on writing
why I want to expand the scope of my writings on here
Writing has been one of my passions, but recently I’ve just found myself starting drafts and not finishing them here.
I think the primary emotion that I used to connect with, when writing on here, was bitterness — bitterness realising the extent of the effects of Western imperialism and how it trickles down through the generations. I felt it, and I saw how it impacted others.
But then I found it was possible to recover from it and also thrive. I feel really elated that this is truly possible. Elated and full of hope for the future.
When I started writing on here, I was at a really low point in my life. My life has had its ups and downs — soaring & thrilling highs as well as thought-provoking lows.
Most of the pieces that I published on this site were all impromptu — I sat and wrote them all in one session. if I started a piece and couldn’t finish it in a session, I just took it as a sign that the piece didn’t have enough “force” (or “energy” or “purpose”) per se to be published. It had to be authentic and come from the heart, not conceived as some detached & overly academic pandering to mainstream notions about what writing is supposed to be.
My interests have also morphed. What started as learning Russian for political solidarity has morphed into love, affection, community, romance and so much more. I’m performing traditional Russian folk dance at the local Slavic festival next weekend! I’m baking delicious 12-layer Russian honey cake with a cute Russian boy whom I’ve fallen in love with!
I also have dual or more competing identities. during my official day job in my professional career, I’ve been an iOS engineer. and I’ve always considered this my core identity. My political identity is one that I moonlight under. I’ve never truly reconciled these — to me, they’ve almost always seemed forever irreconcilable. To express political opinions in that industry can be a death sentence for your career. To potentially make a lot of money while working as an engineer feels conflicting with some of the core values that underpinned a lot of my political convictions.
I think another theme that has surfaced for me is ambivalence. To have more than one feeling towards something. More importantly, to allow yourself to have more than one feeling towards something. As in, I like some parts of this but I don’t like some parts of that. And that’s how I started to feel about the political ideologies that I felt pressured to adhere to. Like communism & anti-colonialism. I think that anti-colonial criticisms of the West can remain true, and yet I still also like, admire & respect Western culture and the people who live there. That I think Russia is justified in responding to the situation that the elites of the West concocted in Ukraine, but war and death makes me nauseous. That while the Viet Minh was responsible for liberating Việt Nam from French colonialism & American imperialism, a lot of Vietnamese people who left the country feel differently about Hồ Chí Minh and them.
I started and tried writing several different pieces on Palestine, but mostly none of them made it to the publishing stage. Deep down, I know that the suffering that they’re experiencing will ultimately go unnoticed & forgotten by the ones in the West who glorify themselves as their allies but are really just doing it for their own egos — as it happened for those who branded themselves as protectors of us Vietnamese. For activists in the West during the Vietnam War, it was just another phase they went through in their youth — like whichever band they were into when they were 23. they never had to deal with the unsavoury aspects of war and conflict. There is so much suffering that is just never “glamorous” and poetic enough to make it to the headlines or articles or any generally accepted form of writing. Things like me wrestling with mundane & nonsensical psychotic delusions a generation after my parents experienced the war directly; things like my Vietnamese peers in school talking about their parents having to drink their own urine while fleeing on boats because there’s no fresh water for days. I feel that when I read about Palestinians in Gaza having to deal with rats gnawing on their flesh and so much more than that.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/gaza-genocide-rats-rodent-infestation-overruns-displaced
why pretend to defend a people when you’re not defending them from anything? not from the rats that gnaw on their infants, not from the israeli snipers that shoot children in the head and the heart, not the bombs that bury their loved ones in rubble, not from the cold & damp of the tents, not from the aching loneliness & grief of losing so many people that you love. not from being beaten & sexually violated in prisons, not from having your land and livestock stolen.
And I stopped writing because I fell out of that pretense.
and also I realise I was actually running away from healing from my wounds. I was broadcasting my wounds from “the empire” and broadcasting others’ wounds from “the empire”. but I wouldn’t actually let those wounds heal, and didn’t get the help I needed to heal those wounds. I was just distracting myself from my own wounds.
And slowly I started being more and more honest with myself. I saw a good quality psychologist and actually found it was possible to heal from a lot of the problems that I was experiencing. It wasn’t artistic, and it wasn’t dramatic, and it wasn’t political. It was just one step at a time, therapy based on sound psychological science with a caring practitioner, slowly over months & years.
my psychosis was caused by stress. stress from past experiences with homelessness, with family intergenerational conflicts and mistreatment from family members who themselves had experienced trauma (at the hands of empire), stress from work and fear of losing my job because it meant being dependent on those who had mistreated me before. To recover from psychosis, I needed to allow myself to actually relax and not pile on any more stress that worsens my psychosis symptoms.
And so I realised that the first step, the best way to emancipate myself from the wounds that “the empire” had inflicted, an empire that had wanted us killed, was to enjoy life. To actually allow myself to enjoy life for once. To live life simply & honestly, first of all. I danced, I baked, I learnt (and am still learning) a language, I bought cute stickers & journals for myself, I read cookbooks. To take joy in the simple acts of life. Which I hadn’t let myself do.
And as I have grown happier, the scope of things that I want to write about has changed. I don’t want to linger upon the bleakness of empire all the time anymore. Because I discovered that even some of the worse wounds that empire has inflicted can actually be ultimately healed from. I always thought that every horrible act committed by empire was something that could never be healed from, and that’s why it was so unforgivable. but I had allowed myself to experience the fact that even my personal worst psychological nightmare, psychosis, could be healed from.
I’m not saying that it means that all wounds can be healed from or that they can be dismissed and such. No, you can’t bring a murdered person back to life.
