The Way Out Is In / A Love Letter to the Vietnameseness (Episode #117)

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Dear listeners, welcome to this latest episode of the podcast The Way Out Is In.

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This is not the normal episode you would expect, but it is a recording done at Harvard University with Brother Phap Huu, Nho, who is a core member of the community and a spiritual sister to Phap Huu, and also the great author Ocean Vuong. And it's a conversation about what it means to be Vietnamese in this moment, not how to replicate what existed in Vietnam many years ago, but what it means to be an immigrant, what it mean to be Vietnamese in this current world. It's a very deep conversation and also it's not just about Vietnam or being Vietnamese. It actually can speak to all of us because in some sense we are all refugees, immigrants. We're all trying to find our way in the world. We're finding new ways of being. So we really hope you enjoy this rather wonderful, deep, joyful conversation about what it means to be a Vietnamese person today in the West.

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The way out is in.

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Let us all find our breath, become aware of our whole body, allow our shoulders to drop, our arms to relax, our hands to be rested. Let us bring our awareness to our in-breath and out-breath, identifying it just as it is. This is in-breath, this is out-breath. Now let us breathe in deeper and breathe out longer and slower. As I breathe in, I fully take refuge in my in-breath. As I breath out, I fully take refuge in my out-breath. In-breath and out-breath. Breathing in, I am aware of my whole body. Breathing out, I give permission to just be, just rest. In, aware of this body. Out, resting. Breathing in, I see this body is not mine alone, it is a continuation of my ancestors, my spiritual ancestors, and of this whole planet, the cosmos. Breathing out, I am a continuation. In, no separation. Out, continuation. Breathing in, I invite my teacher to breathe in with my lungs and sit with my back. Breathing out, he is in me, and I am in him. Thay, breathe with my lungs, sit with my back. You are here. With body, speech and mind in perfect oneness, I send my heart along with the sound of this bell. May all those who hear it, even in the darkest places, may they wake up and walk the path of transformation and healing.

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Thank you, Brother Phap Huu, for that really grounding and beautiful guided meditation. I was, as I was making my way over here, I was like, what are we gonna talk about? But mostly I was worried because I was late. So I was sort of running over here. And then, but as I came over this way, I saw your head pop up in the window. I was like oh, I'm home. It's here. And I stepped in, and as soon as I stepped in, Ocean's like, this is one of the preserved classrooms. Because Radcliffe used to be a woman's college and sort of was telling immediately the history of this space. And in that moment, really quickly, I remember Thay and also other writers always saying, like, whenever you step into a room, bring your ancestors with you. File them in, yeah, Maya Angelou, file in your ancestors with you and you walk in with a lot of integrity and pride and just hold yourself as if you're holding all of your ancestors with you. And this year, on October 11th, would be Thay's, our collective Thay's, 100th continuation year. And we find ourselves together in this place and this time, almost by the hands of the ancestors bringing us together, this conversation we had, I think, didn't begin after the meditation, but it began, I think a few years ago, when we first all just hung out together at Ocean's home in Western Massachusetts. And the conversation was so alive and so light and so free, where we were just talking about our Vietnameseness. We're talking about being children of refugees, being refugees ourself, what does it mean to be Vietnamese and what does is mean to live that hyphenated life, right? You're just somewhere caught in the in-between or in that liminal space of being, and both the beauties of it and the limitations of being in that liminal space. We talked about video games, we talked about going to temple and what it meant. And this conversation, I think, is a continuation of that conversation, but I feel like we should get into it and really get into what does it mean to each of us to be that hyphenated Vietnamese, to be a child of refugees, to be a refugee yourself? And how that has informed the way that we think of what is rightfully our inheritance as a culture, and how we think about how we continue our parents and our teachers.

