TRIBUTE TO THE CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS OF VIETNAMESE AMERICA

ARTIST AND CONTINENT,  WITHOUT BORDER:  
THE ART OF VIETNAMESE AMERICA

Yes, there is America, and there is Vietnamese America. 

      I don't mean Little Saigon in Orange County. I mean the vision of the homeland in America held and kept by the few thinkers, writers and artists of Vietnamese descent, including those who, although they live here, have never left their home behind...Their spirit returns home via their art, in universal ways that transcend borders.  To many of them, home also harbors the memory that tears and sheds: fear, melancholy, regret, and the whole range of emotions that I call "the rain-tears of the soul."

      Years ago, at the University of Denver where I taught, I thought of honoring Mrs. Tang Thi Thanh Trai, a Vietnamese lawyer who occupied the first tenure-tracked teaching position in an ABA-accredited law school.  I grew up with an image of her as my self-made-women-in- the-law motivation.   Back to 1975, facing my career choices as a 17-year-old after the fall of Saigon, I did not know what I could have in the arts.  How about concert pianist, opera singer, Broadway performer, stage/film actress, ballet dancer/choreographer, oil-on-canvas painter, journalist/writer, playwright, and the list went on -- all the choices not available to the little girls from urban Saigon or war-torn Vietnam, who have boarded the plane. Being new to America and having no mentor, I did not know that the list of career choices in the arts could even exist!

     In the decade that followed, I ended up choosing law because of what I  called the immigrant's burden.  This choice of practicality carried with it the same noblesse oblige that had made me the head of  my class ("truo?ng lo*'p") all throughout my last three years at that Vietnamese all-girl school in Saigon (the high school that bears the name of Vietnam's national heroines).  Law was the choice of the brain rather than the heart.  My motivational factor for justifying this career choice (brought about by a sense of burden) was the image of the slender, short-haired Mrs. Trai (aka Mrs. Le Thanh Minh Chau, then provost of the University of Hue). Her image captured my imagination of the ideal self-made career woman , the day Ms. Trai appeared on Vietnamese TV  in the early 1970s...

        So, decades later, at the University of Denver, I was going to honor her as the motivational factor for all of us, Vietnamese women who chose law (and the few of us who chose law teaching). As it turned out, the plan was never materialized because of a simple reason:  Mrs. Trai does not want or need the event.  (And the  few Mrs. Trai's of our culture might or might not have chosen law for all of us who came after her -- those little girls of South Vietnam who had seen her image on TV and held on to it, the way I have...

      For those little girls who have given the law all of themselves -- in exchange for, not money, nor status, but instead, their sense of noblesse oblige that I have tried to hold on to through the years of my youth, I must now poignantly ask:  what have they received in return, for the burden they each silently carry in their soul, when they chose law as the road less travelled for the first wave of Vietnamese immigrants into this country?

       When I resigned myself to the fact that I should not try to honor Ms. Trai, my childhood idol, I felt such a loss.  With that realization, sitting in my faculty office at the University of Denver, I decided to honor, not Mrs. Trai via a University-sponsored program, but rather, with my own pen in my own private space.  My tribute went to a different person all together, some one who did not resemble even an ounce of Mrs. Trai.  I decided to write a long poem and dedicate it to the dead man who on his own carried the real burden of exile:  he was the Kinh Kha of Vietnamese youth. The young man belonged to those generations of Vietnamese who were sent to Universities abroad with the aim to return home to give war-torn Vietnam their sense of noblesse oblige, "nghia vu va phung su."  The young man, Kinh Kha of our youth, returned home to die a tragic death in his homeland.  His body has never been returned to his loved ones.  For me, he confirmed my long-held belief:  the death penalty cannot, and should not be given, to political dissidents, if the values of liberty and democracy are to be respected in a civilized society. 

