Now What?

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Dear Viv,

I’m not sure how much you remember about the harsh summer’s day when we strolled, talked and thought along the edge of Lake Burley Griffin. Just before you boarded the train back to Sydney, I blurted, ‘It was always going to be good, wasn’t it?’

Was our initial encounter enjoyable and enriching? And was it always going to be?

For me, the answer to the first question is ‘very much so’. At the time, I would have also answered ‘yes’ to the inevitability of our mateship, largely because we’re both Vietnamese Australians who are into stories and philosophy, and who gravitate towards oddballs and outcasts.

Though upon reflection, I’m not so sure about my answer to the second question because I’d like to think nothing is inevitable. Fate can be such a bummer. I’m thinking of the epic poem about the star-crossed Kiều and how, in submitting to fate rather than choosing justice, opportunity, and love, she screws herself over time and again.

But more importantly, now that we’ve shared adventures, work, meals, and appeared on stage and in seminars together, I reckon I was wrong to assume that we’d get on because we are outwardly similar. For me, it’s our deep differences and distinctive approaches to writing and thinking that have made our relationship so rewarding.

So too I appreciate how you slide sticks of dynamite into the walls that I’ve built around being Vietnamese Australian.

From, Kimbo.

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Hế lô Viv,

That’s what I meant by you blowing up my preconceptions. I raise fate in The Tale of Kiều and you throw down the dynamic between predestination and free will in P.G. Wodehouse’s oeuvre.

You’ve helped me see that to fixate on form and fiftieth anniversaries is to view events as hurtling towards a predestined point, and to risk overlooking the exquisite details that make up a scene and moment. I wonder if, when we grasp those details and allow the story to sing, the plot then takes care of itself?

I should let you know that when James at the SRB suggested we discuss Vietnamese Australian writing, my immediate reaction was ‘no way’. I wasn’t sure if I had read enough or knew enough.

It’s since occurred to me that I have consumed just about every Viet Aussie memoir: from Anh Do’s The Happiest Refugee to Hung Le’s The Crappiest Refugee; from Cat-Thao Nguyen’s We Are Here to Tracy Vo’s Small Bamboo. For a quarter of a century, I’ve sought out these stories, probably because I’ve never belonged to a tight-knit Vietnamese community in Canberra. Perhaps in them I sought my tribe.

However, my reluctance to discuss Vietnamese Australian writing relates more to my growing discomfort with it. Particularly, its preoccupation with gratitude: first, to Australia; and secondly, to the post-1975 Vietnamese refugee generation. This preoccupation is right there in the title of the biography I wrote about my parents, Where the Sea Takes Us: A Vietnamese Australian Story. I was uneasy with the title from the start, but couldn’t come up with anything better. So when the book went to print, I readily accepted what the publisher devised.

In a way, this worked because it reaffirmed the idea that Indochinese boat people were driven into the seas by their conflict and poverty. It praised Australia for saving and redeeming us. And by projecting us as innocent and helpless, the book countered long held fears of yellow perils, along with more recent but related compulsions to ‘Stop the boats!’ What the title ‘Where the Sea Takes Us’ doesn’t do so well is capture the gusto, wit, and wonder of being Vietnamese, and of being a boat person. I hope the story isn’t so flawed.

I want to be clear, Australia did save my family. And I am grateful to many folks, especially in my hometown of Canberra. But increasingly, I struggle to reconcile that with the realities of colonialism. More specifically, recognising the dispossession, killing, devastation, and industrial scale theft that the French, Japanese, Americans, Chinese, and others inflicted on Indochina disrupts the hell out of what being Vietnamese Australian means to me. It messes with the idea that we Vietnamese were conflict-ridden and poor because there was something wrong with us. It upends the narrative that we were lucky to escape our fated homelands and should be forever thankful to be resettled in generous countries like the US, France, and Australia.

In the TV series, Anh Does Vietnam, Anh Do returns to his birthplace to ask, ‘What would life be like if I never left?’ I’ve often asked that too. Perhaps, though, we should also ask what our lives would have been like if the colonisers had never left their shores, or had done so with more noble intent and to less destructive effect? Add to that First Peoples’ enduring sovereignty and you can see why I’m struggling so much with questions of gratitude and acknowledgement.

