Category: Teaching

After a break, I am returning to my series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. This is a special two-parter, featuring two connected books that engage with the Vietnamese American refugee experience. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my students—this semester there are two—as well.

Previous reviews:

1. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
2. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
3. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, Saman
4. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (4): Tash Aw, We, The Survivors
5. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (5): Thuận, Chinatown
6. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (6): Dorothy Tse, Owlish

Although I will discuss both books here, I will start with the more recently published one first, as this is the order in which we read them.

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

If you have even a passing interest in Southeast Asian or Asian American fiction, you’ve probably heard of Ocean Vuong‘s monumental first book, which I first encountered through NPR. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is, at one level, the story of Little Dog, a Vietnamese American boy growing up in Hartford, CT, exploring his experience as an refugee, his relationship with his mother and his extended family, his race and sexual identities, and others.

Spoilers: we learn over the course of the book about Little Dog’s mother, a mixed race daughter of an unknown American soldier, and his grandmother, who left her South Vietnamese village after an unhappy marriage and made her way through the Second Indochina War as a sex worker.

At another level, this is a book about interweaving the American and the Vietnamese experiences in the late 20th century. That’s not even correct, though: the point is that the Vietnamese experience in America is the American experience. The book describes the racial landscape of Hartford, agricultural work in Connecticut*, with extended reflections on class and nation, and especially on white poverty, fentanyl and heroin, violence, and trauma across generations. And moreover, on the intimate connections that are not there: fathers who are not biological fathers, grandfathers who are not biological grandfathers, and fathers who are biological fathers but do not parent, and so forth.

I will resist injecting too much of my own personal reflections into this discussion, but the book’s setting in Hartford is important. Southern New England happens to be my own entry point in the geography of Southeast Asian American life: humid summers and damp cold winters, a racial and ethnic landscape that does not match what one learns about in high school U.S. History classes. There are other Southeast Asian Americas, in California and Washington State, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, Houston and North Carolina and Hawai’i, and everywhere else as well.** I don’t know all the connections among these Southeast Asian Americas, just that the diaspora is aware of itself as a diaspora within a sprawling continental empire.

Stepping back from the subject matter, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is also an important piece of literary fiction, in which the writing itself is as much the centerpiece as is the content. Vuong is a poet, with an amazing way with words, describing grinding rural white poverty and the economy of the nail salon. His writing about sex and violence is artful and clinical at the same time. The book is nonlinear, multiperspectival, poetic. You must read it closely and carefully to see all of the layers.

lê thị diễm thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For

In an interview with Literary Hub, Ocean Vuong described lê thị diễm thúy‘s The Gangster We Are All Looking For as a formative influence. He focuses on the narrative structure:

thúy not only breaks the rules of traditional Western narrative; she insists that such rules can be consciously rejected because their rubrics were made without considering the bodies her book holds—even at this risk of rendering it, in the eyes of critics trained to recognize and celebrate hegemonic styles, as nonsensical or wrong. The result is a bold and empowering refusal of conformity in search of other ways of speaking and being.

In my own read, though, I hardly noticed any of these aspects of lê’s book. What took me in, instead, was the story itself. thúy’s account is autobiographical, the story of growing up in a boring suburb somewhere in San Diego County, the daughter of two hard-working, troubled parents who had lost two young children while fleeing Vietnam after 1975. A heartbreaking spoiler is that thúy’s birth name was not thúy: that is the name of an older sister who drowned in a refugee camp in Malaysia. Owing to a mixup during processing, thúy ended up with her older sister’s name and it has stuck ever since.

The Gangster We Are All Looking For is thúy’s father, a Buddhist and a criminal from northern Vietnam who married a Catholic from the south during the war. He endured the tragedy of learning of his son’s drowning while interned at a reeducation camp before fleeing to the United States with thúy (her mother came separately). In the U.S. he works several jobs alongside his relatives, thúy’s “uncles,” before ending as a gardener. He drinks too much on the weekends, and when reunited with his wife in the U.S., they build a life anew. They fight, they cry, they lose their home. Their daughter is haunted by her lost brother and sister, and flees east for college. But before she does, she relates the experience of growing up in hot sunny southern California, the smells of mimosa and night jasmine, the boredom of the suburbs when you have no car, the experience of being lumped with the Cambodian and Lao and Hmong of the area as just another “Yang.”

