Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 460 - How Can We Be More Than The Scenery? Cathy Linh Che

Transcript

460 - How Can We Be More Than The Scenery? Cathy Linh Che · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

0:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to the Vietnamese podcast today.
0:02
[SPEAKER_02]: I have Kathy Linjé on Welcome to the podcast, Kathy.
0:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much, Kenneth, for having me.
0:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Very welcome.
0:12
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we have met many times in the past few years and finally we get to sit here and talk about your work.
0:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm so glad.
0:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, me too.
0:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Very happy to chat.
0:25
[SPEAKER_02]: We have talked in the past about we grew up sort of in very similar, I mean, we grew up in the same town and very similar Vietnamese Catholic circumstance.
0:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think it's very interesting.
0:42
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a, it's its own sub niche of Vietnamese American L.A. Because, you know, there's these camps that that we both went to for church.
0:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's rare that I get to talk to anybody about it and we talked about it.
1:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And I keep thinking about that the last time we talked.
1:11
[SPEAKER_00]: My niece and nephew both just came from camp last weekend.
1:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a Lyon do on camp.
1:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I know about that one.
1:24
[SPEAKER_00]: They're from St. Lucy's Long Beach.
1:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're that next generation.
1:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So for me, I grew up in the 80s and 90s going to these camps and they were really,
1:37
[SPEAKER_00]: formative, you know, just in terms of having a community, in terms of structuring my life, around, you know, the, yeah, they just had ritual, they had, you know, identity, it was all of it.
1:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So I really, really had a strong sense of movement through that space, to need them
2:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
2:07
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, when I think about Sundance Film Festival and I think about your film, we were the scenery and I think about your parents.
2:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think about all the things that are circling around these ideas of story and narratives.
2:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And then to think about
2:29
[SPEAKER_02]: What a beautiful childhood when I think about the church.
2:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you walk me through this from when they left Vietnam to today, you're in New York?
2:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And I want to hear and share with the audience your life story.
2:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
2:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, my parents, they married in Vietnam during the war.
3:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me think.
3:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So my mom, this is a story.
3:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, the story today may not be the story when I pick up more information from my mom in the future because she might correct it.
3:15
[SPEAKER_00]: But I've heard these stories my whole life, right?
3:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is something that I think is how I would trace it.
3:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So my mother's journey is that she grew up in a village outside of Denang.
3:27
[SPEAKER_00]: She at the age of approximately 13 was separated from her mother because American soldiers had entered the village.
3:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're supposed to be there for to protect in theory, right?
3:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Protect Vietnamese people, but they were not there as protectors.
3:46
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, like they were there and there were these young boys.
3:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know,
3:54
[SPEAKER_00]: their marines, let's imagine and you were at the youngest would be 18 years old and when they saw her, my mom was a very beautiful young woman and at 13 they would just sort of go up to her and just like make this gesture of trying to cut her hair because they wanted just a little piece to put on their helmet like a little like talisman.
4:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And when my grandmother saw that she immediately
4:18
[SPEAKER_00]: sent my mother away to Danang the city to live with family.
4:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And so during that time, my mother was an only child because my grandfather died when she was born.
4:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So during that time, my grandmother met my step grandfather.
4:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And when my mother kind of got wind of that or heard about that,
4:43
[SPEAKER_00]: had kind of changed up.
4:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And the only thing is she couldn't go to school anymore, right?
4:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Because, you know, she was in a place where the school house had been destroyed.
4:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So after sixth grade, there was no more education.
4:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So she was starting to become an apprentice, right?
4:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So that, um, an apprentice to her trade that she was learning was to learn how to sew.
5:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was what she was trying to do.
5:06
[SPEAKER_00]: She'll, so she essentially was going to school to learn how to do that.
5:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she, you know, she worked at the soy sauce factory with her best friend for a while, and then around the age of 17, she heard there was a job elsewhere, so she went to Saigon at 17 with her best friend and she lived with family.
5:32
[SPEAKER_00]: um, and that job didn't pan out, um, so she ended up doing more apprentice work, you know, as a seamstress and she got a little bit more into it and got paid, but while she was in that she met my father, um, and so,
5:49
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, my dad is 14-year-old older than my mom.
5:53
[SPEAKER_00]: He was his stories that he was born outside of Gwynion in a village called Huahung.
6:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And his dad died when he was born.
6:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And then his mom died when he was 10.
6:06
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's an orphan.
6:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And,
6:09
[SPEAKER_00]: his older brother as a Catholic priest.
6:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So my mom's family is not Catholic.
6:13
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad's family is Catholic, but then my mom converted to be with my dad.
6:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that so somewhere around third grade, my dad's education was also interrupted.
6:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And he stopped going to school until I, and that's around, you know, third grade was around,
6:32
[SPEAKER_00]: little before his mother died then when his mother died and you know he's the youngest of ten right so at that point he gets um he just becomes a fisherman like a child out to see you know like learning how to fish with the adults and whatever they get paid he gets like like a small portion of it and he gets fed and he so he he's doing that type of work until he's um
7:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And then his oldest brother who became a priest and finished that because the two oldest in the family.
7:08
[SPEAKER_00]: did seminary school.
7:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So one became a priest and the other got married and had like eight kids, you know, so and then became like some kind of pharmacist and then some sort of officer in the army.
