through books, writers, writing programs–wherever people care about words.

2. Which three books have you read more than three times?

I love rereading; it’s like comfort food to me. Among the most-read would be: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, and Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.

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3. Who would you be if you had not become a writer?

If I had not become a writer, I might have gone into a food-related field.

4. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers and poets?

My advice for aspiring writers and poets is to read and write in equal measure. And once you’re writing, stay there as long as possible.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Writers’ Spotlight: Bich Minh Nguyen

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

 

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Photo by Cole Anetsberger, courtesy of WritersCorps

The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center are proud to present the Fourth San Francisco Diasporic Vietnamese Literary Festival on Saturday, April 19, 2014 at the African American Art and Culture Complex (762 Fulton St, SF.)

In the approaching weeks, we will highlight our writers and artists with a Q&A and a tantalizing taste of their work. We hope you will enjoy getting to know our fabulous roster of writers and artists, and join us in celebrating their work in April!

Have you subscribed to diaCRITICS yet? Subscribe and win prizes! Read more details.

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Clik here to view.Our second spotlight is poet Anh Vu Buchanan. Based in the Bay Area, Anh Vu is the author of The Disordered (sunnyoutside press 2013) and Backhanded Compliments & Other Ways to Say I Love You (Works on Paper Press 2014). He is the recipient of the 2010 James D. Phelan Award  and also received an Individual Artists Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. His poems have also appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Cream City Review, Harpur Palate, The Journal, kill author, The Minnesota Review, Parthenon West Review, word for/ word, Vinyl Poetry, and ZYZZYVA. He received an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. He currently teaches in San Francisco.

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Q&A

1. How important is community and location to your identity as a writer and your writing process?

Community is so important to my identity as a writer.  For me, it’s always been my fountain and source of inspiration.  It can be the  community of writers I belong to that push me to my writing limits as well as all the places that I’m from that find their way into my poems.  These are things that are of part of my writing life and really give me that extra boost just when I need it.

2. Which three books have you read more than three times?

Four Letter Words – Truong Tran, Fresh of the Boat by Eddie Huang, and Blood and Soap – Linh Dinh

3. Who would you be if you had not become a writer?

Photographer, I love photography just as much as writing and poetry.

4. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers and poets?

Block out the noise. Write for yourself and write about the things you are passionate about. If you aren’t writing about things you have an interest or even a slight obsession with it will show in the work.  Read everything and anything you can get your hands on. Find a community or a support system. A small group of writers to give you motivation or feedback or whatever you need in your writing life. It’s really hard at times to take the time to stop and write. Having a support group to push you or inspire you is a good way to get the creative energy going again.

~

Additional Links for Anh Vu

https://www.facebook.com/anhvubuchanan
https://twitter.com/anhvubuchanan

Excerpt
Union 

My dreams move in with your dreams and we go tell the organ how to play the mountain. I’m making you breakfast sandwiches by the fire and when you say squirrel I know you mean look at my shirt smiling. You were spitting secrets out again and my question marks aren’t lonely anymore. I want to play within the margins with you. My bottle caps mingle with your bottle caps and we’ve gained another hour. If you say murmur again I might explode and collapse and wake up under smokestacks drifting in my thoughts. If I found us a hammock to live in would you tell me all the things the street tells you at night? My cave is next to your cave and I can hear the water serenading the rocks. We’re in a graveyard of lost socks and all I have is a bottle opener. So we chant theme songs together and it sunsets again. I’m looking for a necklace made from compass parts for the tree you sketched your name into it for the very first time for all the bookstores to call our own. Can you feel the honesty of my time machine? I’m bringing you a meadow and a lake. I’m stealing all the clocks I can to show you age is on our side. My picnic marries your picnic and in the blankets we disappear.

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Writers’ Spotlight: Anh Vu Buchanan

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Writers’ Spotlight: Phong Nguyen

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

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please like, share, and comment on this post! Writers’ Spotlight: Thao P. Nguyen

from diaCRITICS, the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic arts, culture, and politics. diacritics.org

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Photo taken by Maslow Rafal

The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center are proud to present the Fourth San Francisco Diaporic Vietnamese Literary Festival on Saturday, April 19, 2014 at the African American Art and Culture Complex (762 Fulton St, SF.)
In the approaching weeks, we will highlight our writers and artists with a Q&A and a tantalizing taste of their work. We hope you will enjoy getting to know our fabulous roster of writers and artists, and join us in celebrating their work in April!