00:11:32

Yeah, I love how everything happens so organically with our meeting and how auspicious to arrive at Thay's 100 continuation anniversary, a Libra, who would have guessed, of course, right? The only sign that is not after organic matter. The scale, everything else is an animal or a being. And this is a fabricated sign, a sign that comes from the world, that comes from intention. Taurus, Cancer, these are all organic beings. And the Libra is the sign that someone had to make. And the make was to create order and balance and to judge, make judgment and discernment. And that actually is a wonderful segue into this idea of what is Vietnamese identity beyond Vietnam. And I think that's something that it's up to us to make it. And right now there's no space for it. So we are the 1.5 second generation or the generation that then comes. I mean, we're sitting at Harvard. I don't know any Vietnamese person in my life that has sat at Harvard before, having a conversation about Vietnamese life. Most of my family have never been in a university unless it's to visit me. So we get to launch a beautiful, imperfect inquiry into what this is and what it can be. And I think for me, the most fruitful position is to acknowledge that it can never be what Vietnam was or is. It can also never be what America was or is. And the struggle is that we are in a third space, but the third space cannot be seen. We are standing in a third identity as immigrants and refugees, which means that our Vietnamese is not beholden to the mainlands. It is not, quote unquote, perfect to the mainland. Some of us, like my cousins, don't have Vietnamese at all. Are they any less? Is my beautiful friend, poet, Hoa Nguyen, any less Vietnamese? Hoa, by the way, insisting that she pronounces her last name Nguyen, because it's difficult for her to say […], and so for her it's Nguyen. Is she any less? So I think so far, the critical framework has borrowed Western puritanical binaries to judge us. And we have also, let's admit it, borrowed that binary. Academia loves that binary, black and white. So, for lack of a legacy of developing it we have borrowed it. We borrowed the view that white academia often voice on us, which is East meets West. And I think it's important to reject all of that and borrow from black thinkers. For example, Édouard Glissant, who says, after the Middle Passage into the Caribbean, without being able to trace, at least we are able to point to Vietnam and say there is a place, there is a Weihun. But for some of these black thinkers coming out of the Middle Passage, they cannot point to a specific place. And so Glissant said, well, maybe the idea of origin is a Western fantasy. And he says that the Arawaks, the indigenous communities in the Caribbean move nomadically. They move according to the seasons and the weather and they don't see in origin as a pure genesis, the way the West does. Glissant even says that colonialism works, moves very antithetically to nomadic tribes in that it moves like an arrow. It flies out of the instrument and must go only one way. And usually it lands at death. And I think we have an opportunity to borrow from those thinkers. And Glissant healthily says, there is a creolization to the refugee, to the immigrant, that culture is not the fantasy of purity or origin, but the creation of the present, a total mosaic, complicated, contradictory present. And I think that's what I want for us. I really want us to be able to look at Vietnamese identity in the diaspora and say, this is something else. It started somewhere, but now it's something else. It is not beholden. You know, it would be incorrect to look at a 17-year-old Vietnamese kid in America and say, you're not saying, ma, right. I was at the temple last year, and it was an 11, 12-year-old girl. Her mom passed away, and we're doing the ceremony, the 49 days. And she, you can tell she doesn't speak Vietnamese often with her mother, she's probably speaking English, but the aunties are like, you're speaking Vietnamese here. So she tries to say, ma, and maybe because she's thinking of the English, ma, Hey, ma, right? And she's crying. And so she's trying to say, mom, where are you? Mom, I'm here. Because the auntie's like, speak to your mom. She's around. You know, she's still here, in the beautiful 49-day tradition. And I'm there, in the back, and I'm listening in this ceremony. And then she starts saying, ma, […] It breaks my heart, but compounded into a third space. Linguistically, her error, the fancy word for this is catachresis. Her error in pronunciation makes her to start saying, Ghost, where are you? And I'm like, damn, that's more accurate than anything. I'm, like, girl, now I'm crying. I'm like, that's right. And I'm saying, Oh, you know what? That mistake, quote unquote, would never happen in Vietnam. That mistake is made possible by the refugee experience. So the old argument would say, oh, you're wrong. Get it right. But my work and my thinking is like, no, no. That's so special. Inside the fact that we are in Bridgeport, Connecticut, inside an old post office turned into a temple, an 11-year-old girl is trying to say, mom, where are you? And she ends up saying ghost, where are you? The diaspora is inside that sentence. That is a specially made thing and there's no place for it. There's no infrastructure or institution for it, it can only be read as an error. And yet to me, the error is everything. It is the creolization of that moment. And I'm like, wow, she's discovering, to me, a double layer whether she intended it or not. And I'm like, that's it. In my heart, I was like, that's the diaspora. That moment, right there, trying to say mom and you end up saying ghost.

