By Emily Velasquez
If there is a book that profoundly puts together a recording of one’s life through poetry, it would be Lan P. Duong‘s debut collection Nothing Follows. Duong transports us into her childhood and adulthood, investigating what it means to be a refugee trying to recover their family, loss, and the gaps that exist when one is forced to find a home in another’s land.
What is most evocative about Duong’s work in this collection is how she turns our attention to her girlhood as a child of a father who was forced to flee Vietnam with his children due to the war, while then having to experience trauma from the war and the separation of his family. Additionally, the narrator in this collection must also face the reality that her mother was left behind due to the difficulties of governmental paperwork.
As the reader moves through the three sections of this book, early on in the first section, entitled “Father’s House,” she creates a vivid portrait of isolation through the abuse and disconnection Duong experiences from her father, even though one might expect a father’s house to be a place of protection and support. The narrator’s father’s house in this part addresses how it made her more aware of her father’s overworked labor hours and how his body became the source for her and her siblings’ survival as refugee children living in San José, California. As the speaker maneuvers through this collection, Duong provides us with this palpable image of how being a refugee daughter to a refugee father means building a relationship with a country that makes one fear their language, their culture, and the idea of freedom. There is an emotional embrace that Duong creates within each poem that allows the reader to experience this final exhale from the speaker when she arrives at adulthood and becomes a mother herself. In the section, “The Leaving,” the speaker’s breath unites with that of her mother’s as her mother strives to search through her now degressive memory. In the poem “Paris by Night,” presumably named after the Vietnamese variety series of the same name, Duong visits this moment with a sense of longing to understand her mother:
Where is your memory?
Can I get it for you?
Where are your stories?
Can I hold them for you?
Where did you go?
Can I follow?
Just as Duong keeps returning to her mother, I, too, keep returning to these lines. Their presence is rooted in something more than these pages can absorb. “Can I follow?” is not just the speaker turning to her mother for a response, it’s also the speaker allowing herself to be the one who initiates the conversation of tracing and following the narratives on separation of families during the Vietnam War and as well as the post-war stories from refugee children and families. Duong extends these conversations into a creative space where varied audiences can create new meaning from what was lost. She presents a collection that navigates us into the pit of how the question “Can I follow?” represents remembrance. It documents the fact that Vietnamese refugees were here and shifts the perspective regarding the impact of the Vietnam War to that of a girl growing up in its aftermath, her family fractured and kept apart by needless paperwork.
Nothing Follows is available from Bookshop, East Bay Booksellers, Elliott Bay Book Company, Green Light Bookstore, Magers & Quinn Bookseller, and Skylight Books.
Emily Velasquez is a poet who loves anything about food and cooking. Born and raised in Santa Ana, she received her B.A. in English from California State University Fullerton. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University.