This book almost wasn’t published. I was a writer at the beginning of my career, in the mid-2000s, whose first novel had been released as a paperback original on an imprint of a major New York publishing house. The expectation was that my second manuscript (a two-book contract) would be a novel, to be published as part of the publisher’s main catalog, as a hardcover release and at a higher profile than my first. However, when I turned in the second manuscript I’d written, four novellas about four women, they decided against publishing it. I was asked to repay a percentage of the advance money, and my agent and I took back the manuscript and restarted the search for a new publisher. It was summer 2004 when we began this search. The book in its final form, as The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, eventually found its home with Counterpoint Press in early 2005.
While I wholly accept the reasons why the first publisher decided this manuscript didn’t fit in their catalog—among those (as cited) the interiority of the writing and its absence of plot—I also believe another reason this manuscript may’ve struck editors (especially more than a decade ago) as having too obscure a potential for readership may’ve had something to do with narrative scarcity.1
I might here mention that I am a woman writer of Vietnamese descent. I was born in Vietnam and fled as a refugee (as an infant, with my mother) in 1975, at the Fall of Saigon. I grew up—with no memories whatsoever of Vietnam—in a small northern California town, in a family of mixed-cultural makeup: my mother remarried a Danish American immigrant, and we spent our family years in a rural, mostly white and conservative, community. The generational label given to people like me is an in-between moniker: the “1.5 generation.” Our bodies have experienced the physical passage and potential trauma of displacement, yet we are not identified, as strongly as our elders, with the originating culture or geography. For many of us who landed in the West as young children, we are likely to have grown up more influenced by (and trying to assimilate into) the diasporic land’s culture and customs, while also conscious of our not fully belonging—in either direction. Needless to say, growing up I encountered no literature or media that portrayed lives like my own. At the same time I inhabited the same cultural landscape recognizable to many Americans.
In graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I recall one instructor theorizing about “ethnic” American literature. She said the first generation of published writers from any marginalized group would be tasked with the work of laying out the context of that group’s history; that it would not be until a historical context was established that subsequent generations of writers could be more free to experiment with form (and, in effect, to write as they pleased—which could also then include not addressing said historical context at all). I might agree with this theory, to an extent, at the same time wishing to push against it.
In the mid-1990s to early 2000s, when I was first beginning my writing career aspirations, it’s true there were only a handful of diasporic Vietnamese authors’ names circulating. I had encountered Lan Cao, Linh Dinh, Le Ly Hayslip, translations of Nguyen Huy Thiep (this last technically not diasporic). In 1998 an anthology, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, was published by the then-nascent Asian American Writers’ Workshop, edited by Barbara Tran, Monique Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi. This anthology (which included two of my short stories) was one of my first exposures to diasporic voices closer to my own age group and “1.5 generation” experience. But it was not until Andrew X. Pham’s memoir Catfish and Mandala (2000) that I first saw a Vietnamese diasporic voice appear in long-book form, backed by a major publisher. It felt momentous (at least to me), in 2003, when three Vietnamese American women authors’ debut books came out all in the same year: Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and my own first book, Grass Roof, Tin Roof. My mother, as a writer in Saigon pre-1975, had been a “pioneer” of sorts in her own milieu, and I felt like I was following in her footsteps, maybe, just a little. But I must acknowledge that of course there were always others before us.
In numbers, this still amounted to relatively few diasporic Vietnamese writers tasked with—or granted opportunity to participate in—the so-called setting of historical context or defining our cultural experience, as of the early 2000s. And, as Chimamanda Adichie has since so eloquently put it, there is danger in having only “a single story” about any group of people. This single-story status is arrived at largely due to the question of power—who decides which and how many stories are let through the gates, into a field of public visibility—and white Americans in the publishing industry have long been the ones responsible for opening those gates or not. For Vietnamese Americans, I would argue the single story so far defining us has to do with war, refugeehood, our debt to America (or America’s debt to us), and is limited, at times, by being able to perceive us only insofar as we also define ourselves by those circumstances: our displacement, entry, and assimilation narratives—which are also, and yet, war/colonialism/imperialism-consequent narratives. By this I mean that, although concerned with consequences suffered by emigrant/immigrant/refugee populations (affected by world-political events America has played part in), these are narratives still hinged—especially in the case of Vietnam—on the centralizing subject of American power and conscience, both its capacities and its perils. While this is all undoubtedly crucial territory to engage, in a world where there exists narrative plenitude, there would also exist permission for many, and any, types of stories, a multiplicity of perspectives to portray a given group of people. We would (and should) be able to define (and un-define) ourselves on our own terms. In narrative plenitude there would exist space for our war and refugee stories, alongside our postwar, pre-war, beyond-war, aside-from-war, and war-irrelevant/irreverent stories, our direct and oblique approaches to subject matter, our aesthetic experiments and our conventional narratives, our loud stories and our quieter ones.
