I see that we Vietnamese Americans don’t talk about our history. And don’t forget to pull on your nose three times a day.” “Don’t plat in the sun in the middle of the day! You’ll be dark like a peasant’s kid. She prided herself on the lightness of her skin. I served in the war, but you – you’re okay.” I gave him my normal response in situations like these, Vets - acquaintances and strangers - have said variations of this to me since I was a kid and didn’t know what or where Nam was. Tyle says, “I was in Nam.” I have guessed as much.
I want to pull some of them out to make a comparison (and to shamelessly promote my poetry which I want to continue to work on). While I was reading, I could mark specific quotes from the book that were paraphrases of my own work, with my medium being poetry. I found comfort in An’s story because now I don’t feel so alone in wanting to make our Vietnamese American experiences concrete through writing. Is our origin story a legacy or a memory we’d rather forget? My grandparents have 18 grandchildren, with the youngest not more than two years old. I have such a privileged life but I know that my family has lived a dark past that we try to forget with every new generation. I have not lived through all this myself but I have heard the stories on the rare occasions they are told. Fathers that were persecuted and jailed, escape by sea to asylum southeast Asian nations, the struggle to adapt to American life and the English language, family secrets. I saw many parallels to the author’s story to my own family’s story. It was recommended to me by my uncle before I found out it was an assigned reading and I can see why he valued the book. I saw the book as an exploration and affirmation of my identity and for non-Vietnamese Americans, an opportunity to understand the challenges that a Vietnamese immigrant family, particularly 1.5 and second generations face. Pham and while a large handful of students are struggling to finish the book purely with the intent to perform well on the quiz, I wish that they would take the reading more to heart because it must have been the best book I’ve read in a really long time.
Today we have a quiz on one of our assigned books, Catfish and Mandalaby Andrew X.
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