This is one reason why your novel, The Coconut Children, is so vivid and valuable. It’s a Vietnamese Australian story that’s not so weighed down by angst and obligation. As they make their way through 1990s Cabramatta and Australia, your characters are, rightfully, anything but grateful. They don’t aspire to be congenial members of a society that’s geared against them.

Especially disruptive is the father figure who cannot let go of his boat journey – not because of the horror, but rather, because of the thrill. The thrill of being marooned, of facing a storm, of being free. To be sure, he’s awfully screwed up, but I suspect this is in part because nothing in his new home – including his family – can match being in exile.

Much respect, Kim.

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Dear Kim,

Thank you for the beautiful email. The kind of gratitude you’ve mentioned never came naturally to me, though that was my mum’s aim. I grew up knowing vaguely, and then all at once, what my dad had gone through as a teenager in 1977. Not only the fateful escape and the gunshots that peppered the beach that night, but the months of planning: secret rendezvous to determine boat-building logistics, organisers running off with people’s life savings, learning how to swim in the same rivers used for washing clothes and defecating. At the dinner table, my mum sequenced the events of my dad’s refugee journey into a parable about hunger to make sure we’d never leave any rice in our bowls. But the moral of the story was disrupted by the why of it all; it didn’t make sense to me that I was inheriting a childhood, an unbombed school, and dinners you didn’t have to fish for at what seemed to be my father’s expense. What made me worthy of this? What made him unworthy? I ate every grain of gratitude unwillingly and grew up on the fat of resentment.

Perhaps refugees and children of refugees who became doctors and business owners have more use for gratitude, or its performance. It dramatises the rags-to-riches story and reaffirms a sense of belonging to golden-soil-and-wealth-for-toil Australia. For me, and perhaps for every generation of Vietnamese writers in the post-1975 diaspora – that nebulous cloud-mass – there has been a struggle to maintain equilibrium between paying tribute to the people and stories that brought us here, and not letting our own bitterness belittle us. Like you said, the pain of the refugee reaffirms the salvation of the open-armed settler society, farcically good-willed and generous with stolen land. In typical Kim fashion, you’ve bravely and humbly talked about all of this through the flawed assumptions bound up in your book’s title; those assumptions weren’t only yours and your publishers’, they spoke to an Australian public plagued by a saviour complex.

In recent years, I’ve wondered if Vietnamese artists’ struggle with bitterness has become a question of aesthetics; namely, how do we make our conundrums palatable to the white settler society to which each of us, in various degrees, kowtow? Western Sydney is as much a setting as a character (or caricature) in dramatising these conundrums. I mean the Western Sydney you get in literature, theatre, and film that portrays suburban life – post-war, post-trauma, post-mother-country – as something bleak and unliveable, capable of meaning only when a character is suffering. Many such characters exist in experimental theatre productions and writing anthologies centred on violence, substance abuse, and sexual encounters in ‘culturally diverse Western Sydney’. To name them would be to risk pushing over the edge artists who already exist on a precipice, but this lurid aesthetic and its repertoire of characters whose interiority can only be represented through suffering are widespread. We should distrust any piece of art that makes no room for the possibility of joy.

In the Vietnamese world outside of Vietnam and unconnected to Western Sydney, André Dao’s Anam and Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem give readers an awareness of the effect of several histories of colonisation on the Vietnamese self, and a superbly speculative vocabulary of self-consciousness. Still, I find myself wondering about the problem of power and who might benefit when we write about our lives and bodies so abstractly. I often think of Jumaana Abdu’s ‘A Manifesto for the “Diverse” Writer’, where the question is posed: ‘Who profits when you are paid because your identity is recognised as a viable commodity?’

