AWP 2019: “Vietnam is a 7-Letter Word”
Five members of She Who Has No Master(s) presented as a panel of Vietnamese women writers at AWP 2019 in Portland, Oregon. Anna Maria Hong wrote this review of the panel event for Jacket2.org:
“On the Thursday of the AWP Conference in Portland, OR, I skipped the long line for badges and made my way through the throngs of people chatting, milling purposefully, and sitting and sipping decent coffee along the corridor floors of the Oregon Convention Center to a panel titled “Vietnam is a Seven-Letter Word.” I was familiar with some of the writers presenting but not all of them, and I was intrigued by the description, which noted that “women of the Vietnamese diaspora [would] offer insight into how writers may elasticize and complicate definitions of one’s various assigned ‘identities’ and lend voice to the silenced, obscured, or overlooked.”
About fifty people were seated around the nondescript, medium-sized room as I arrived, and the moderator Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen, the poet, community artist, and editor of AS IS: A Collection of Visual and Literary Works by Vietnamese American Artists, finished introducing the other four panelists. Aimee Phan started off the presentations by reading from her novel-in-progress, a follow-up to her debut novel, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, which weaves together intergenerational stories taking place in Vietnam, France, and the US. She read a scene in which a pianist wanting to conceive a child with her husband, a political prisoner, and a lab tech converse in a tense discussion. The Providence-based poet Stacey Tran read next, reading imagistic lyrics focusing on food and familial relations from her first full-length collection, Soap for the Dogs.
The Portland-based, hybrid-media artist Dao Strom then read from her bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, syncing her reading with the projection of black-and-white images from the book on a small screen mounted on the wall above the panelists. The images were informed by inherited war memories and recollections of childhood: a helicopter in the sky, waves in an inverted triangle. Strom noted that the book was partly an investigation of the psychological difficulties of leavings and returns, drawing upon her parents’ stories. Her mother was a refugee from Vietnam due to the war who was unable to return to Vietnam until recently due to personal and political factors, and her father grew up in Denmark during World War II and never returned there by choice.
Thi Bui concluded the presentations by reading and showing of excerpts from her illustrated memoir The Best We Could Do, which tells the story of her family’s journey from South Vietnam after its fall in the 1970s and the challenges of establishing lives in the US. “It’s a graphic memoir,” said Bui wryly, “which as my mother says, makes it 99 percent true.”
Due to technical difficulties, the panelists had to crowd around a single laptop at the podium where they cheerfully read a scene taking place in 1955, in a “South Vietnam that no longer exists” as Bui noted. The scene occurs during the end of the French occupation of South Vietnam and the mass exodus from the North to the South, when Bui’s father was fourteen years old, and each of the writers voiced the dialogue of several family members, as panels from the graphic memoir projected on the small screen above them. The presentation ended with an audio recording of Walter Cronkite narrating a documentary on the Vietnam War.
The Q&A portion of the panel began with Nguyen asking, “Given the need to elasticize Vietnamese diasporic identities, how do you use craft to resist and reorient narratives?” ...
[read the whole review here]
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