7:20
[SPEAKER_00]: So my dad ended up going to school.
7:22
[SPEAKER_00]: At that point, he got he got brought out of, you know, kind of this in my mind, I always think of my dad as Huck Finn, this like, you know,
7:31
[SPEAKER_00]: childhood, and brought into school.
7:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was a kind of French seminary school in yet young where my uncle lived, you know, and so my dad got an education there, but he was he because he had a four-year gap in education.
7:47
[SPEAKER_00]: He had to kind of like study with people much younger than him.
7:50
[SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't eating that much during these years, so he was kind of small and young looking, so he was able to
7:56
[SPEAKER_00]: sort of do that.
7:57
[SPEAKER_00]: But he never really loved the school, you know, like he he kind of felt oppressed by schooling, say some degree.
8:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, my his his brother ended up getting murdered, you know, and my cousins also gay, you know, it's like he was a priest and he brought four of my cousins with them.
8:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And they ended up getting murdered by the Vikram.
8:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a story, right?
8:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And so my dad's education also was interrupted.
8:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So he got taken in by a classmate's family.
8:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And that classmate's family was the one who in Saigon basically my dad's ended up living with, as he was drafted into the military, as he was,
8:44
[SPEAKER_00]: like just lived the rest of its life, he was like considered like adopt it as part of that family.
8:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And my mom ended up kind of living in that house because that's the job she thought that was open.
8:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they lived in the same house that lady of the house kind of did some matchmaking and that's how they ended up together.
9:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And when in April 30, 1975, when
9:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the country, essentially, it seemed like the north was going to win.
9:16
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad was like looking for a place to leave with my mom and he had the all of these fishermen skills so they took off to the Philippines together on a bow, you know, I think it was like three scape at least escape attempts and success won the last one.
9:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And from there they, you know, they were cast.
9:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They lived in the refugee camp in the Philippines for 11 months.
9:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And from there they were used as extras in a apocalypse now.
9:44
[SPEAKER_00]: They came to the US in 1976, because they had a cousin who married an American GI here.
9:50
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad did in North East LA.
9:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think they settled into Al-Hambra or El Monte.
10:04
[SPEAKER_00]: 1980, I'm born, so probably two kids, you need more space so they bought a house in Highland Park.
10:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They got a bunch of their friends pulled money together, people they met in church, you know, Sacred Heart Church in Altadina.
10:16
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a home base for them.
10:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, from there that was just
10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, I grew up in Highland Park until the age of 10 moved to Long Beach after that.
10:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, it just kind of became a poet along the way and just spent my childhood into adulthood listening to my parents tell about their lives and there's such an amazing story
10:50
[SPEAKER_00]: tracing that journey from Vietnam to the Philippines to being in a apocalypse now to ending up the United States.
10:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And kind of driven by their voices, you know, we record them telling their stories, you know, even though it's a two-way interview, the only voice is you really hear are theirs.
11:12
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't hear my voice doing the interviewing.
11:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't want to be
11:17
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I have my poetry, that's where I get to do all the speaking, but I really wanted to get out of the way.
11:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So they are pretty much leading the story and so when we put it together, the radio edit is all their voices and then we paired imagery with it.
11:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for sharing that story with me because, you know, I think of it as a
11:42
[SPEAKER_02]: decades long journey to get this short film out at Sundance where it won the jury award.
11:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And we'll hear it like that and you, because I got to watch it, you sent me the screener to watch.
11:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think about all of the things and all of the years that go on and we don't think that
12:09
[SPEAKER_02]: in a bigger movie, and the stuff is so meta, right?
12:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Cause now, there's a movie made about people in a movie.
12:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And how did it come about?
12:20
[SPEAKER_02]: How did this short film come about?
12:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It was poetry first.
12:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I've been writing about my parents' stories, about being people and Vietnam during wartime,
12:35
[SPEAKER_00]: as refugees and their first years in this country.
12:38
[SPEAKER_00]: In large part, because I felt this really urgent insistent absence within most literature, most media, especially growing up in the 80s, 90s, I didn't see very much of my parents' lives or their communities' lives really represented in these spaces.
13:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, poetry is my first love, and so that's what I wrote in too, and then I'd been doing research in terms of interviewing my family going to Vietnam, going to the Philippines, going to the refugee camp, going to the site of where apocalypse now was filmed.
13:23
[SPEAKER_00]: in order to pursue this poetry book.
13:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And during that time, as I was writing it, I met a filmmaker who basically said, oh, have you considered making a short film about it?
13:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And I hadn't really considered that because I just don't have the skills, it's not my genre and he was like, but I, you know, that's my genre.
13:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I can help you.
13:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So that started off this collaboration at the end of 2018.
13:49
[SPEAKER_00]: We just met at a artist residency where I wasn't even one of the artists like I was hanging out with a friend who was there, you know, another poet selling my mouth.
13:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she was, you know, invited all her friends at the residency, or wherever else a dinner, and we had dinner, and we sat next to each other, and I asked him writing some poems, and I'm thinking about using a screenplay format, like, what do you use with the software?
14:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he mentioned, oh, you know, this type of software, he's like, but, you know, would you consider making a short film about that short documentary?
14:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's a great idea, but I can't, you know, like I don't have the skills, so that's how the short film kind of ultimately came about.