[LINK TO THE tvb POEM]

         But today, I want to do something different.  I want to do this for myself, as I look back at the could-have-been's -- the career choices I never had although America was supposed to be the promised land.  I decide to give my personal tribute to a few people whose creative forces and talent I have come to know, because, in my view, the following pieces of creative arts and performances belong to the shining light that must have come from the heart.   In that shining light of Vietnamese America rests terribly a sense of solitude, yet wonderfully the joy of creation.  These pieces belong to one Vietnamese America that has existed for my 39 years in this country.  Confined as a lawyer, I have created this image of Vietnamese America for myself, and in it, I put my endless pursuit of the arts. I have made that pursuit an endless journey that has cost me the epitome of financial and career success that I could have had in the law.  Nhu ke lan hon da nhoc nhan tren suon nui, Toi deo mang con duong thien ly cua rieng toi.  In that shining light of Vietnamese America rests terribly a sense of solitude, yet wonderfully the joy of creation.  

        Below are my tributes:

1) THE INTROSPECTIVE POET OF OUR TIME:  Tribute to the Vietnamese poet To Thuy Yen, who spent 13 years in the Vietnamese gulag, after which home-sweet-home, notion of the motherland, became "the visceral fear" of existence (the poet's own choice of words), so America to this man of wonderful verbal and poetic skills becomes the draining conquest of that terrifying fear (where fear is the terror itself).  In my opinion, To Thuy Yen is THE POET OF OUR TIME, the generations following Vu Hoang Chuong.  But, to me, TTY is more than Vu Hoang Chuong, because he has brought to Vietnamese modern poetry images of That-Road-Less-Travelled (Robert Frost) or the Vietnamese myth of Syssiphus: For a poet-philosopher, it's the Inward Journey of Thoughts and Sufferings, the "Etre-En-Route" of human existence.  That road, to TTY, is the way homeward ("Ve^`"), when the Self has become Bankrupt.  With his poetry, the intellectual poet TTY has brought us "Vinh-Du-Lam-Than-Cua-Kiep-Nguoi"  (the Honor of Sufferings).  (By Intellectual, I mean the journey of Thoughts that the Poet engages himself in).   

Quen, la., ba.n, thu`, chung gia^'c ngu?
Chung lo*`i thu*o*ng tie^'c kha*'c tre^n bia 
To-Thuy-Yen

[link to TTY poetry online]

2) THE SONG THAT CROSSES CULTURAL BORDERS:  Tribute to the semi-classical music of Ngo Minh Tri, a songwriter from my generation. His album brought me the "Song-of-Happiness" in the semi-classial genre.  The album invigorates a new dimension for Vietnamese modern music, and although Ngo Minh Tri thinks that American jazz is the breakthrough for him, I think the quality of Tri's music lies in his ability to make beautiful melodies.  In "Happiness,"  Tri combines a little bit of Jazzy modern harmony with a simplified, linear melodious expression that reminds me of Chopin's Tristesse.  The new dimension that Tri brought to Vietnamese music in America is indeed as old as the chagrin of Chopin's soul, jazzed up (if you will) into an expression not found in all that repertoire called Pham Duy and Trinh Cong Son and Van Cao and Cung Tien and the likes of them, i.e., the favorites of Vietnamese (so far).  

     This song called Happiness written by Tri, a relatively unknown musician (unknown to many Vietnamese but, by now, known to my concept of Vietnamese America), has motivated me to choreograph a modern dance based on the awakening of a Vietnamese woman.  In the dance, she delivers to herself, at the dawn of day, the monologue that speaks the same sadness found in Tri's Song of Hanh Phuc.  When darkness gives way to the first touch of sunlight, there is the quiet joy of celebrating the first (and perhaps last) sun ray that warms up our vision of Vietnamese America, at the beginning and the end of our journey for survival.  Our survival is against cruel history and politics, against an external world, as well as against ourselves.   Ours has been a journey full of sorrow and anguish (the same "Honor of Sufferings" found in the introspective poetry of To-Thuy-Yen). On that journey, the smallest trace of sunlight will become the happiness of a lifetime...In reading my novella Postcards from Nam and seeing with me the journey of Boat People, commenter Tran Van Tong of Paris compared my "trace of sunlight" to Rene Char's "the instant light of being." ("Si nous habitons un eclair, it est le coeur de l'eternel --If we live in that light, it is the eternal heart: Neu ta cu tru trong tia chop, thi no se tro thanh trung tam/trai tim cua su vinh cuu").   