There are parallels between Vuong’s narrative and lê’s. Besides the obvious diasporic linkages, their rooting of American refugee experience in the tragedies of the war in Vietnam, there are issues of race (thúy’s father has a high nose, a sign of his partial French ancestry), of sex (thúy’s experiences in a “kissing box” are presented much more tenderly than Little Dog’s first sexual forays). There is also a parallelism in that the narrators know their families’ checkered pasts. Refugee histories are real and present, and there is no time for mythmaking. The ancestors are not all nobles.

Read together, these books were a moving reflection on not just the refugee experience, or the Vietnamese American experience, but on America itself. It led me to remember my own upbringing; my hometown had its own Vietnamese refugee population, after all. It brought back heavy memories of my own experiences with refugee communities in southern New England. These are not just a stop along my own intellectual journey, they make me who I am today.

I do not think of these two books as Asian American fiction (although they are), or refugee fiction (although they are), but rather as American fiction. The point of these books, as I see it, is that Vietnam is here, just as America was there, and we constitute one another. Just like Fievel sings about sleeping underneath the same big sky, lê’s parents look to the ocean in California to see the same water that claimed their children, the water that they crossed to find America.*** That ought to be everyone’s story.

NOTES

* Before reading this book, I had no idea that there was something called Connecticut Shade Tobacco. Amazingly—although perhaps not surprisingly for the Nutmeg State—the tobacco cultivar used in Connecticut is a Sumatran variety. A New World crop like tobacco moving to Sumatra and then coming back to Connecticut is such a wonderful expression of the Columbian Exchange.

** My Vietnamese class in grad school had students from Rancho Palos Verdes, Terra Haute, Bridgeport, Cincinnati, Albany (the one in NoCal), Philadelphia, Dallas, and other places I’ve forgotten, all but two of us the children of South Vietnamese refugees. RIP Anh Brandon.

*** The Vietnamese word for the United States is Mỹ. This is notable because mỹ is also the Vietnamese word for “beautiful.” It is also lê’s mother’s name, and through the fence of the internment camp, she calls out to her husband from the north (named Minh, wink wink), Anh Minh, em Mỹ. Which you might translate as “oh brother, it’s your sister.” But there are other readings too.

This is the sixth in a series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my student as well.

Previous reviews:

1. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
2. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
3. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, Saman
4. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (4): Tash Aw, We, The Survivors
5. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (5): Thuận, Chinatown

Dorothy Tse, Owlish

This book mildly violates the rules for a course in Modern Southeast Asian Fiction because, as we will see shortly, this books isn’t really about Southeast Asia. But we all know that Southeast Asia is a social construct, an imposition of order and logic from the outside-in. Change any of the relevant details in Asian and colonial history and “Southeast Asia” would denote a different set of countries, places, and regions. And as we’ll see, Dorothy Tse‘s debut novel Owlish is definitely about a southeastern something.

Owlish is ostensibly about a fantasy world in which dolls can come to life and humans can fall in love with them. It is told from the vantage point of Professor Q, who lives in a coastal region called the Nevers, in the southern region of Ksana. Nevers sits across from Valeria Island, separated by Valeria Harbour, first developed by the blonde-haired and blue-eyed Valerians. On the other side of the mainland sits the Vanguard Republic. Professor Q immigrated to Nevers as a small child, and teaches in the university there. He spoke a different language at home than he did at school. He has led an OK life, he has married an ordinary Valerian named Maria and entered middle age, but the Professor Q whom we meet was never happy, never fulfilled. Never, that is, until he discovered a life-sized mechanical ballerina named Aliss.

