when you dream, do you dream of vietnam
"Measures of Eternity", framed photographs, 2017
This Week In Reading
I recently read Good Scent from Strange Mountain by Robert Butler. Or rather, I read half of this goddamn book before giving up. Who let this white man write a book about Vietnam? Who gave this white man a Pulitzer for writing this deeply terrible book about Vietnam? Has Robert Butler ever met a Vietnamese person?
The first story is about two Vietnamese translators at an Australian military base. The Australians show them a porno for the first time and one of the Vietnamese men commits suicide. You know what I really didn't need in my life? That. You know what else I didn't need? A story that describes in detail the "titties" of a Vietnamese American exotic dancer.
In hindsight I should have known better, the person who initially recommended this to me, five years ago, turned out to be a total asshole. Robert Butler managed the double whammy of stereotyping Vietnamese people as prudish and traditional while simultaneously depicting Vietnamese woman as slutty exotic whores. I also feel like a lot of his assumptions about Vietnamese culture came from stereotypes about East Asian countries, completely disregarding how different East Asia and Southeast Asia are.
I really wanted to finish this book because I feel like I need to complete something in order to be justified in my hatred, but honestly, I have better things to do with my life than ready shitty literature. When my mom really hates a book she will recycle it because she doesn't want anyone else to read it. I recycled this one and I give you permission to do the same.
That's all I'm gonna say about that because I don't want to think about this dumb book about Vietnam anymore, I would rather tell you about some art I made about Vietnam.
Studio-ing
In Vietnamese culture, girls are given a jade bracelet when they are very young. They are carved from a single piece of stone, to make seamless circles of jade. A child can easily slip their hand through the ring, but as they grow older, the bracelet is unable to be removed. Both my grandma and my mom were given such bracelets as young girls. My grandmother has worn hers every day of her life. My mother's broke when I was very young. My mother, who keeps nothing, has kept the broken pieces in a jewelry box for the past twenty years.
As a child, I too wanted one of these jade bracelets, a desire that remained unvoiced for years. Now it is too late for me to start wearing one, my hand much too large to slip through the unyielding jade circle. Three bracelets for three generations of women, each generation a step further removed from Vietnam; a metaphor too obvious for me to pass up.
I've always had a tenuous relationship with my cultural heritage. Vietnamese culture has always played a fairly major role in my family, yet I've never felt like I've had a right to claim it. With my white skin, freckles and white name I've always felt like an outsider to my own culture.
I have never felt I was enough in either direction. My father's side of the family tells me I look just like my mom, my mom's family tell me I am a total Anderson. What they are really saying is: you don't look like us.
It is a strange middle ground to occupy. As a white passing half Asian, I have been afforded so many privileges. I grew up in a nice, white suburb of Seattle, I don't speak the language, have been indoctrinated by American pop culture. In many ways, I am so white. And yet, my family is undeniably closer to the asian half of my family. We celebrate all of the major holidays with my mother's Vietnamese family. They prepare traditional American meals with golden turkeys and mashed potatoes, foods my mom hates. We honor my grandfather's death day every year with a Buddhist altar set with our favorite Vietnamese foods. I collect twenty dollar bills from my relatives every Tết, Andrew Jackson's face tucked into red li xi envelopes; a silk áo dài hangs in the back of my closet.
Sometimes asian people tell me I am basically white. Other times, people of color try to play up my Vietnamese heritage, try to erase my whiteness so we can be on the same team. Both things make me feel deeply uncomfortable. I struggle to explain how far away I feel from both of those interpretations. I want to tell them, "please don't try to unpack my identity for me, trust me, no one has thought about my race more than I have." I first and foremost identify as biracial, than as white, and finally as Vietnamese. I often find that I relate best to other mixed people, regardless of what mix they are. They understand what it means to straddle two cultures better than people who come from either of the ones I am technically a part of.
I was raised on stories of Vietnam. On the story of my mother, at age 14, crossing the Pacific on a fishing boat the night Saigon fell. Stories of my grandma taking a bullet to the hand when she fled North Vietnam twenty years before that. Stories of the French school my mother's siblings attended in Vietnam. These stories of Vietnam, these refugee stories, have undoubtedly shaped my perspective. But at the same time, they are not my stories. I am not a refugee, did not smuggle bikes across the North Vietnam border, did not ride through the cramped streets of Saigon on the back of my father's moped. I am just a white-ish girl who was raised in an upper middle class suburb of Seattle.
I am fearful of co opting my own family history. I think a lot about the cultural legacy I am inheriting. What do I do with this thing I can't fully comprehend? How do I pass it on when I myself don't feel comfortable laying claim to it? I have made art about this before. I will probably keep making art about it until I figure out the answers to those questions.
There is a difference between owning and possessing something. I bought myself my own jade bracelet, finally, from a stall in Chinatown. I can't wear it, but it is a beautiful object nonetheless, smooth and cold as I run it through my fingers. At long last, I possess the jade bracelet that to me, has always symbolized an unbreakable commitment to Vietnam. But I still do not feel like I own the culture I was born into, a birthright that has always been at arms reach.
These photos are portraits of the women in my family, and are also an attempt, futile as ever, to reinsert myself into my own family history.
Further Reading
Books I enjoyed by actual asian writers: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki and Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. Neither of them really tackle Asian American identity head on, but both are excellent novels. I know, I know, I should read The Sympathizer. It's on my list. If you have any other recommendations of books by Asian American authors, let me know!