I was invited to speak at an innovative event on translation and creative expression organized by the scholar Catherine H. Nguyen from the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature and the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights at Harvard University. Together with poet-scholar Quan Tran, we shared our scholarship and arts practice. I spoke about my scholarly research and its intersections with artistic expression and personal history. It was a refreshing and radical opportunity to speak honestly about my ‘historian-artist’ identity and diverse body of work–from research essays and teaching on Vietnamese history to film-poetry on translation and feminist performance art.
Category: Art
Hanoi Song / Hà Nội Sống Film
The sounds of the city — the torrential rains, construction sites, tranquil cafes, continuous traffic— play together as music notes to form a song of the city. Sống, means “to live.” In this film, I weave together vignettes and sounds of life in Hanoi.
Why I made this: Hanoi has changed me. And Hanoi is changing. I want to hold a piece of this time with me. Over the years,, my time in ‘Hanoi’ will become a memory, a lesson, and a concept filtered through my individual particular experiences. After the sights, smells and sounds of Hanoi fade away into sepia toned nostalgia…I hope this film can remind me of the feeling of the people and place of Hanoi.
Music by:
Hanoi, the city
The Passion HiFi – “Distant”
Giraffage – “Slo”
Pete Rock – “Pete’s Jazz”
Zero Db – “Anything’s Possible”
Making of Hanoi Song / Hà Nội Sống
LIBERATION TIME
Film & Poem by Cindy A. Nguyen
Chapter 1
What year did that happen?
Before liberation. / Trước khi giải phóng
When did you go to school?
Before liberation.
When did you become a farmer?
After liberation.
When did you meet dad?
After liberation.
When did you want to leave?
After liberation.
And when was I born?
After liberation. / Sau khi giải phóng
What is liberation?
Chapter 2
Liberation was a time.
It was a demarcation
of what came before
and what came after.
Liberation was a place.
where everyone was invited
and forever remained guests.
Awaiting an alternative future.
Liberation was a friend.
a neighbor, a brother
a believer, a dreamer
familiar, familial, filial.
Liberation was a sound
repeated, whispered echoes
to cleanse and empty
the evils of the past,
the errors of the past
the past, the past, the past.
Ngày xưa, ngày xưa, ngày xưa.
Hanoi, 2017
INHALE THE AIR OF TIGER BALM
What do you do
at the beginning
of the end
of a story?
Hold fast the feeling
of sandpaper hands
of worn and tired rosaries
of stiff furniture wrapped in plastic.
Inhale the air
of tiger balm
of the damp, dark, disinfected hallway
of concoctions of ginseng, seahorse, and powdery dreams.
Hold your breath to the melody
of spilled pills
of hesitant doors opening and closing
of the rhythmic hum of snores, sniffles, and television whispers.
Replay the image
of the wrinkled forehead
of greys floating down paisley pajamas
of fluorescent flickers against translucent skin.
And just be
because they can no longer.
The Slow Undoing of Velcro Shoes
My mom speaks a particular linguistic formula of Vietnamese.
Take two generations of refugees,
Multiply it by memory, nostalgia, and fierce loyalty,
Subtract contemporary Vietnamese đổi mới economic changes and internet slang,
Add some Catholic guilt, the weekly Penny Saver free section, and just enough American English to avoid jury duty.
And as a result, we have the language of 1990’s Little Saigon, California:
We just moved here. = Tôi mới ‘mu’ (move) đây.
You have a duty to your family. = Con có ‘bổn phận’ (antiquated Sino-Vietnamese to mean obligation, citizen’s official liabilities) với gia đình.
The market has a sale. 5 pounds of apples for 1 buck. = “Chợ đang có ‘seo.’ Năm ‘paon’ táo cho một ‘bức.’
It’s a familial language of living history.
It’s a parental language to instill morality and gratitude.
It’s a mother’s language of survival.
And it was the language that I was raised on. Before I found my time structured by recess, arts and crafts, and English grammar, I absorbed the world around me. I helped my mom cut away the loose threads of her day’s garment work. I watched Vietnamese children’s karaoke and learned about sweeping the house, playing with fireworks, and cooking for your grandparents. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I traced my mom’s handwriting of my name, Nguyễn Thị Kim Anh.
Utterances of sacrifice, duty, and reputation inserted themselves between meals and commercial breaks. These were the Vietnamese words that guided my everyday. But then I started to learn a new language at school. This language had other rules, speech patterns, and ideals. It was unlike the religious creeds my grandmother whispered, or the ethics of family forever first.
New authority figures who did not look like my parents told me,
“Good job!”
“You can be whoever you want to be.”
“Everyone is different. Cindy has a flat nose.”
“You plagiarized. Your English essay is too good.”
And classmates who were supposed to be something called ‘peers’ told me,
“You are a Communist.”
And I would say, ”No I’m not. I came to America on a boat.”
And then everyone would laugh.
A different set of pronouns and names governed my existence.
At school I was the neutral pronoun “I” and the newly chosen name “Cindy Nguyen,” (“Cin-dy Win,” I would enunciate slowly each day during roll call. Yes, it’s okay, you don’t need to bother with my real name.)
At home I was a child (con) and the affectionate term of endearment “little one” (bé). But more often than not, you would find me in trouble—a disappointment to my entire family, kneeling in the corner and thinking about all of my sins. At that time my parents called me by my Vietnamese name, “Kim Anh”. Or on worse days, they called me, “someone else’s child” (con nhà ai).
I never questioned if I was ‘fluent’ in English or Vietnamese. Until that stale suburban afternoon during my third grade parent-teacher conference, when my mom screeched “My children talk English good! She not ESL. She do good job in school.”
I remember it very clearly as a screech because all the little hairs along the back of my neck stood on end. I replayed in my head not what my mother said, but how she said it. I wanted her to stop speaking, because it resembled the scratching of distorted static—the slow undoing of velcro shoes (something I yearned for) during Catholic confession (something I feared). She sounded foreign, bizarre, comedic even. That day I learned that the English language could be something called ‘broken.’ And for the first time I was embarrassed of my mom.
And day by day, the Vietnamese language that I was raised on turned into a secret language. Take my mother’s version of Vietnamese, then
Multiply by 12 years of American public school peer pressure,
Subtract the ability to read and write Vietnamese,
Add some creative misunderstandings, unspoken teenage resentment, and dreams of the American sitcom family.
And as a result, we have the language of my Vietn-America. This language was contained within the perimeter of
The five apartments we lived in during my childhood,
The fifty person weekly reunions with extended family,
The five o’clock afternoon routine of sleepy Sunday mass.
My version of Vietnamese mechanically activates after I enter these spaces. Automatically, my head tilts downwards, my shoulders hunch, and the weight of loss, sacrifice, and misguided hope force my arms to cross over each other.
I lose the ability to look at someone in the eye.
I lose a vocabulary of expression, of empowerment, of individuality.
I lose the pronoun “I.”
School was good. = “Gút”
I’m sorry mom, I made you sad. = “Xin lỗi mẹ, con làm mẹ buồn.”
Thank you Mom and Dad, for taking care of us kids. = “Cảm ơn bố mẹ đã “trông sóc”… (Apparently this is not actually a word, as confirmed by the Vietnamese dictionary, but a creative combination of “trông nom” + “chăm sóc.”)
Your bittermelon soup was delicious! (I love you.) = “Canh khổ qua mẹ nấu ngon lắm!”
It’s a familial language of food (and love).
It’s a child’s language to ask for forgiveness.
It’s a girl’s language of broken translations and dreams.
—
Hanoi, February 2017
Cindy A. Nguyen 