14:35
[SPEAKER_00]: These were stories, it's narratively, it's something I've been pursuing for, I don't know, at least that apocalypse now story for over 10 years.
14:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Stories about my parents and Vietnam, like since it was like 21 years old, maybe earlier than that.
14:55
[SPEAKER_00]: doing that.
14:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, I studied, I was taught poetry all through K through 12.
15:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I was writing about love or writing about other things that were important to me, but my parents' lives were not clear to me.
15:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't clear to me that these were stories I wanted to tell in this quite this way and tell I went to like Portland, Oregon to go to college.
15:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And Portland is the whiteest city in America, or at least was at the time.
15:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And so
15:31
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, going into the library bookshelf, it was just very clear, urgently clear.
15:36
[SPEAKER_00]: This was 1999, you know, that my parents, like, these stories are not here.
15:41
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of Vietnam war stories, but they're told from the US GI perspective.
15:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's true of film too.
15:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And I wanted to be able to write into that space what was lacking.
15:55
[SPEAKER_02]: the most random, this is the most random story and how film got made.
15:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think about the conversations you and I have had about how you really kind of don't at this point in our lives, don't really control what bubbles up to the surface.
16:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Cause it sounds like this artist for us in and see, you're not even part of that residency, you're just like there.
16:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
16:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And this filmmaker's there and you you trade jobs and few years later you have a movie.
16:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And we talked about your poetry.
16:29
[SPEAKER_02]: The ideas and in poetry, I think we talked about muscleing.
16:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that was the idea where at some point you don't
16:39
[SPEAKER_02]: put that kind of that effort behind it, but you kind of let go.
16:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think different traditions call it the muse or divinity or whatever, but that sort of like creeps up into the formation of the ideas of the narratives that you're putting out or artists that are really
17:02
[SPEAKER_02]: little further down the road.
17:04
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not about age, but it's just about the confidence to let go and let the narratives come out.
17:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, confidence is a big part of it.
17:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that I had anxieties around telling this particular story because my first book, I didn't feel anxious about so much.
17:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean,
17:25
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, my first book's called Split and it's about the intersection of my parents' lives under wartime and my own experiences of sexual violation.
17:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I felt very much that these are personal stories that don't need vetting, you know, they're, I felt very confident that it's not part of this larger, even though
17:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Like my family's stories, nobody's gonna kind of tell me you don't have the authority of, you know, no one's gonna fact check whether or not my mom, you know, had this experience or whether or not I had this experience, but with apocalypse now, as this larger story, it's a beloved film, people consider it one of the greatest of all time.
18:17
[SPEAKER_00]: People are constantly telling me how much they,
18:21
[SPEAKER_00]: love this film and there there's it's also very storied the making of is very storied so they're asking me oh have you seen the making of the film have you heard these stories so there's a lot more lore that is known around this film so and made me feel like I needed to do more a
18:47
[SPEAKER_00]: the story around that, which I'm not that interested in to be fair, like that's not my mission.
18:54
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's not my focus, but because so many people have all of this knowledge around it, it felt like, oh, it boos me to know more.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the other aspect is that it's a very, like, when I tell people the simple one line, okay, for
19:10
[SPEAKER_00]: to Vietnam or refugees who end up being used as extras in Apocalypse.
19:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, it's an automatic reaction, especially from American point of view.
19:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It's automatically interesting and exciting and rich.
19:24
[SPEAKER_00]: But in terms of how do you tell that story well, you know, how do I approach it because there's so many ways to do it, it just led to me just not doing anything for a while.
19:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just like frozen and not sure how to proceed.
19:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, with the poetry, I finally just picked a form and tried it and it's the golden shovel form.
19:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So I did this thing where I
19:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like taking lines from the screen, play of Apocalypse Down, putting them kind of in the margins, and then filling in the space with my mother's story, and my father's story, and my grandmother's story.
20:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was this kind of, it was a formal way to
20:15
[SPEAKER_00]: restore the perspective of point of view of my parents are actually my family is actually the center of this story, you know, of this version of the story.
20:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And this other story of the GIs are actually on the periphery, you know, or even the story of the movie, that's actually on the periphery of their their their lives and their point of view.
20:41
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's this kind of
20:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Inversion because it's based on where are you looking from and who are you centering?
20:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But back to muscleing.
20:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I'll just say, you know, yeah, some of it is like at some point you just I mean, there is you know, I do automatic writing so there is like it's a
21:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second book is a mixture of my voice, my father's voice, my mother's voice, my grandmother's voice, and I did come to the voices through this act of, you know, divination or what I say on and just like listening to them and I've been listening to them my whole lives, right?
21:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not hard for me to listen and have that interact with my English and my
21:39
[SPEAKER_00]: reading and all of that, and for it to come out into, you know, this form or this literature in the end.
21:48
[SPEAKER_02]: If what point in your life did you say, I'm a poet, I'm a bonfire poet.
21:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say probably around the age of 28, 29.
22:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And why, why at that point did you have the confidence to say, I'm a poet?
22:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a little bit biosmosis so I studied poetry from like from grade school into middle school and to high school and then so it's a very school oriented and then in college I also studied so I wrote a creative writing thesis and then I became as you know a k through 12 not k through 12 high school English teacher and that's what I really wanted to do because I really
22:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you know, literature really made me feel less alone.
22:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It made me feel alive.
22:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It made me me, you know, there was all this beauty and wonder and pain and politics.
22:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was just, I, I just connected to it so beautifully that I wanted to be able to do that for other high school students that, you know, my high school teachers were amazing.
23:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wanted to be
23:09
[SPEAKER_00]: now that I was older.
23:11
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was so difficult.
23:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't write a thing during those years.
23:15
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I tried sometimes, but outside of that structure of school, I didn't know how to.
23:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And so after I was a high school teacher, LA Unified School District, I taught at Bell High School.
23:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I did that for three years.
23:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I applied to MFA programs across the country to get my master's and fine arts in creative writing for poetry.
23:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And for me, I didn't have ambitions around writing a book.
23:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I never thought about that.
23:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I just really wanted to study this form to expand what I could do, to do something new, just to grow.
23:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And during that time, I got into several programs, but I ended up choosing to move to New York from LA, and to attend NYU.
24:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I was always like, why do I do this thing?
24:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, this thing in the dark, this thing that nobody in my life fully understands.
24:15
[SPEAKER_00]: But then I entered into a space where everybody was writing poetry.
24:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And everybody was doing it on the side, privately secretly in some degree to some degree.
24:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that over time, it was just by surrounding myself with people who felt so strongly about becoming
24:36
[SPEAKER_00]: artists that I finally somewhere along the way.
24:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It just like, it just like seemed into me.
24:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I was, oh, I am a poet.
24:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I am an artist.
24:48
[SPEAKER_00]: That is my identity.
24:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was not, it just happened one day.
24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't a decision.
24:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I love to hear that.
24:59
[SPEAKER_02]: That it wasn't, you said it wasn't a decision.
25:02
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I mean, the decision to do the MFA was a decision once I was there, something through that being surrounded by it, it just became sort of, oh, yes, this is part of me, this is who I am.
25:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so if that was not a decision, I didn't decide it one day.
25:25
[SPEAKER_00]: You just became clear.
25:29
[SPEAKER_02]: former Catholics.
25:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And by definition, you're always a Catholic because we were baptized Catholics.
25:37
[SPEAKER_02]: But as I've gotten older, and we've talked about this a little bit in our conversations in the past that there is sort of this divine
25:48
[SPEAKER_02]: thing that as I'm getting older, I'm kind of like resigned to the fact that I can't control where the hand of God, if you will, is taking me.
26:01
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a liberating
26:06
[SPEAKER_02]: feeling because somebody who's cared so much about money and status at one point, it's still in me because the Vietnamese DNA is there.
26:18
[SPEAKER_02]: You know the way we were raised by our parents and society are our Vietnamese society, but it feels more liberating as the days go on and I'm
26:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And God could be anything, right?
26:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we're talking about just this sort of, imagine this energy, and when I hear you talk about it, it really strengthens my belief in this lack of control as artists.
26:51
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't really,
26:53
[SPEAKER_02]: have, you can't really force the work to come, can't really force the inspiration, the messaging, or any of this, it just sort of like comes into you and it's finding a way out.
27:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
27:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It's something like, I personally find it to be this balance between, quote unquote work.
27:23
[SPEAKER_00]: and inspiration or intuition.
27:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Because...
27:31
[SPEAKER_00]: for me at least like I need a mechanism for that intuition to materialize, right?
27:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I, you know, for instance, for spans of time during the year, I have a daily writing practice, you know, when I'm too busy, I put it on pause, but then I return to it and I consider it
27:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I need to write acts to get to this goal all the time, you know, and share with me the practice, if you if you're open to that.
28:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I joined this group.
28:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called the grind.
28:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a, it's just a writing accountability group where you write every day for a month, write or revise every day for a month.
28:19
[SPEAKER_00]: and you're put into these groups, these email groups of let's say six to 12 people.
28:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And some might be your friends, you can organize that, but most are strangers.
28:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And you just write something every day.
28:35
[SPEAKER_00]: and or revise something and then you just send it to each other to as a way to be like, I did it, you know?
28:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And you don't put any comments on it, you don't do any of that, it's just, I wrote today, here we are.
28:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And so for me, like, I've gone to the place where I do,
28:54
[SPEAKER_00]: When I do my daily writing, it's like, good, better ugly.
28:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like this practice so that I don't feel rusty.
29:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't feel out of touch with my intuitive self or my intuitive practices.
29:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So I feel like that's what it is.
29:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And then whatever it comes out, sometimes every once in a while, something comes that I'm like, oh, I really love that or I love what I'm building upon
29:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that might be something I save, but I don't feel like this pressure necessarily to create in that way during the creative process or the generative process.
29:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So that would be some of it.
29:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Poetry blended self to that more so than other genres, you know, I think like if you're trying to write a novel, there's the sentence writer people, you know,
29:52
[SPEAKER_00]: There's the people who write sentence by sentence and they're just trying to find what happens and they're allowing surprise to happen and then there's the plotters, you know, who have like a shape and a plot and an ending in mind.
30:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's people in between and there's so many skills that go into writing long-form prose, you know, that it might now work the same way, but for me, I find very,
30:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I find that like having just this daily poetry practice it's it's extremely satisfying I don't have it's on a control over it just whatever I listen to and live in it comes to me to some degree even though sometimes I direct I directed a little bit I'm like I actually want to write about
30:41
[SPEAKER_00]: what's happening in the world.
30:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm thinking about politics.
30:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm thinking about this.
30:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like I owe it to myself to, if I know from this like safe space to explore these difficult, these difficult questions of my life and our time, and I want to be able to have like my
31:07
[SPEAKER_02]: When we think about the Vietnamese community, there's so many conservatives and politically, you know, people on the right, a lot in America.
31:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think the younger folks, the younger Vietnamese Americans, you know, swing, move swing progressive and liberal.
31:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the artist community typically are, you know, far, left and far more progressive.
31:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's just a strange time for all of us that are in the arts because the creative community, the Vietnamese American creatives are not having a pleasant time right now.
31:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And I
31:51
[SPEAKER_02]: I try to, like, block all this stuff out so I can do my work, but it does affect me and I don't need to talk about it.
31:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I really don't get to share it with my guests or I don't have the space to talk within my family, up for obvious reasons and it gets in the way of production, you know, it gets in the way of us doing things.
32:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And here's what I think about quite often when I think
32:21
[SPEAKER_02]: things that are beyond war and pain and discomfort, or do we need this to really produce?
32:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think you have a whole generation that is gonna be coming up.
32:36
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't have that strong connection to the war in the same way.
32:41
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, their identity is not tied up to end in that fully.
32:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's, it has existed.
32:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The first Vietnamese anthology of literature, watermark came out a little over 20 years ago.
33:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was a question they posed.
33:02
[SPEAKER_00]: They were like, we want to write work that isn't about the war at all.
33:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, 20 years ago, they were posing that question.
33:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
33:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that book was about that.
33:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Or that anthology was about that.
33:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it was very much like it was Barbara Tran, Monique
33:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and there's another, I don't mean to erase it.
33:23
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think boy.
33:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh yeah.
33:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I met him during this, um, anthology reading and that was, that was a, a question they had.
33:33
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted to, topically, to be very expansive, you know, and to ask the question can't of Vietnamese artists write about anything and the answer, I think, was yes, resoundingly
33:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's a reason why Vietnamese Americans or diasporic people had written about pain and war and trauma.
33:59
[SPEAKER_00]: We dig, I mean, are people went through a lot, you know?
34:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And people want to talk about it or not talk about it.
34:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, talk about other things in different ways.
34:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it's clear to me that, you know,
34:20
[SPEAKER_00]: uh, expansive story, but our literature is very young.
34:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, we're just going to sleep.
34:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Every film that comes out, it's very new.
34:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody is like treading into a very new territory.
34:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Every time a single book comes out, or a single film, or a song comes out, it's a very new.
34:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I hate it.
34:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It was talking about the Vietnamese diasporic.
34:52
[SPEAKER_02]: I hate to say this, but God, I put this metric on everything that comes out is it war-related or not.
35:00
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I mean, that litmus test, and I have to stop that because then it becomes black and white, but I can't help it sometimes.
35:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, on one hand, I want to honor it and I want to really be somebody who listens to,
35:17
[SPEAKER_02]: the pain and suffering of our community.
35:19
[SPEAKER_02]: But at the same time, I'm like, oh my god, are we ever going to move past this?
35:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And you said, watermark 20 years ago, dealt with the same question.
35:28
[SPEAKER_02]: What about you?
35:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you think that you are entirely moving on from trauma pain or
35:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, my first book was very much about trauma pain more, you know, and I love it, you know, I love this book.
35:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel a deep connection to it because it was like a writer who really wanted to honor this set of stories and and the set of emotions and feelings that people don't always allow ourselves to feel.
36:09
[SPEAKER_00]: We're in a, you know, that book came out in 2014.
36:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And our lives are very different, you know, 2025, we're 11 years later, our lives are extremely different than they were in 2014.
36:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So there is a need, I think, for me at least, I'm not going to speak for other people entirely, but there is a need for to acknowledge our full self.
36:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So I mean, the fiction writer and visual artist, Lethie Zimfoye, she, I went to one of her readings, and she's like, I want to bring whole Vietnamese
36:49
[SPEAKER_00]: people into the room, not just our trauma.
36:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So I really took that to heart to kind of listen when my parents are telling their stories.
36:57
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not in pain, actually.
36:59
[SPEAKER_00]: 50 years after the end of the war.
37:02
[SPEAKER_00]: they are very funny.
37:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They're very joyful.
37:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think I've been playing the film at various festivals.
37:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's another film that I watched.
37:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a documentary about it's called Year of the Cat.
37:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you've watched it, but it's about
37:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Tall and easy seasons, but yeah, Tony, yes, when.
37:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Tony and when, really humorous has another generation his kids, and it's about him searching for his father.
37:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's all of it.
37:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You feel, you're on this journey with that.
37:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, main character that in is a documentary, you're on the journey with that with Tony as you move through, but there's a lot of humor, there's a lot of joy and their sadness, but it's it feel very much feels like this whole person, you know, and it has very much it's place based it's about.
38:13
[SPEAKER_00]: what it's like to grow up in the Bay Area, like of his age, the types of intonations that you have, the types of people you have in your family who are mixed race, for instance, you have like, you know, you can tell he, you know, grew up, you know, like his accent is actually like of, it's an urban accent, you know, so
38:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so there's a lot to that film that I felt like, oh, a lot of people are thinking a lot about this.
38:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what is the representation of our people and ourselves?
38:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not just all pain and trauma.
38:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And no war.
38:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It is absolutely all of it.
38:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't have more, but something in it is related to the war.
38:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's just our reality, which is, why do you have this separation between yourself and your father?
39:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would your father be in Vietnam and not in the US, right?
39:10
[SPEAKER_00]: the diasporic experience that was generated by the separation probably because of war not because of just a generalized immigration narrative.
39:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he was on a few weeks ago and beautiful story, beautiful film, light touches with heavy, heavy themes.
39:35
[SPEAKER_02]: very heavy themes of loneliness as a result of not having a father and trying to dig this information out of your mom and your mom knows something that she knows, then she doesn't want to, sounds like she doesn't want to share it, you know, and I think that that in itself is what a, you know, at the end of your the cat, you your love with
40:03
[SPEAKER_02]: such a beautiful story, life story of Tony, you know, and finding his father and, you know, and his kids are the third generation, you know, that get to kind of participate in the journey.
40:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I'm watching that, that family dynamic is very cool too, because it doesn't look like, like nothing about his relationship with his kids,
40:27
[SPEAKER_00]: looks like the relationship between my friends and their parents.
40:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's not how we talk to our parents, you know, that's not how we relate.
40:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we're, he and his kids kind of, it's like their homes.
40:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they're homes.
40:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they're equals.
40:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
40:45
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, uh, my kids call me bro because that's like the thing that's that are lingering and I think a few years ago when I had younger people, younger people like 10 years, five years younger than guys and they call me bro, I have a big problem with that.
41:01
[SPEAKER_02]: It did now my kids and when they started doing it, it was extremely uncomfortable.
41:06
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think I was like, wait, this is the reality.
41:10
[SPEAKER_02]: This is what they think it's fun and I think, but they're not calling me bro, it's just part of the thing, right?
41:18
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just the way they
41:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, yeah, I think that something you mentioned about money and status before about that being kind of Vietnamese, there's something to that.
41:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, my parents have their own version of that.
41:30
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not very money-oriented, but they still feel this obligation, for instance, like part of my mom feels shy about like going back to Vietnam.
41:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of it is just her health.
41:44
[SPEAKER_00]: She can't do it, but some of it is like this
41:49
[SPEAKER_00]: In that generation, you go to Vietnam as an elder, right?
41:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Like status wise, she's an elder, she's the oldest sibling.
41:59
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to see every single person in your family and you got to prepare money and gifts, you know?
42:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And for the her that's just a lot of work, you know, and physically she's just not able to fly anymore on that distance, but, but, you know, even my father, he's 85, if he had to speak to somebody who was of a different rank than him, even for their younger, but they're like, and older,
42:36
[SPEAKER_00]: like an older cousin, even if they're younger than him, he has to be deferential to them.
42:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he expects that from us, a kind of, so you have a very codified sense of, what it means to be respectful and filial.
42:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the U.S., actually, people don't respect their parents that much.
42:59
[SPEAKER_00]: They're always blaming their parents.
43:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know,
43:02
[SPEAKER_00]: they don't respect their grandparents very much.
43:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's a kind of way there.
43:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, you know, it's many things.
43:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just one one way is good, one way is bad, because like there is something really,
43:15
[SPEAKER_00]: There is something sad about the ways that in the US, there's an obsession with youth and a kind of discarding of elders, that doesn't necessarily happen in other places in the world where elders are really considered just treasures, or wise people who lived a full life that we should have some kind of sense of respect and enveneration for.
43:41
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the US, it's not that much.
43:42
[SPEAKER_00]: You're like, oh, you're old.
43:44
[SPEAKER_00]: There's like, there is a real, you know, ageism in this country, too.
43:50
[SPEAKER_02]: blessing and a curse, I think, the way that the United States mentality of treats elders, because we are able to buck the system and the codified way that we approach things in Asia holds us back most of the time.
44:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think as the third culture, which is like people like you and you and me were were like, okay, well, we have one foot in the old country and then one
44:20
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, the amalgamation of these two cultures, and I think our sort of like the way we live is like we take the best of for us, whatever the best of these two cultures are, but I think it's foolish to not, and it sounds weird, but I think it's foolish to not have generations living on top of each other in the same house.
44:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that it's, I mean, it's costly.
44:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't
44:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It is costly to not do it on a fundamental level.
44:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it is where the United States has this because of the ways that the nuclear family was marketed, we were marketed in the 70s and 60s, 50s, but destroyed the family structure.
45:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It also creates this kind of like,
45:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, you, everybody has to have their own house.
45:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody has to have their own car.
45:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's such a capitalist society.
45:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a product.
45:23
[SPEAKER_00]: So each house has to have X number of cars.
45:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So and then child care becomes its own industry.
45:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if, you know, when I'm in Vietnam with my auntie,
45:35
[SPEAKER_00]: She lives in the house, my uncle lives in the house, her two grown children live in the house, their wives live in the house, their kids live in the house too.
45:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what happens is you have, so they have, but there's three grandchildren in the family now.
45:54
[SPEAKER_00]: They have.
45:58
[SPEAKER_00]: to four or six, they have six adults.
46:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, adults, to help raise these three children, right?
46:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And you go wrong that way.
