By Thu Anh Nguyen
It is Spring, the hopeful season. It is impossible not to notice that the bare-branched trees of last week are suddenly green, budding and foliating. The children dive into days headfirst, and refuse to look back. They stubbornly wear shorts no matter the still-fluctuating weather, no matter my motherly advice to dress in layers. I love their optimism, and I also feel strangely outside of it. It is easier for me to be skeptical, waiting for the wind to change, because that’s what my ancestors taught me. That’s what life as an immigrant has taught me.
April also marks the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. Last year was the fiftieth anniversary, and I spent much of my professional life as a writer and artist giving talks and making work to commemorate the end of the American War in Vietnam. It felt important to me as a Vietnamese American immigrant that I respond to the fiftieth anniversary with the joy of someone whose family made it through the conflict. So much of my identity has been formed by the way other people talked about Vietnam: through war stories, stories of struggle, and failed attempts at assimilation. I knew that my identity was more than those tragic stories, and I felt the need to stubbornly tell different stories. Even so, it felt unnatural for me to depict any sort of realized American dream. Happy endings are for fairytales.
What is remarkable about the new poetry collections by Vietnamese American poets Mai-Linh Hong and Hieu Minh Nguyen is the way they hold in such fine balance what is difficult and dark in this world with what is hopeful and possible. There are no fairytales in their writing, but there are moments of intimacy, love, and beauty that light up the dark.
Hong’s collection is called Continental Drift, and her dynamic, ever-shifting use of line and stanzas–the way her poems move across the page–act out the emotional and literal turbulence of constantly moving. The speaker of her poems often recounts being haunted by ghosts because, of course, a Vietnamese refugee of war is haunted by the ancestors and lives they’ve lost and fled. In her poem “Fifty Years Later” that recalls the Fall of Saigon, the speaker declares “We never finish / making refuge.” Although the War is over, and the speaker resettles in America, and has a child she loves, the War has left her with a constant need to seek refuge. It’s hard for the speaker to find peace because “[t]o survive is to refuse / death, but how / to tell refusal from retreat.” The answer is that the speaker in Hong’s poems never fully retreats from life, and instead finds ways to love it more. In “Casey Kasem and the Cannibals” (my favorite in this collection), the lines that dance across the page that might have been disorienting in the maelstrom of other poems, reflect the joy of music and family, like the uncle who visited bringing “cuttlefish or plums.” Although the speaker was up late worrying about the rumor that the Boat People “were eating each other,” and “Parenting, it turns out, // is fucking terrifying and will unanchor / every single ghost you thought / you had thrown on the seafloor,” she also concludes that she would do anything to ensure her son still had a mother. It’s a love poem inside a grief poem, or the other way around. Yes, refugees are displaced people, but Hong’s poems also argue that “What we lost may come ashore.” Similarly learning towards hope, the fragments of phrases that are scattered throughout the poem “Third Country Resettlement” make the poem more beautiful for their breaking.
While the shifting forms in Hong’s poetry make them feel alive and promising, Nguyen’s poems are held in tight formal containers of lines and stanzas that initially feel constrictive. At first, it was harder for me to find the hope in Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Staying Still. The tight structure of the poems heightens the tension in already heavyhearted stories. The speaker of the poems seems perpetually alone, always an outsider looking in on the intimate lives of others, but it is because of all that time spent looking at others that he is able to do such beautiful, deep looking at himself as well. He has practiced paying attention so that even when he has been the loneliest in these poems, he notices that the world refuses to abandon him: “Sometimes I look up from my life & discover / the world, undeterred by my hiding, has found me.”
It’s so important for the speaker in Nguyen’s poems to be seen because he is a man who wants to dress and appear as a woman, but has to hide this desire from family. He also struggles with intimacy with other men, often describing the physical intimacy as separate from emotional intimacy. In the poem “Paradise” the speaker is stuck in honeymoon hell with a newly married couple who can’t stop talking about how they are on their honeymoon, while he is once again alone. Where he seems most at ease is in the poem “Come Over,” as a passenger on the road trip with Auntie Kim, his mother, and six kids. The tight stanzas of previous poems now loosen up, and open into short, meandering paragraphs. The family in the poem is also meandering: they embark on a long road trip as they wait for “however long it took for some man to pack his shit & leave.” They weather the storm of domestic uncertainty by driving to the soundtrack of Shania Twain’s album Come Over. There’s such freedom and joy even as the speaker clearly yearns for more, putting on makeup to look like his female relatives. He “learn[s] to be a son by wanting to be a daughter.” There is so much yearning in Nguyen’s collection that the moments when needs are met are full of relief: when they all get lice, the kids make the best of things by sneaking away from the adults to listen to Shania and scavenge half-smoked cigarettes, their “glossy faces lit by the dashboard lights.” It is a cherubic image; little golden children emerge despite the hardships of their days.
The road trip and visits to other cities in Nguyen’s Staying Still mimic the journey of an immigrant just as the continental shifts and natural disasters do in Hong’s Continental Drift. The speakers in their poems are on the move constantly, and even so they aren’t quite there yet—that’s the nature of being an immigrant searching for home. That’s the nature of being an immigrant unsure that they can actually settle. It’s the central question of Nguyen’s title: can the speaker in these poems stay still? In the final poem of Nguyen’s work, the speaker has a “hard time believing winter is somehow, / all of a sudden, over” even though it’s May, even though he admits that “perhaps Spring is here.” Of course it’s hard to believe after a war and resettlement, and after a lifetime feeling like an outsider that “there is someone, somehow, waiting for [him],” but it’s clear that he does believe it. There is no bleakness in the poems without contrasting brightening.
There are moments of love for the world in both Continental Drift and Staying Still that are like a change in the weather and season. They remind us that amidst all the loss there can be rebuilding. In the last words in Hong’s final poem, the speaker tells us how to steel ourselves
for each new year, each war, each loss, each bomb, each fall,
each almost-free-
dom. For losing refuge
over and over, but most of all
for its revival,
my refusal—
my next, great,
growling
No.
The last “No” is far from negative: the fact that the speaker has been tossed about so much in these poems, and gets to make a final, loud declaration at the end feels uplifting actually. The defiance feels like the best kind of progress, hard-won and powerful.
This year’s winter where I live in Maryland, like on much of the East Coast, felt particularly long and hard: surprise, late-in-season snowstorms made us feel like we’d never catch a break. But then the cherry blossoms did their thing. People emerged to frolic underneath them. The world awakened, and I reluctantly put my jackets away. Last night, there was a freeze warning. We were told to bring our potted plants inside, and to cover any fragile new growths. I did bring in my blueberries, but the plants on my deck railing are so hard to move that I risked it, and left them outside. I am not comfortable going all in hope or all in despair. This morning I discovered that the deck flowers had wilted. The leaves were crispy with frost. I was lucky with the berries, but I might be lucky still with the deck plants. My mom taught me how to garden, and she taught me how to persevere, to wait for the good stuff. When we came here from Vietnam, she made sure to hide in her clothing the seeds that she wanted to plant in America. I know this is the way with gardening, and with all good stories like the ones told in Continental Drift and Staying Still: you lose and lose, and you try anyhow. You keep showing up to see what blooms.
Thu Anh Nguyen is a poet whose poetry has been featured in the Southern Humanities Review, Cider Press Review, NPR’s “Social Distance” poem for the community, The Crab Orchard Review, The Salt River Review, 3Elements, Connections, and RapGenius. She also writes about equity, justice, and community through literacy. Her essays on the importance of reading diverse literature have been featured in Literacy Today.