The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys was published for the first time in 2006. It had a small reception at best, some praise, some criticism, and went largely unnoticed. I was still pleased with this, and with the book itself, grateful just to have it in the world especially after its rocky start. I would not publish another book until 2015. This was not for lack of trying but was also in line with my creative development in that period, which was leading me—beyond fiction—toward a more hybrid literary expression, to integrate poetic, musical, and visual instincts, as well as the collaborative, the multi-voiced.
I want to digress, just slightly here, to talk a little about the influence of my mother.
My mother, especially by traditional Vietnamese standards, was and is a fairly radical woman. A “different” kind of mother and woman than most others, as asserted by aunts and my mother’s friends over the years. Although I’ve not been able to read her stories in their original form, in Vietamese language, growing up I always knew the story of her as a writer and journalist. So I understood this about her, or had at least this lens to apply when trying to understand her. I understood this was why she pushed intellect forward as the aspect she wished to be both judged and loved by; I also understood, at fourteen, when she first told me I shouldn’t have children if I wanted a career (even suggesting hysterectomy as a form of birth control), not to take it too personally. That she was just trying to tell me, or warn me, the possible way of the world for women like us. Inadvertently, she was my first writing mentor.
And, while the most visible representation of Vietnamese womanhood—for white mainstream America, that is, and especially in the eighties and nineties (the era of my coming-of-age in America)—may’ve resembled something more like the “fallen” yet virtuous, self-sacrificing, tragic bar girl character in Miss Saigon (not to mention other victimized and hyper-sexualized depictions of Asian female bodies in American cinema), for myself the probable “story” of Vietnamese womanhood, as conveyed first through my mother, then through many other Vietnamese women I’ve since met, is a much more complicated, thorny, heady, contradictory, and un-frameable portrait, and one also still marked, to degrees, by [her] sexuality—the consequences, violations, empowerments, entrapments, and portrayals of it. The feminine—on both shores—appears as something others—male-dominated power structures, that is—feel the need to control or condemn. As just one example: after 1975, my mother’s books were banned by the Vietnamese communist government, due to their “decadent” nature. To give some explanation of what “decadent” means in this context, I turn to the two (in English) sources I’ve encountered that mention my mother’s work as a writer. One is from an essay in a journal out of Yale University, Vietnam Forum,2 from 1987, in which the essayist describes my mother’s fiction as bearing a “cool description of woman’s very human sexuality,” and this sexual content being “a slap in the face of an ethical system that has attached a strong stigma to such sexuality and has relied on a narrow concept of chastity to evaluate women and hinder their total development as human beings.” My mother shared this essay with me when I was an MFA student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where in the Iowa City public library I also found—for the first time ever—one of my mother’s books. (I still recall the strangeness of recognizing her pen name—Trùng Dương—on the spine in the foreign-language section of a library in the middle of Iowa.) I quote the term “decadent” from the second source, an Encyclopedia of Censorship,3 which lists censorship parameters for South Vietnamese literature (among other countries’ literatures). The term “decadent” appears in
Category B: works considered as decadent by the authorities. Vietnamese authors, often women such as Tuy Hong and Trung Duong, whose works featured reasonably explicit sex or dealt with otherwise taboo sexual topics and were as such judged indecent and immoral.
I venture that my mother may not have considered her “sexual topics” to be “taboo” so much as rooted, rather, in the realistic: fiction based on the experiences of real women whose so-called decadence was, perhaps more truthfully, a (self-)possession of will, that some will always have, to push against bounds set by a patriarchal culture. My mother was writing her stories in the late 1960s to early ’70s, a time when feminism was making its waves in western countries too. From this viewpoint, it is easy to understand how Vietnam’s patriarchal traditions chafed her.
From her pictures and recollections, I glean the type of feminism my mother embodied: cutting her hair short, claiming her right to education, taking liberties in sexual, social, and professional arenas—in short, doing things as she perceived men were free to do. She may’ve been an outlier, but she was not unreasonable. At the same age I was beginning my own writing career, she was a recognized writer, a publisher of an independent Saigon daily newspaper, and mother of two small children. Later, by the time of our fleeing, she was also a war widow. Had we stayed in Vietnam after 1975, she would’ve been persecuted for her literary activities.
I was never trying to imitate my mother’s stories.