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Thank you, everyone for being here and going deep into this space. It brings me to this moment I had with Thay in 2012. And we're in Hong Kong leading a retreat. And Thay just looked at me and he said, Thay has renewed Buddhism 60%. 40% I leave it to all of you. And I was a little bit shocked because I thought Thay was being humbled because I'm like Plum Village is so cool. It's like, it's not very temple, traditional, and I wouldn't even be a monk if it wasn't for the renewal of Buddhism. And I can understand everything that you're teaching me. But he looked at me with deep eyes and he said, no, no there's still so much to do because we have to translate and we have to find a way that the teachings and the culture still stays intact but at the same time be accessible for everyone. And this has been my own journey of like understanding what does it mean to honor my Vietnamese roots, but also dance in the third space where I'm not going to pretend to know how to chant like a traditional monk. All my chanting is in English and all of my thinking is in English, but then I can always like return to then the depths of the Vietnamese language where it's so much deeper in some spaces. And where I'm at now, like sitting here with everyone in the space and having this opportunity to reflect, what's coming up for me is that our journey, my journey, I'm going to speak for me, my journey is a journey of also honoring the sacrifices that my parents have given me. And before it was a burden, but now it's more becoming like a source of incredible energy that they have given permission to be something so different that they couldn't even imagine. And then connecting to Thay, which is a refugee, and a refugee not by choice, but by conditions, and have found a way to be at home wherever he went. And I think, spiritually, like for me, the word home is a very big word, về nhà, to arrive at home, to come home. And the first Dharma seal of our practice is I have arrived, I am home. And arrive here means to be with oneself and not to be feeling disconnected from who you are. And the question who you is also a very deep question because I also agree, I cannot just say I'm Vietnamese. Because I'm also Canadian, and I'm also French now because I've lived there for 20 years, and I am also very international. Or I'm not myself, even, because I have listened and I have learned from so many great human beings that this journey is not mine alone. But it is, at the same time, so important to also just embrace the beauty that I never knew I could say as a Vietnamese person. We are so resilient. Like we know how to […] And I think that's both a flower and both a healing that needs to be done. And […] means we can work hard, we can go through so much suffering. We can bend our backs in order to succeed, which is a response from colonialism, response to war, response to survival. And it has also been a way for us to then embrace our suffering, our pains, much more stubbornly. And I think now, I want to hear from all of us, like, how are we healing this? As well as how is it empowering us to take our ancestors' pain and suffering, and to honor their pain and suffering at the same time as heal their pain and suffering. This is what I've been meditating on in every action, at every opportunity that I'm able to engage in a retreat, leading, facilitating. And so there's a dance between the healing, the transformation and the moving forward.

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You know, what both Ocean and Brother Phap Huu shared, what you both shared, really makes me think of, I really love the language of a fantasy of origin or a fantasy of wholeness, and the idea of the attachment to this notion of perfection, right? And… Because I think that's, you know, if we're going to bring in some Buddhist language, excuse me for that, but like, you know, if you're going bring in some Buddhist language that is, those binaries of perfection and imperfect are things that people often get caught in on and that's where we start to have these notions of less than, better than, or enough and not enough and all of our sort of neuroses start to begin there. And I think that the more I contemplate my own identity as this person, this being that exists here with the complexity and the multitudes of what I contain and more that I don't even know about, I love and rely on and ride the waves of both imperfection and uncertainty. And I think that imperfection and that uncertainty shows you fragments of wholeness. But it reflects these fragments of who we are, reflects this sort of wholeness, but those fragments also allow you a space of creative becoming. And that, for me, is like this inheritance that you get, both from your roots, where we can point to. That's my […] over there. Vietnam is my Kui Hung. And here are the branches, right? And when I was young, Thay said to me, he said, you know, you and I are like […]. He's like, my roots are in Vietnam and the wind is blowing and it's touching the land of France, it's hitting the land in the US. And it was, at that time, I was very young, so I was always like, this guy is obsessed with Vietnam. And, cause I just didn't appreciate it, cause I was just like, I'm an American. And he is forever forcing me to be this Vietnamese person that I'm not. But in fact, now, as I get older, and I'm thinking more and more about it, I think he's giving me permission to say, yeah, I have this place where I could find my roots, and my becoming aren't determined and defined by those roots. And so when I think about your question, Brother Phap Huu, and I think about what Ocean has shared about imperfection and this fantasy of wholeness and origins, I just think how lucky we are that Thay has offered us this practice where there isn't a demand for perfection, but there is a demand for presence and there is a demand for love in all of its manifestations. And I think that is a thing that begins to heal. Because in 1997, my first retreat with Thay, he came over here, and his only retreats were for Vietnamese people. And it was targeted for Vietnamese people and young Vietnamese families that were navigating their life and their identity in this new place. And the practice was for us to be able to embrace who we were because there was a big I don't know, I don't know about you guys, but when I was growing up there was a lot of brainwashing even in elementary school. I remember being told that even though technically we lost the war but you won because you're here. And you're not a communist, you're not X Y& Z, like there was so much that we were fed that made us both explicitly and inexplicitly hate our Vietnameseness. And I remember one day, I was put up, like all the Vietnamese kids were put on display and we were made to do a dragon dance and none of us had, none of us know how to do dragon dances. Like, so we had to like… it's like someone was like drumming and someone was holding, like dancing in a dragon and, like… And we felt paraded and like around the school as if like, look at these little Vietnamese kids that we got and look what, you know, we were just a sideshow for everyone. And we thought this is how we're going to be accepted. But those micro-experiences really started feeding into this marginalized identity as being Vietnamese, as being something that was on display for people to look at and to mock, because I remember the American kids were laughing at us and we were forced to sing the Southern Vietnamese national anthem in front of the whole school. And none of them understood Vietnamese. And we didn't understand Vietnamese, right? And so when I encountered the practice, it was a very basic sort of like, do you know who you are? And it was a very gentle invitation to start unraveling all the things that I didn't know that… all the ways in which I was torturing myself by not being able to embrace the fragmentation of who I was as a person because I was chasing after the fantasy of fullness and wholeness and purity and I'm still doing that today. And the practice has allowed me to slow down and really be like, what's going on here, actually? What am I doing to myself and what am I doing to everyone else around me when I think like this?

