Vietnamese is a very poetic language, it’s incredibly beautiful. It’s so tender, Vietnamese, there are certain words that I just love… and I feel like shouldn’t be in a book, even, because it’s so beautiful. I do feel, however, that there is a lot of the Vietnamese language in my writing. It’s just invisible. ... It has my…somatic system of Vietnamese-ness embedded within, between each word of the English word, or between the letters of that English word, that when people read it, [they think] ‘oh your work is really strange and poetic’. I don’t think it’s strange and poetic. I think it’s because I lived in Vietnam, I was an immigrant, we were refugees… When I read my work I’m like, this is so Vietnamese, but it doesn’t look like Vietnamese, it doesn’t even sound like Vietnamese… but there is a phantom (I think) sonic volume that is…quiet and silence… And I want to say that silence, that invisibility, is very Vietnamese.