Have you subscribed to diaCRITICS yet? Subscribe and win prizes! Read more details.

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Our very special guest at this year’s festival is Vietnamese American writer Kim Thuy, the author of internationally acclaimed novel Ru. Kim Thuy, a double Université de Montréal graduate, has reinvented herself several times since fleeing her native Vietnam in 1978. From the age of 10, shortly after she arrived in Quebec, she has worked as a vegetable picker, seamstress and cashier during her studies.

Since completing her degrees in law (1993) as well as in linguistics and translation (1990), she has worked as a translator, interpreter, lawyer, restaurateur, food commentator and most recently as a novelist.

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Her journey is the narrative of her debut novel Ru (Libre Expression). The title of her autobiography means small stream in French or lullaby in Vietnamese. The book became an instant sensation in Quebec and France.

“Kim Thuy’s writing flows like poetry – it transports and appeases. It is powerful and evocative,” says French newspaper Le Figaro. “This first novel provides a rare feeling of bliss.”

Born in Saigon in 1968, Kim Thuy left her native Vietnam with her parents and two brothers to flee from a regime of repression. Their impossible adventure began in the nauseating hold of a fishing boat followed by a painful stay in a Malaysian refugee camp before eventually ending in Quebec, where her family learned to adapt to an extremely different lifestyle. The most memorable moments of their adventures are poetically conveyed in Ru, which resembles a series of inspiring post cards.

Montreal newspaper La Presse describes the success of Ru as a fairytale for Kim Thuy: “The fact that she is winning over the hearts of so many readers in what isn’t her native tongue isn’t surprising. ‘I am a child of Bill 101, a Francophile and a Francophone in my soul,’ she says. ‘I speak Vietnamese, of course, but it is the Vietnamese of childhood or cooking. The language in which I think and feel most is French.’

Q&A

1. How important is community and location to your identity as a writer and your writing process?

I have learned to write whenever and wherever it is possible.  So, the last book was mostly written in airports and airplanes. I love these public spaces for their anonymity.  Somehow they all end up looking the same, or at least with the same architectural logic, which allows me to create a world of my own, where I can pick and choose whatever I need to transform strings of words into a story with characters who do have a community and a location.

I am a bit like water: I have the shape of the container.  I feel at home in new cities/countries very quickly and most of the time, I think I could live wherever I landed just some days before without even going back home to move my things. My identity is more cultural than geographical.

2. Which 3 books have you read more than 3 times?

. The Lover by Marguerite Duras – I used to know it by heart.

. The Things They Carried by Tim O’brien – I must have given away about 25 copies since I first read it in the late 90′s

. L’accordeur de silence by Mia Couto – It took me a whole year to get to the last page because I kept going back to the first page and typing /sending my favourite passages to friends.

3. Who would you be if you had not become a writer?

Even though I have no particular talents, life has always given me the opportunity to work in so many different areas–interpretation, law, restaurant cooking, radio/tv… Maybe I would have continued one of these careers or maybe, I would have become a dancer with two left feet.

4. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers and poets?

Write, write, write.  And then delete, delete, delete. And write some more and delete some more.

I think writing requires a strong self-discipline and an unconditional love for words. In my case, inspiration is the original spark but would not become a fire without voluntary and conscious effort. So, maybe, like everything else, the secret is ‘hard work’.

~

Other Resources:

Interview with Kim Thuy with an audio excerpt of Ru: http://www.npr.org/2012/11/24/165563101/a-refugees-multilayered-experience-in-ru

http://www.randomhouse.ca/books/209096/ru-by-kim-thuy-translated-by-sheila-fischman

~

 Excerpt from Ru: 

I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, when the long chains of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along with the sound of the machine guns.

I first saw the light of day in Saigon, where firecrackers, fragmented into a thousand shreds, coloured the ground red like the petals of cherry blossoms or like the blood of the two million soldiers deployed and scattered through the villages and cities of a Vietnam that had been ripped in two.

I was born in the shadow of skies adorned with fireworks, decorated with garlands of light, shot through with rockets and missiles. The purpose of my birth was to replace lives that had been lost. My life’s duty was to prolong that of my mother.

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Please take the time to rate this post (above) and share it (below). Ratings for top posts are listed on the sidebar. Sharing (on email, Facebook, etc.) helps spread the word about diaCRITICS. And join the conversation and leave a comment! Have you read Kim Thuy’s novel Ru? If so, tell us what you think!

please like, share, and comment on this post! Writers’ Spotlight: Kim Thuy