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The idea of the process, what you're describing, that there's grace. To me, like healing, particularly communal healing that comes from an epicenter, like the wars of the 60s and 70s and prior, in Vietnam, was that war for nearly a century in the 20th century. And it give each other grace to not be obliged to follow the purity rules, and I think you're onto something there, Nho, because the purity rules existed in Confucian-inflected Vietnam prior to the diaspora. You know, those, this idea of how to behave and respectability, right? Mắc mặt, đừng làm gia đình quê, đứng có sáu hổ. And so the shame is something that is generational, it is tied to community, ancestry, and deeply patriarchal, right? It's all around the dignity of men, you know? And so the dignity of men then controls the behavior and the freedom and it starts to police the freedoms of everybody around us. And we are raised by those poor folks. We were raised by women and men who come out of that. And part of what Buddhism taught me is to be able to be brave and ferocious enough. I think like people don't understand how ferocious Buddhist practice demands of you. I think that's why I love the idea of the wrathful deities because Buddhism has been commodified in the West as self-help, corporate self-help especially, right? Go calm down so you can answer more emails efficiently for the corporation. And I think to me the most, like the things that I lean on most every day is Buddhist ideas of committing oneself fully with courage. Courage is very different than fearlessness, because fearlessness means there is no fear. There's a lot of fear in me. I don't know about Nho, but living in this world, a lot of fear. But courage is doing something despite fear. And Buddhism has given me that set of tools and Thay's being, Thay's embodiment to walk out of those turmoils and to sit so calmly within oneself is a tremendous power. So I think that's what I think a lot of Westerners don't always understand when they see someone like Thay. They're like, wow, what a peaceful monk. And, sure. But what I see is that, wow, this is an impenetrable force of survival, and it feels so strong to me. And I think about the Buddha's final teaching on his deathbed, the reclining Buddha, and he says, to paraphrase, because all forms will fade, go forth with earnestness. And I think that whole sentence is so important because I think it doesn't mean don't have humor or joy. It means that keep in mind that all this will go away. So don't waste your time messing around. And I think that's taught me how to make art, how to teach. You know, I teach with the earnest desire to go to the root of it, because we don't have time. We don't time to be cynical or ironic or perform this sort of disassociated, I'm cooler than you, so I don't care what the kids say nonchalance. When you're gonna die, you don't wanna have time for nonchalance. Your family, your community is going to get wiped away. Nonchalance is a privilege most of us cannot afford. And I think the antidote of that is grace, to say, who are you? I don't know. We will never be at a true arrival. And so the labels will only constrict us further. And I thing giving our generation, we get to know, cause let's, you know, our parents and our aunties and uncles went through what they went through. I'm not in the business of trying to correct or reform anybody. I think part of that grace is also like, yeah, people have their things, but we get to offer a way. And that way I think has to begin with rejecting the old Confucian models and the American Puritan models of binaries. Who is right, who is wrong? And rather say, who are we? And whatever you are is who we are. If that makes sense, right? If you're a Vietnamese kid who can't speak the language, don't know, can't even point to it on the map. I know some of y'all are out there. If you can't even point to Vietnam on the map, I want you to know that you are as Vietnamese as anybody else. And now, not only that, but that lack of knowledge is now indicative and representative of the violence. Sara Ahmed calls this epistemic violence, the disruption of knowledge systems through geopolitical violence, disruption. So we can joke and say, yeah, you don't know where it is. But I'm like, well, that wouldn't have happened though without these wars. So you are the result of it. There's no right or wrong. You are what has become of us. And I want you to be whole in that position.