46:06
[SPEAKER_02]: You know what I mean?
46:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Six people raising, oh my god, that's like a fantasy for me.
46:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, yeah, no, because there's so many, there's also so many single parents, right?
46:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, yeah, you know, single parents,
46:19
[SPEAKER_00]: trying to, like, they call it solo parenting.
46:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, why is that a term that exists when, in the past, people really, and not that long ago, I'm talking about the 60s, the 70s.
46:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I was still, like, understanding or hearing the phrase, it takes a village to raise a child.
46:36
[SPEAKER_00]: these days like nobody wants anybody from the village telling them anything like to why we have depression.
46:44
[SPEAKER_02]: That's how we have depression suicide.
46:46
[SPEAKER_02]: That's how we have these high numbers of like a dissolution of society because it's true.
46:52
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just it's a savage.
46:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that the capitalist way of, you know, my mom moved in with my ex-wife and I like eight years ago.
47:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, we were raising my two kids and then my ex-wife and I had a divorce a few years ago.
47:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it's like, my mom still lives with me and then we would have these massive fights my mom and I, and she would throw it out with her siblings.
47:18
[SPEAKER_02]: I go, no, no, no, no.
47:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh-uh, from now to the day you pass away, you will always be with me because my brother lives in Vietnam.
47:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I was like, there's no way.
47:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And even now, like, when I think about like dating, it's tricky because,
47:32
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm a grown-ass man, but my mom lives with me and it's, but I think about like, wait a minute, that's perfectly fine for my culture and I should be, hopefully that's correct.
47:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
47:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
47:49
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, she has like 11, 11 siblings.
47:52
[SPEAKER_00]: We're living within a different culture.
47:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
47:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Sort of judges that very strongly.
47:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and I don't let that seep into my brain.
48:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, and how many more years does she have with us, you know, like for your dad and your mom, right?
48:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I know you don't live anywhere near your parents, but yeah, and my brother, he doesn't live near my mom, and he's been away from my mom and dad for 20 something years.
48:16
[SPEAKER_02]: How many more times does he get to see my mom, you know?
48:21
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's one of these things that are like, the return to our roots is so important.
48:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It's that when you are saying we have the best of both it's it's like it's also, you know, identity crisis as well in do the thing right because you have a foot in both types like at least our generation and we have a foot in both spaces to some degree more and one more and the other whatever, but then it's sort of you that means you're like you're wondering,
48:56
[SPEAKER_00]: how to be because you're not in one place.
49:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll just give an example.
49:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, my partner is my partner's family's from Wahaka.
49:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So his family's indigenous to that land, right?
49:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So he can go back, like,
49:15
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, who knows how many generations, you know, like, and so there's a stability in that if you are from that place and you're rooted there and
49:28
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and your, you know, their, your families there, you know, all of your families there and there's something about that that's really powerful powerful, it's becoming gentrified, you know, he also lives in the US with me and so that generates and I'm what I'm witnessing it that generates a whole set of challenges and emotions.
49:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And it could be joyful or whatever, but just like it unlocks all of these new things that don't exist without this kind of diasporic experience because if you're rooted in a place where you were born and like
50:06
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like 14 generations ago, that's where you've been, that kind of eliminates a lot of like our own questions about how do we situate ourselves because there's the whole set of traditions, customs and support systems that are already in place for you.
50:24
[SPEAKER_02]: which are obliterated for us, it's gone.
50:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, the final thing is, it's been a scam because, you know, in the 50s, there was a one in from household, one in, you could get a house, I mean, not everybody, but the middle class, you can get a house, a car and go on vacation and feel like,
50:50
[SPEAKER_00]: and retire.
50:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, they're on one income.
50:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think there are some people who could do one income, but you've got to be up or a class or you've got to live.
51:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
51:01
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got to live somewhere where housing's very cheap.
51:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's not more.
51:06
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not New York.
51:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you been to Vietnam?
51:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I have.
51:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So I, for the film for the book, I went to Vietnam to
51:18
[SPEAKER_00]: see family.
51:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And to do research, I guess I call it research, but it's research is just visiting the places and having conversations with people, including my family.
51:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So my first trip back to Vietnam to do the research for this book was 2015.
51:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I got a Jerome Foundation travel grant,
51:42
[SPEAKER_00]: visited my auntie and she told me the story about an uncle that I have that I never knew about and at that point, 2015 I was 35 years old and that was the first time I heard that essentially 1975 my grandmother was pregnant with a baby and she gave birth to this boy, this baby boy
52:12
[SPEAKER_00]: She was sick, she was unable to take care of him and nobody could take him in because it was like in the throes of wartime and so my aunt I think she was around 10 years old then and she says like I wish that I could have the baby would just kept crying and crying I didn't have milk so I can do anything if only I could have like calm this baby down then we could have kept him so that's like her.
52:39
[SPEAKER_00]: younger brother, youngest brother, right?
52:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And they didn't write his name, getting write down the name of the convent, they just gave him away.
52:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And to this day, I didn't know my mom never told me about this, like, until that moment.
52:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was kind of what going to Vietnam and doing a quote unquote research opened up.
53:00
[SPEAKER_00]: These like stories, I had no access to otherwise.
53:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Cause my mom probably didn't know either.
53:07
[SPEAKER_02]: What a painful story.
53:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It is painful.