[LINK TO TVTONG'S COMMENTARY AT VIET THUC]

    So, what is the fate of the artist, then?  Ours is the kind of self-journey that repeats itself, always, until we again and again try to reach that small trace of sunlight, when our warm heart can rest at peace in a place called homeland, just as Chopin rested in peace when he asked for his heart to be brought back to Poland and buried in the soil of his homeland.

Tim qua chinh chien mot thoi
Tim qua tang toc mot doi
Tim dau noi be dau
Tim quanh xuong trang phau
Tim dau qua cach ngan qua tran troi...
Tim trong dau xot da vang
Tim noi muon thu xa ngan...
(lyric for Hanh Phuc written by Ngo-Minh-Tri)

3) THE POET OF SEPARATION AND VIETNAMESE CLASSIQUE: THE BEGINNING OF EXILE IN THAM TAM'S TONG BIET HANH:  

Link to Tham Tam;

In appreciation of Tham Tam's timeless poem, I myself have  composed two versions of my own Tong Biet Hanh: 

[Link to DNN's 2 versions of Tong Biet Hanh]

4) THE PERFORMING ARTIST OF OUR TIME -- PERFORMING WITH THE HOMELAND'S SOUL:  Ton Nu Le Ba
[to be drafted]

[link to viet thuc] her performance of HO TRUONG 

5) THE UNLUCKY POET:  NGUYEN TAT NHIEN: 
[to be drafted about his life and death]
[link to the best of NTN]

6) THE WOMAN THROUGH WHOM WE CAN ALL SEE OURSELVES:  Last but not least, I give my tribute to Nhu-Thuong.  Here is a fellow Vietnamese woman who has chosen to write Vietnamese poetry to relieve herself of the hardships of her life, from Vietnam to America.  Her poetry is classic sublimation. Daughter of a political prisoner, for many years in her native Vietnam, she was not able to pursue the education she desired and deserved.  America brought that about and afforded her the chance to realize the vision she had at the tender age of 14: she dreamt that she would make poems and publish them.  Now, in America, she calls herself Nhu-Thuong, perhaps the unintended counter-ego of my own birthname Nhu-Nguyen.  "Nhu Thuong" means "like love or compassion," and my name Nhu-Nguyen means "May All Your Wishes Come True."  May all your wishes come true when all wishes are made out of love and compassion.  Many Vietnamese women will see themselves through her, the woman who calls herself Nhu-Thuong, likening herself to love and compassion.  And her poetry speaks exactly just that.  In fact, all of us see ourselves in her, as the woman reaches for her peace, Nabokov's refuge of art and my Postcards from Nam.  She found that in Vietnamese poetry. Like TTY, Nhu-Thuong seeks in poetry a way homeward, via the simple "six-eight" form originated with Vietnam's folk songs.  But, unlike the exhausted poet-philosopher TTY, for Nhu-Thuong, poetry also creates a different world.  Her ornate and sometimes archaic language of the six-eight poetry offers her the bliss we all lack in real life, each in our own way.  My tribute to Nhu-Thuong lies less in her poetic means than in her compassionate end:  what makes Nhu-Thuong herself is not so much her six-eight form, but, rather, her compassionate soul -- her substance, as shown in her following piece of prose:    

[link to nhuthuong sweater on a snowy day]

     To all of the poets and artists above, it matters not whether i know them or they know me.  My Vietnamese America is for them just as much as it is for me.

       Unlike Chopin's Poland where the composer's heart rested, my vision of Vietnamese America does not have to be territory.  The territory is...myself!  Through these personal tributes, I wish to thank all the nameless Vietnamese refugees who have made it to shore, those who have chosen to die, those who have died without a choice to live, and those very few real musicians, painters and poets who have gone on to create despite the shackles of life and the fate of exile.  They all have reaffirmed the place of Vietnamese America for me via their own force of creativity.  I want to believe that the few artists mentioned above hold on to their creative forces, not for fame or fortune, but only for the need to create in itself.  Perhaps I might have just projected myself onto them, but one fact remains:  With them, I share the bond of culture. It is our bond.  

That's why in the following piece of fiction, I speak the voice of a Vietnamese woman who searches for love.  At the final point of destination, she finds that cultural bond, even though for her, the bond -- in the form of romantic love sought by all men and women -- has become an illusion of peace.  

Click here:

OF CULTURE, BOND, AND BONDAGE