But the license she had given herself, she had also given me. Whether I was conscious of it or not, I carried something of her lineage—that of Vietnamese women writing the lives of modern Vietnamese women—into my own literary ventures. Though of course the consequences for my mother of writing her women in their contemporary landscape in her time in Saigon were significantly different than my own context.
I was in my late twenties to early thirties when I wrote the stories in The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys. I was, as a person, not unlike some of the women protagonists of those stories. I had gone to college, had moved a little nomadically between different U.S. cities, had had numerous romantic relationships (was still sorting through this area of my life), as well as numerous odd jobs; I had artistic ambitions and was the mother of a young child, also a single mother. There were ways that being Vietnamese and a refugee/immigrant from war figured into the experiences of my first decade or so of womanhood, and also many ways it did not. I was writing from both of those places in these stories. I had few articulable goals in my process. I knew it would be four stories—four portraits, so to speak (and then this parameter, even, was interrupted by a fifth “interlude” story arising, the only piece that centers a male—a brother’s—perspective). I knew the characters would each have elements of their backstory connecting them to Vietnam, but their ethnicity wouldn’t permeate the stories, nor offer explanation or foundation for their current persons. I knew also that I wanted an emotional current to run through (this meant I would follow that rhythm in writing), and this intuitive and liminally associative logic, more so than any plot-driven details or applied narrative architecture, is what would ultimately draw the stories together into a whole work.
It was also, and still is, of greater interest to me to read and write prose that maps characters from their interiors looking out, and that [re]presents—in my opinion, at least—the truer ambiguities and multi-texturality of human experience by not neatly tying all the pieces together.
I am a different woman today, and certainly a different kind of writer, than I was when I first wrote these stories. More than a decade ago now. Looking back and reentering their terrain, I encounter a mixture of feelings and impressions. First, there is the surreal sense-memory of remembering writing them, or (in some moments of re-reading) realizing I do not remember the writing at all: I cannot really remember being [her] or tracing [her], that younger female perception enacting the lives of [her] young women characters. For the sometimes-missteps of their desires I feel some tenderness, some chagrin, for these young women; I feel also admiration for the tenacity of their sensitivities, for their affectionate perceptions of the small. And I am compelled to stand out of the way of their proclivities for scrutiny, of nearly everything coming at them, their determination to turn everything external into something of use or meaning on an internal level. I see them, the young women of these stories, working so hard to see, yet also refusing to see, themselves in the (white) American context that engulfs them. They are Vietnamese characters, but also of mixed-Vietnamese and estranged Vietnamese identities, which—in reality—is just one more way one may abide in relation to one’s cultural makeup. As I sit down to write this author’s note, intellectually I want to be able to contextualize the stories (and my intent through them) according to what I know, now, about our diasporic literature; but I think, much like myself at the time, these stories are mostly concerned with perceiving—with insisting on their simple being through sensing—the materials of experience and body that were then present.
As a facile image, I think of the pea beneath the stack of mattresses that imperceptibly intrudes on the princess’s sleep. Or I think of mist seeping into a landscape and deceptively soaking it in precipitation, belying the straightforwardness of rain: issues of past / culture / racialization / the feminine / marginalization are in ways always present, like undercurrent or undercutting. Tenuous; indelible. As both a person and writer, for as many years as I can remember, I have walked about within this negotiation that comes with inhabiting a perceptibly brown and female body in a Western land.
*
I am at a reading at the SF Public Library and it is 2018. The lineup for this reading consists of six writers spanning a range of genres—poetry, fiction, interdisciplinary art, comics, photography, music—all of us women and of Vietnamese background. This reading falls under the banner of a collective art/literary project, She Who Has No Master(s). In the audience are a number of younger Vietnamese Americans, one of whom pointedly asks what advice would we give to beginning writers like herself who are also Vietnamese and female. We talk about being women writers and working in and beyond dominant literary contexts, we talk about racial pressures and stereotypes, about inherited trauma and motherhood, about not heeding feedback from our (white, male) colleagues, among other things. Our collective project has been in motion since 2015 and by now it’s common for us to encounter audience members struck by the group of us—the visual and physical representation of a Vietnamese diasporic collectivity that is also female—and by the realization that seeing/hearing a multiple number of Vietnamese women’s voices sounding their stories together is rare. At this particular October reading in downtown San Francisco, we noted upon entering that just across the street (on the marquee of the SHN Orpheum Theatre), another art event featuring (or titularly claiming to feature) a Vietnamese woman as subject matter is simultaneously occurring: it is a production of Miss Saigon. We go into our reading at the SF Public Library marveling and disgusted at the irony of this juxtaposition. Later, I will google “miss saigon sf 2018” to research its reception. I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole. I glance through a few reviews. The SF Examiner calls it “slickly produced and soullessly executed” and “emotionally vacant,” while the Mercury News review opens with the bald assessment: “There’s something grotesque about Miss Saigon . . .” and goes on to state the most obvious problem, that the production “plays into an insidiously stereotypical narrative, imagining backward Asian people helplessly waiting for white saviors.” While this surely states a prejudice just about every Vietnamese American knows to dismiss (and many non-Vietnamese folks know it too), it is yet hard to miss the fact—visual and visceral—that this depiction of the Vietnamese feminine is still, to an absurd degree, our competition. And, surely more robustly funded and attended.