Spoilers start here. So, OK. Obviously this is a novel about Hong Kong. It is also a novel about fantasy: it is a fantastical tale, about a man’s fantasy love life with a doll, and the fantasy of one’s social life and social position within a society that is strange and familiar all at once. The recent New Yorker review summarizes Nevers like this:

 a shadow zone, a dream world behind or beneath the first. “Dangerous” but “full of unknown potential,” it hosts Q’s fecund—and unabashedly filthy—fantasy life. Tse’s prose curls around Q like a vine, dropping him in landscapes that are equal parts Bosch and Freud, lush and deranged. Imagine an after-hours cut of Disney’s “Fantasia”; Alexander Portnoy on acid; a Losing Your Virginity theme park brought to you by Mephistopheles. 

It is not easy to parse out the meanings and metaphors in Owlish. In the words of my student, this is a book that “demands to be over-interpreted and over-read.” Aliss definitely takes us through the looking glass, to a wonderland, but more specifically she takes Professor Q through the looking glass. The novel’s title references a mysterious force in Professor Q’s life who takes the name of Owlish: is Owlish just Aliss pronounced differently?* Ksana is Sanskit term that, in Buddhist cosmology, refers to the smallest possible moment in time, an impermanent moment like the instant between waking and sleeping (see 刹那 and क्षण and kṣaṇa). That must be on purpose, but what does the author Dorothy Tse mean by naming this place Ksana? There are countless questions of this form.

For most of the novel, you can focus on the characters themselves, on Professor Q’s obsessions and perversions and his ill-fated attempts to act upon them without disrupting his marriage and the life he leads. Professor Q’s professional life is of passing interest to someone with an academic background: his application for a promotion is denied, his teaching comes up from time to time, and the university where he teaches is personified by grim and unresponsive superiors (whom he knows he must fear). Valeria Island and Nevers have their own atmosphere as well, which might as well be a character in the novel: the physical structure of the city with its mountains and waters and islands, the heat and humidity and smog, its crowdedness and the jangly streets of the urban core, the little islands with decaying old churches that are evolving into bedroom communities.**

Near the end of Owlish, though, you discover that at the same time that Professor Q is having all of these moments with Aliss, Valeria is beset by university student protests. These are quite obviously the Hong Kong student protests. And Professor Q finds himself in trouble despite the fact that he actually has nothing to do with them. As a reader, this part of the novel doesn’t feel like the author is just describing another part of the atmosphere. Rather, this seems to be “the point” of the novel, in some way.

So how might one tie all of these things together? Recalling my student’s admonition that this novel is just begging to be over-read, here is my own over-reading of what’s going on in this book about a fantasy of a place and a fantasy of a doll who comes to life in a place that is obviously real at a time of great turmoil. I believe that Owlish is about Hong Kong society, and that Tse is trying to describe an impossible fantasy of what Hong Kong can be in the wake of the 1997 handover.

Amidst all the surreal and fantastical elements, Tse’s novel is telling us a story of an ordinary person working within a social structure that is tolerable but unfulfilling. He finds fulfillment in a bizarre perversion that he must hide, even as he desperately wishes to share it. The more that Aliss comes to life, though, the more impossible his life sounds, and the more obvious it is that his fantasies will never be made real. Social structures and institutional constraints are more powerful than any one person.

This is an interpretation of the handover and what has come after, as told by someone who is intimately involved in the exact political processes that revealed the limits of autonomy. Just as Professor Q dreams of explaining to his wife that he can maintain his job and his marriage and also carry on a love affair with a wooden ballerina, one dreams of a Hong Kong that is free of colonial rule, the fantasy of a separate system in which Hong Kong is part of the PRC but not bound by it. As an individual, you could make your way through this obvious contradiction, but just until the student protests. This, I think, is the fantasy that Owlish is designed to reveal.

NOTES

* I will admit to having looked up the character list in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to see if there was an owl involved. There was no owl in the book, but several adaptations have feature a character called “The Owl.”

** I have only limited experience visiting Hong Kong, but even I can notice the places: Wan Chai is Valeria Island’s entertainment district with the foreigners and the bars, Lantau is where the Nevers people go on hikes, the little island where Professor Q stashes Aliss is someplace like Cheung Chau, the New Territories are the parts hard up against the border with the Vanguard Republic.