In the introduction to Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin writes of Paris, Spain, Corsica, and Scandinavia as illusory havens from the problem of colour in an America deeply entrenched in the Civil Rights Movement. This was 1961, eight years before the assassination of Fred Hampton, four before Malcolm X, three before Medgar Evers. Baldwin says, ‘Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. It turned out that the question of who I was was not solved because I had removed myself from the social forces which menaced me – anyway, these forces had become interior, and I had dragged them across the ocean with me.’

The current state of Vietnamese Australian diasporic writing seems to me concerned with afflictions and crutches, and questions dragged across the ocean like socks filled with water. I have at times been irreverent in my writing towards the figure of the refugee. It is hard not to when I call that elusive figure ‘father’. And it did not necessarily get easier when I had to run away from home. In The Coconut Children, as you point out, Sonny’s refugee father is a solipsist nostalgic for his exile from a youth he barely survived. Sonny’s mother does not exist outside of the domestic margins of her dysfunctional household – there is a scene of her cleaning ants from a jar of rock sugar in the backyard, and that is as far as we go. Vince’s father is a violent drunk, Vince’s mother is soft-hearted and ultimately useless. The story’s only hope is in the children, and what limited futures they can dream up for their elders.

My position on the irredeemable refugee parent has shifted since meeting you. I know now that my own parents weren’t bad parents because of the terrible experiences they’d gone through. They were just your standard bad parents with terrible experiences to boot. I struggled to understand that for the longest time, reconciling the epic and heroic refugee with the flawed, withered person forever in exile. Then I met you and could only marvel as you spoke with humour and ordinariness about the very things I was taught to worship. I continue to watch you manage humility and genuine connection in every grand thing you do.

Lạ gì thanh khí lẽ hằng,
Một dây một buộc ai giằng cho ra

Of course, when two kin spirits meet, one tie
soon binds them in a knot none can yank loose.

It’s nice to have elders, even ones that live in Canberra.

Love,
Viv

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G’day V,

What should a twenty-first-century Vietnamese Australian aesthetic look like?

I’m quite sure it won’t come from me. That desire of the refugee generation to be free from afflictions, the crutch that is their sacrifice, and the obligation to be an ambassador for their suffering – these are all part of me as a member of the 1.5 generation. Which is okay.

It’s okay because I know that you understand.

It’s okay because the twentieth-century wave of memoirs and family histories justifying our presence in Australia has dissipated. Now writers like you, Joey Bui, Shirley Le, Annabella and Antoinette Luu, Kim Pham, and Sheila Pham are crafting fiction, zines, poems, essays, and scripts that do not seek to belong but rather to challenge and broaden what belonging means.

And it’s okay because I’m reacquainting myself with my parents’ generation, many of whom have reached their one hundred years (that Vietnamese euphemism for dying). As you know, I’ve been caring for my old man after he had a stroke. He also has cognitive issues, cancer, vision and hearing impairments, and chronic insomnia from when we fled Vietnam. Otherwise, he’s doing great!

And, in a way, I am too because many of our hangups and filters are falling away, allowing us to have a relationship that’s unmediated by duty. Confronting my father’s present vulnerabilities has compelled us to address more established ones associated with war, displacement, and resettlement. We do this during slow walks, games of table tennis, and long drives that alleviate stresses arising from his violent history and from my middle-aged middle-class life.

Filial piety and karmic merit don’t capture what’s going on between my old man and me. They are, however, nestled in what he once said as I helped him bathe, ‘You’re doing for me what I did for you.’ He said this with a fair dollop of irony. But I receive it as a statement of fact and attribution of honour.

Onwards, K.

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Hello!

I have no idea.

About much, but particularly what a twenty-first-century Vietnamese Australian aesthetic might or should look like. I do see a move away from Diasporic Literature’s tendency towards self-destruction and solipsism. Too often when this tendency takes root, the resulting work itself embodies the intersections of violence placed on the diasporic subject. Ocean Vuong sees obliteration as part of his poetic practice: ‘I’m interested in what happens when form collapses, when it hits the point where it obliterates itself and yet it has to continue. My question for myself as an artist is: Now what? How will you honor total obliteration and still have a life to work with?’