*
My relationship to my Vietnamese-ness, so to speak, has been its own long slow return. A form of return one must attempt over and over, I’ve come to believe, via meetings and re-meetings and healing processes that seem sometimes to have no end. In 2003, when my first novel was published, I knew no other Vietnamese American writers personally. In 2004, I did my first event for a Vietnamese organization, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, and met its co-founder, writer, artist, and academic Isabelle Thuy Pelaud. But it was not until 2010 that we really began to share our personal stories, and then in 2011 I was invited to be a contributing writer to another DVAN project, diaCRITICS, a blog being launched by then-aspiring novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen. My roles within this community grew gradually, organically. In 2015, I proposed to Isabelle that we initiate a collective project, to bring together the voices of Vietnamese women writers: this began with a dinner party and sharing our work and personal stories in Isabelle’s living room and quickly grew from there. There were five of us at that first gathering (and I feel it important to name the names)—Angie Chau, Aimee Phan, Julie Thi Underhill, Isabelle, and myself—and since then other voices have joined us to varying degrees—Stacey Tran, Vi Khi Nao, Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen, Thao P. Nguyen, Hoa Nguyen, Anna Moï, Lan Duong, Thi Bui, Beth Nguyen—the circle fluctuating and still evolving. Under the heading She Who Has No Master(s)4 we debuted our first multi-voice poem at a reading in Portland, Oregon, in May 2016, with five of us sitting together on a bench, letting our voices interweave. I still remember the atmosphere of fortification and vulnerability, and the powerful quiet with which we were received, in that space forged by our collectivity, between our bodies and words. There is a different kind of energy our voices and experiences take on in standing with one another, that a single story, a solo voice, cannot encapsulate on its own.
The multi-voice space, too, is a form of narrative plenitude.
It has taken us—I recognize—some time to arrive here. It is 2019 now, a far cry from my mother’s and my landing date of 1975. I am not as disconnected today from a “Vietnamese American community” of artists and writers as I was in the early 2000s, when I was writing my first two books. And it is no doubt a privilege that I get to look back on the passage of my writing life and see it traceable in terms of manifested creative works. From this vantage, I can observe that from the beginning, whether I understood it or not, the question of the collective experience and the individual voice within it, was always with me—via the multiple perspectives of the novel-in-linked-stories shape of my first book, and in the four-novellas framework of my second. I can also observe that my initial impulse in The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys to make a space (in this case a book) that contained multiple “portraits” of Vietnamese women, was an impetus—both aesthetic and personal—that would continue growing and morphing with me, to push eventually beyond the constructs of a single book or fiction as its genre, to evolve into the hybrid and collaborative formations it now compels me to work in, engaging hybrid media in my solo work, and engaging the collective voices of other Vietnamese women via our She Who Has No Master(s) project: a scope more multi-faceted than I could’ve even imagined in 2006.
The Vietnamese and diasporic experience has countless facets, like a river sending its many mouths to the sea, and I believe we are still learning how to listen, and heed, these many voices, their many variances and contours of rhythm and flow and shape. I hope that this reception of the multiplicity of our stories will continue. It is within this expanded and reawakened sense of context that I feel fortunate to greet the re-release of The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys.
DAO STROM
February 2019
1. The term “narrative scarcity” and its adverse “narrative plenitude” are ideas I take from Viet Thanh Nguyen, which he mentions in various articles and talks and which he coined in his nonfiction book on war and memory, Nothing Ever Dies (Harvard University Press, 2016).
2. Công-Huyền Tôn-Nữ Nha-Trang, “Women Writers of South Vietnam (1954–1975),” The Vietnam Forum, No. 9 (Southeast Asian Studies Publication Series, Yale University, 1987).
3. Jonathan Green, Encyclopedia of Censorship (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 1990).
4. The title of our collective project, She Who Has No Master(s), was inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House.”