53:11
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why it's like, we don't want to tell stories of pain or trauma, but it's part of our story, too, you know, it's not like we want, it's not like obsessively focused on it, but it's like, how can I tell, how can I not tell that story?
53:26
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's for me, how can I not tell that story, especially as a poet who is interested in moving away from spaces of
53:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, silence, you know, this is like this was silent for many years for me, at least it was undiscovered because I think my mom didn't know because she was grown by then.
53:43
[SPEAKER_00]: She was like 22 years old and she just lost a baby herself, you know.
53:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a kind of, you know, my grandmother had her when she was young because that was like, that was the mean thing then.
53:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So you could have a baby, a child he was like in her 20s and a new baby, right?
54:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, that was something that opened up during that time and
54:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like the film, like it has sadness in it, but it also has, you know, what I knew, this is the other thing.
54:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Like when I hear that story, I'm heartbroken, but the truth is our reality is much more that's 50 years ago and 50 years into the future.
54:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a different Vietnam and it's a different,
54:28
[SPEAKER_00]: situation as Vietnamese Americans.
54:31
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I mean, you know, I mean, my dad, my dad's a Trump Republican, too, you know.
54:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So, he's kind of having a good time during that time when like, you know, growing a time when like a lot of us are not having a great time, especially because, you know, Vietnamese American young people, like it is like what you said, there's a,
54:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Like a couple years ago, I read a newspaper article about how it's the most dramatic swing for I'm right left, generationally, because
55:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't really lay my parents, I mean, it is kind of, but it is also like, they live through a very murderous, like, experience of what communism looks like.
55:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So anything that sounds like social welfare communism is so scary to them because that sounds like corruption and mass death and torture.
55:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Like they're literally, you know, like, and kidnappings and all of these things.
55:36
[SPEAKER_00]: say, you know, sit you down when I have an experience that myself to sort of correct your own ideas or preconceptions.
55:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not.
55:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not gonna happen first of all because my dad's not a listener, you know, but but it's also sort of not something I have firsthand experience enough to like talk to him about yeah.
56:02
[SPEAKER_02]: There are some really kick but poets out there Vietnamese poets.
56:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Ocean Veng, Lanzung, there is wind fun.
56:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Wait my, there's you tell me about how you feel about all these poets that are making their marks out in the world today.
56:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, it's very different from 10 years ago, where we didn't find out.
56:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, tell me about how you feel about all that.
56:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
56:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It's different from 10 years ago.
56:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It's definitely different from 20 years ago.
56:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like there are poets that existed 20 years ago, Lyndon, for instance, like had been writing when I was in high school, you know.
56:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that definitely existed, but in terms of a larger body of Vietnamese American poetry, it feels very exciting to me to feel like I get to be in conversation with all of these writers
57:02
[SPEAKER_00]: are filling in the gaps where you don't feel this burden of responsibility for filling in every single thing.
57:08
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you can tell your story and you can build on each other in conversation.
57:14
[SPEAKER_00]: you can feel like, oh, like, land's book is amazing.
57:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And she definitely is doing something very, it's, I don't know, I love her, her, she talks about girlhood and a very different way than I do for instance.
57:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just love the way that she's, so, like, wonderfully defiant in her book.
57:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I think she has a poem, it's like, called Dumas, in her book.
57:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, I'll just say, like, I am very thrilled to have, like, to join in this conversation and to continue to be in the conversation with each other.
57:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Did we have a junior laureate that was Vietnamese?
58:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I did.
58:05
[SPEAKER_00]: We did.
58:06
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a youth laureate of Los Angeles, I believe, or California.
58:10
[SPEAKER_00]: California.
58:11
[SPEAKER_02]: California.
58:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
58:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so generationally, was it, she national?
58:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure, but what I'm saying is like, there's definitely like this new generation that keeps like writing into these spaces.
58:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
58:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, and often times, you poets make amazing novelists.
58:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that the ability to write these short or long sentences in a very economical way where you're really kind of like
58:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, compressing meaning and ideas into very tight spaces, help when you expand to long-form novel writing exercises, it's wonderful to see Quay Mai's books because she is originally.
59:07
[SPEAKER_02]: I think she considers herself a poet.
59:10
[SPEAKER_00]: First, she's definitely a novelist, but she
59:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you know, Kathy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your, you know, it's important that people in the audience get to know who the Vietnamese creatives are, especially poets and people who have who are processing these ideas of cultural identity, it's really important for all of us to get to know you.
59:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thank you so much for making the time and chatting with me.
59:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm really grateful for this space.
59:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And thank you for chatting with so many Viet folks just to have this diverse set of conversations.
1:00:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really wonderful.
1:00:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
1:00:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And how can we see we were the scenery here in the short film right now, we were the scenery is part of the Sundance Film Festival tour, short film tour.
1:00:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So it is touring the country at various places and you can check out my website, CathyLinjay.com for slash events.
1:00:26
[SPEAKER_00]: You can also follow me on
1:00:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm still on Instagram at Kathy Lynch and Kathy.l.j on Facebook.
1:00:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess I have a blue sky as well, but those are the main ways just follow and you'll get updates on it's to how you can see it.
1:00:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Because right now it's still on the festival circuit as well as you know coming to various screenings across the country.
1:00:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much Kathy.
1:00:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much, Kenneth.