I think the crucial part of that extract from Ocean is the imperative of ‘still hav[ing] a life’. To be an artist is to continually outgrow the story of yourself, to find new ways of articulating your survival. In a similar way, to live in the aftermath of traumatic events is often to narrativise moments which fractured you, and yet to attempt wholeness through this act of recounting. After all, we are writing to each other here and now to commemorate what, for many in our parents’ generation, represents the anniversary of the loss of a nation. If, as José Carlos Mariátegui wrote, ‘The nation itself is an abstraction, an allegory, a myth that does not correspond to a reality that can be scientifically defined’, then all our attempts at writing have been to replace this one lost myth with disjointed others. Perhaps this is our way of saying to our parents, ‘I’m doing for you what you did for me.’ The son washes the father and writes stories he may never read.

Perhaps one of the answers to your question is: a Vietnamese Australian aesthetic that negotiates how writing responds to, or resists, or that somehow creates [something] out of obliteration – instead of one that not only takes fragmented experience as a matter of course, but romanticises the fragments. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the words of the martyred Palestinian writer and activist, Basel al-Araj: ‘Why do we go to war? We go to it looking for romance. The romance of war, that creates a new type of human, for no one stays the same after experiencing war. We chase this romance, and nothing ignites romance more than war.’ He was talking here about the romantic ideals of heroism and martyrdom, which also preoccupy the imagination of the refugee figure. When al-Araj mentions this ‘new type of human’, is he speaking about us, too? Having survived a war, are we still recovering from its romanticism?

Perhaps the answer to your question is simply Ocean’s question:

‘Now what?’

Anyway, myths and obliteration aside, how is Dad? And what about your mum?

All my love, Viv

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Dear Vivian,

My response to you and your offerings is my response to those who ask how my new house is going six months after we moved, ‘I’m still unpacking!’

Lemme try to bring together states of obliteration, national mythmaking, refugee parents, and ‘now what?’ by drawing upon a neoconservative view of how Plato approached gods, ‘We do not love them because they’re good; they’re good because we love them.’

This line is detestable because it says that at the core of our beliefs and identities there is, at most, nothing. This absence of goodness, or anything else, is not benign. From it, there often ensues grave wrongdoing: crimes of betrayal and dispossession upon which clans, nations, and civilizations are founded – I’m thinking of Vietnam’s nam tiến (southward advance), terra nullius, Cain and Abel. This line of thinking (associated, in my academic field of politics, with Straussian neoconservatism) then becomes even more detestable, asserting that instead of outing and coming to grips with our complicity in these foundational crimes, we should perpetuate them through acts of obfuscation and esteem. We must invest in our families, faiths and countries, for no other reason than that they are ours.

But I cherish this line too. Because it reminds me that, within limits, love is what we make of it. So while there might not be anything intrinsically good about being Vietnamese Australian (there might not be anything intrinsic), that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make something of it that is love-worthy.

Speaking of which, let me tell you about Mum. I’m prone to take her for granted because she’s always there. Even more so now that she must turn up for my father all day and several times a night to quell the unease that escapes from his dreams and to help him to the bathroom.

Allow me to pay tribute to her as another example of the refugee, highlighting her ingenuity, her ‘makeshiftiness’. It was evident in the camp in which we subsisted for much of 1979, where she fashioned a lamp out of coke can, kerosene, and a loose thread from my father’s shorts.

And it’s evident today as I turn in my chair to look at my father’s. Dad has terrible allergies (another Canberra thing), which means that there are tissue boxes littered all over our house. And yet he still searches for them. Pay attention, then, to my Mum’s attentiveness in devising this tissue box holder from trackie-dack elastic. Note the angle that she leaves the chair in so that my father can sit with relative ease. And consider how at mealtimes we appeal to my old man at the head of the table for tissues so that he knows he’s still needed. It makes me wonder at the power my mum orchestrates while never being centre stage. And when Mum says of looking after Dad, ‘I was always meant to do this’, I wonder whether fate really is such a bummer.

Allow me to set out what I treasure most about our exchanges in literature and in life.

