Asian Writers in North America: Vietnam

Ocean Vuong, a 33-year-old Vietnamese poet, said he envied Asians who grew up in California. Growing up in New England on the east coast, he didn't drink bubble tea for the first time until he was 29 years old because of the overwhelming majority of local whites and the lack of an Asian diet.

The audience laughed after hearing this. The host asked: How many Asian Americans are there from California? Many people raised their hands. Ocean Vuong sighs, you guys are so lucky.

It was the first time I participated in an offline book talk after the epidemic, and the experience was many times better than the Zoom event. It is possible to see up close the modal demeanor of a writer, listening to the breaths and pauses between his reading lines. More importantly, surrounded by young literary and artistic young people with similar reading tastes, they suddenly felt that the city they lived in was no longer so boring.

After living in the United States for a few years, my sense of identity slowly awakened, and I began to pay attention to the group of Asian writers. Also because this group is constantly emerging with new authors and good works, I want to make a list and expand my reading list.

Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong's family was not part of a wave of immigrants that followed the fall of Saigon, but came to the United States a little later in the early 1990s. His mother was a mixed-race child born to an American soldier and a Vietnamese woman. She was ostracized and discriminated against in Vietnam, so he took him away when Ocean Vuong was two years old. He fled from Vietnam to the United States via the Philippines, and settled in a white town in Connecticut. Open a nail salon. He was also later reunited with his grandfather in America.

The name Ocean was given by his mother. His mother learned the word Ocean by accident, and felt that the ocean connects the United States and his hometown of Vietnam, so he named him this English name. Vuong's pronunciation is similar to "Wang". When Taiwan introduced his book, his name was homophonic "Wang Ouhang". Although the word is not correct, it also has the image of seagulls flying over the ocean, which is said to have been recognized by me.

His creations are all about war, motherhood, as well as his Asian immigrant and LGBTQ identities. In addition to the newly published poetry collection Time is a Mother in 2022, there are also the 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and the 2016 poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds . The Taiwan-translated version of his novel is called "This Life, You and I Are Short and Bright". This novel has also been adapted into a movie by A24 and is expected to be released in 2024.

Among his works, there is a short poem that I like very much, like a rant to himself, called Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong.

The beginning is powerful:

Ocean, don't be afraid.

The end of the road is so far ahead

it is already behind us.

This passage also makes my scalp tingle:

Here's today. Jump. I promise it's not

a lifeboat. Here's the man

whose arms are wide enough to gather

your leaving.

And this paragraph:

Don't be afraid, the gunfire

is only the sound of people

trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,

get up. The most beautiful part of your body

is where it's headed.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen is probably the most well-known Vietnamese writer in North America right now. He was born in literature and ethnology and now teaches at the University of Southern California. In fact, he entered the literary world relatively late. At the age of 44, he published his first novel The Sympathizer ("The Sympathizer"), but he won the Pulitzer Prize in one fell swoop and became famous.

In terms of age, he is a generation older than Ocean Vuong, a refugee who came to the United States after the fall of Saigon in the 1970s. His novel tells the story of a North Vietnamese spy lurking in South Vietnam, whose own family is from North Vietnam and who moved to South Vietnam before fleeing to the United States. In the novel, the Viet Cong occupied Saigon in 1975, the US military retreated, and the protagonist fled to the United States. He continued espionage work in the United States and reported the enemy's situation to North Vietnam. Torture—for compatriots far away in Vietnam, for Vietnamese refugees in the United States, for soldiers in South Vietnam, and for comrades in North Vietnam—all produced genuine sympathy and empathy.

The first sentence of the novel reads:

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.

For a while I really enjoyed going to Eden Center, a Vietnamese town outside Washington. This place is close to the U.S. military base in Virginia. It was the first place for many Vietnamese refugees back then. They stayed here first, and then moved to other parts of the United States to settle down. Many people also took root here. (The same is true for Afghan refugees in 2021. They will settle here first, and then go to various states in the United States.) The American flag and the South Vietnamese flag are hung in front of the gate of Eden Center. The main building is also very similar to the Ben Thanh Market in Saigon. Hometown love. It is said that this Vietnam Town first started as a grocery store called Vietnam Center, which was opened by the Vietnamese wife of a CIA employee, selling fish sauce, rice paper and Vietnamese coffee. Perhaps, perhaps, there have been many legends similar to The Sympathizer here.

In fact, Sympathy in English not only means sympathy, but also empathy and resonance, understanding between people, or common feeling. Reading Ocean Vuong's poems, I often misplace it in the current battlefield of Ukraine. He wrote that his mother could not bear the sudden noise, because like a cannonball, the war had already "lived" in her body and mind and never left. I imagined those Ukrainian mothers who fled with their children. Reading The Sympathizer, I think of a lot of people who left China, people who left Hong Kong, people who pretend to be asleep but often come back in the middle of the night.