But I had never before really experienced the gratitude that comes when you realise you can live a meaningful life even after the worst has happened. And that’s what my parents and many other Vietnamese refugees would have experienced when they realised they could start a family, even after the horrors of war.
And I finally experienced that elation & gratitude, when I allowed myself to enjoy life. instead of solely focusing on the perpetrator, obsessing over every single crime they’d ever committed and were going to keep committing — which ultimately, though they should be held accountable for it, was a fruitless act on my part. that was me avoiding coming to terms with my own wounds and the possibility of healing from them instead of dwelling on them.
this is a meandering post, as many of my pieces on here are, due to my preference for posting my style of “all-in-one-go” impromptu pieces on here. but id prefer meandering and authentic than polished and inauthentic (which some of my unpublished drafts were).
I don’t have any grand answer to all the things that the empire is still doing, still wreaking havoc across the world. You constantly read about happenings that the empire is inflicting in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba. There’s not much that any of us can do besides rely on the government of the country to defend itself from imperialist attacks. and when the people of a place have been systematically prevented from having a government, as in the case of Palestine, we see how ugly the face of the attacker is, as there are no limits to their brutality simply because there’s nothing stopping them — not even appreciation for human dignity.
I don’t have the answers for how to stop this from happening. (And I don’t want to pretend to, not anymore.) so that’s the main thing that has changed about my writing.
Instead I actually want to honour the groundedness of Vietnamese writers that I tried to claim when I decided to start this blog with my Vietnamese name. Yes I chose it because I didn’t want my English name that’s associated with my IT work to linked with my political opinions. Yes I did it because I didn’t want people to expect regular western opinions which they would expect from someone with a Western first name.
But more than that, there is something Vietnamese about me — yes, even someone who once screamed at her mum that she didn’t want to be Vietnamese many years ago and made her mum cry about that. As there is in André Đào, Ocean Vuong, Nam Lê, Việt Thanh Nguyễn, Hồ Chí Minh, Lê Đức Thọ, and the local Vietnamese doctor, Vietnamese eye surgeon, Vietnamese dentist and more in my area.
It’s Vietnamese humility which awes me, humbles me and silences me in front of all these other people. And I failed to honour this, when I chose to write under my Vietnamese name. Did I not attend a writing workshop by André Ðao, in which the first thing he said was that “there are limits to what writing can do”? Did I not heed the warning of the poems of Nam Lê that cautioned against cloaking yourself in trauma as some kind of mandate? Did I not listen to Việt Thanh Nguyễn live in conversation with André Ðao?
Did I not quit high school and fight my way out of an academic scholarship because I hated the way that the private school (which had awarded me with the scholarship) talked down about other schools for not having enough resources? Did I not notice that I, Vietnamese, could not bear this, while the other scholarship students had no problem?
Is Lê Đức Thọ is not the only person ever to have refused a Nobel Peace Prize, because how could he accept such a thing when his people were still being bombed and killed? Did my brain not absorb the lessons that George Burchett wrote about in relation to the humble dwellings of Hồ Chí Minh?
George Burchett
[In December 2006] I visited Uncle Ho’s house in Hanoi. And it struck me. I thought this is the most beautiful house in the world. It is a modest wooden house on stilts, modelled on the traditional montagnard hut in which Ho Chi Minh stayed during the years of anti-French resistance (1946-1954). It is very simple, elegant, functional and energy efficient – the only “luxury” item was a small electric heater for Hanoi’s winter chills. The house took less than a month to build. Uncle Ho specifically instructed that no precious timber should be used. It faces a large pond in which several varieties of fish breed, and were occasionally cooked for Uncle Ho and his guests. It is surrounded by beautiful gardens, with palm trees, fruit trees, flowers, a great variety of native and imported plants. From here, dressed in simple peasant garb, Uncle Ho directed the resistance against the USA and its allies. So if you want a model of sustainability, elegance, simplicity, resilience, harmony, goodness, economy, energy efficiency, greenness and beauty, you have it in Uncle Ho’s house.
it shamed me that I didn’t realise the fabric that holds Vietnamese society together is humility. It is the foundation of Vietnamese society. And yet I had the audacity to write pompous articles under my Vietnamese name.
Of course the only ever person to have refused a Nobel Peace Prize is Vietnamese. Of course a legendary Vietnamese president would only request the most humble of houses for himself. Of course the Vietnamese local doctor goes to Vietnam and provides treatment for local villages free of charge, and the local Vietnamese eye surgeon & Vietnamese dentist regularly waives the charges for his patients.
I realised that the reason that Vietnam could not be split like perhaps North Korea and South Korea could be, for example, is ultimately because of Vietnamese humility. no ideology could ever make us ever think we were better than other Vietnamese people, enough to permanently separate us. (North Korea & South Korea are still unfortunately trading petty barbs at their borders like launching balloons with trash)
it was my own mother that, during the time when I was on scholarship, quietly told me she didn’t really make a fuss about it to other parents that I was. that taught me how I should go about it, my academic achievements and everything else.
but in my writings, I felt I didn’t sufficiently honour the tradition of Vietnamese humility. instead I sounded much more like a Westerner who imposes himself and his way of thinking on other people, instead of understanding others’ views about the world. And that’s another reason I had stopped writing. because I realised this. And needed to spend more time understanding how others see things. just being present and listening wholly to other people, without imposing my convictions and beliefs and filtering out whatever they were saying based on that.
And with that, I feel like I’ve finally gotten out what had stopped me writing & publishing for a while. Pretending that my writing was going to revolutionise the world. Pretending that my writing was going to protect helpless people. Not honouring the culture that I chose to name my blog under.
now I can write again, and just let my writing be what it is.