I respect how you listen and bear witness to others. This is at once a personal and professional quality that helps you to generate ideas, form characters, and build worlds. I have seen you in action in the company of gangsters in their hideouts, lounging beside a two-star hotel swimming pool, and fine-dining with tedious cultural and political icons. In your encounters you never cut in, hold back, or feign interest. You trust people to tell their stories.

So too, you trust readers to complete the text. I used to think that writers fill pages with words, musicians fill silence with sounds, and artists fill gaps in our consciousness with meaning. After hanging out with you, my sense is that artistry is more about creating spaces that folks can come to occupy and duly regard as their own.

I have learnt much from the highly attuned way that you edit my work and the work of other students and authors. When we deploy ‘constructive criticism’ in my academic life, the adjective commonly veils the nastiness and egotism that we inject into the noun. In contrast, you highlight what’s detailed and authentic, tease out what’s obscure and worth developing, and offer quotes that demand reflection and discussion, all of which is evident in our emails.

Given the good times we’ve shared, I’d like to sign off for now by considering whether there’s a distinctive joy about our relationship and about being Vietnamese Australian. Looking back to the refugee generation, they and we too often regard joy as unmerited and unbecoming. As you’ve suggested, it is either sifted through suffering and sacrifice or suppressed altogether.

There’s something radical, then, about me admitting to you that I adore being Vietnamese Australian.

I adore kitsch lunar new year calendars that display both the lunar and solar dates which means that you never quite know what day it is. I appreciate that there’s not really a Vietnamese word for ‘kitsch’. I can’t get enough of our thập cẩm mixed-up identity. It’s like a sâm bổ lượng drink, packed full of treasures, which you can sip, swig, stir, and just peer into. Or it’s like when a loved one carefully cuts and offers you a slice of guava or green mango, to which you cry out, ‘Where’s the salt and chilli?’ It’s the freedom to wear pajamas with thongs. In public, yet beyond the range of tour buses. Experiences by us, for us. Free for now from the ogling gaze.

What do you reckon?

Kimbo.

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Kim,

Let’s call it what it was: a motel. And it’s one of my favourite places in Cabramatta now thanks to our meditations. The level of the pool called to mind the popular insistence to see glasses as half-full.

Love is what we make of it, and sometimes love inspires us to craft brilliant tissue box holders out of things we refuse to throw away. I love your analysis of the chair’s angle and the important duty of dispensing tissues during meals. I’m sure Mum’s resourcefulness and care colour every corner of the house! I remember listening to you speak about her last August at the Institute of Culture and Society. How her talents and intelligences made light work of the domestic and the spiritual, how these realms coexist forever in the Vietnamese home, how honouring ancestors at a death anniversary requires reverence in the form of elaborate cooking. Remembering what the deceased loved to eat in life and making an altar at the dinner table for the living to remember, to eat and think of a spirit’s belly being filled. I’d never seen Vietnamese women celebrated so thoroughly in any public forum.

My sister Kim has become the matriarch in our little three-person, three-dog apartment. She’s a kitchen god (have you seen the Stephen Chow movie?) and the one responsible for learning dishes we were never taught to make, and somehow transcending our memory of what it tasted like in childhood. Her most recent experiment was bún thịt nướng, and it befuddles me how cooks like Kim can recreate a dish, extracting the bad memories and distilling the good till all that remains is simple nourishment. It must be difficult being a matriarch, but the women in our lives have found a way. Just getting to exist alongside them makes the rest of life seem suddenly redeemable.

I love cracking apart avocados with my sister and blending them with ice and condensed milk. Well, I enjoy watching her do it and sometimes being gracious enough to wash the blender. I love being told by Vietnamese aunties that I speak like I’m a character in a Kiếm Hiệp drama – a breath-filled testament to a childhood of watching Vietnamese-dubbed Cantonese dramas. I love not knowing whether to thank my mother or TVB for being the reason I can speak Vietnamese, for giving me enough language to flood the mouth, and for the hunger, so much hunger, to become something larger than what we’d lost.

Hi vọng chúng ta sẽ luôn có lý do để biết ơn nhau.

Love,
Viv