00:39:04

[…] like this conversation was bringing up for me, that when you say we are who we are because of the past, and also who we could become is what I am, I'm always tapping into now, because I look back at […], at Thay, and his courage was not to dwell on the hardship of his suffering, but his courage that he's given to all of us through Plum Village and through his teaching and his way of being is also, yes, we suffered, but now we have permission to be happy, to be joyful, to sing songs, to write poetry, to dance together, to renew this present moment, which that was almost like liberating for me because when I was coming to Plum Village, like there's an opportunity to talk about our suffering, but we get so attached to it, right? It's like, that's our only identity. It's, like, oh, this is the journey I went through. But Thay also says, and? What about the present moment? Like, what are the potentials that you can see in yourself that I could do for my parents? That was some radical idea that I've never heard. All I heard is like, okay, now go and become a doctor, make us proud, or get rich, because we have suffered so much. And that part is still in me, actually. I can still recognize that perfectionism that has been transmitted to me because of fear, because a lot of our ancestors were also slaves, had to bend over and perform for the rich, for the status. And so we have this like way of being that we are so scared of being wrong and we're so scared of being, being free in a way. And I look back and we, me and Nho and our friend Anne, sometimes we would do something joyful, but I can feel like myself, like I resist expressing too much joy cause I don't know how. And what the practice and what is radical about Buddhism that I also think people don't understand is so much more than a religion. Buddhism is a way of being. It's a way being liberated in the present moment to give honor to all of the conditions that have come together to give you this moment. And for me, what I continue to see and understand in Thay's teaching about joy, because I was really skeptical about joy at the beginning. Like what Nho said, like sometimes it's very performative. And I was put in places where like, Con hát kê bài này đi, like sing a song, make us happy. But actually now I'm like, no, I'm going to be joyful. I have the right to be joyful. I have the right to honor my ancestors, to learn this Vietnamese song and to sing it with pride and to sing it with my whole heart. And I'm so happy now that there are some moments where I'm in an English speaking community. I'm like, you guys, you know what? Today, I'm gonna offer you a Vietnamese song and I'm not even gonna translate it. Y'all just gonna hear the melody and be moved by it. And before that, I was like, okay, I want you to understand it so that you can accept me, so that can accept this language. And once again, it's like, we're serving. And what Thay, I got to witness in his presence, because I got to travel with him around and he was entering into a lot of white spaces, right? And he was entering into spaces where it's a radical present moment. He's teaching, he's teaching those of representation of ancestors that have come and colonized our country, but he's teaching them how to be in peace, how to reconcile, how to heal, how to hold their suffering and also how to be joyful so that they can also be a part of this collective transformation, this collective healing that I believe that this is a very pivotal moment in our era, in our times. We are witnessing so much suffering and so much pain, but there's also a reckoning right now that I feel. And to combat or to not combat, to embrace all of this, I understood joy is a form of resilience and to be able to still be with pain because it… Yesterday when we were walking, like in Buddhism, there's this ideal of the Pure Land, of purity, like we're practicing so that there's no more suffering. I came in with that idea, it's like I can only be happy when I don't suffer anymore. And I was like, oh my gosh, after five years, is it working? But there was one day, Thay said, I would never want to send you guys to a place where there's no more suffering, because you wouldn't learn. You wouldn't have empathy. You wouldn't understand. And that is no mud, no lotus, right? And this idea that perfection is where there's no more suffering is an illusion. And I think as a continuation and as we are a manifestation of our parents and our ancestors suffering, but now I… My dad passed this year, so like I'm stepping into a space where I'm like dad, you've always had this mantra which is enjoy, easy, be happy…. You have the right to do this. And in August, I started to step into that more and I started to feel Thay's insight more, which is like, yes, there is suffering around, but collectively we can bring a refuge for one another to hold, to listen and to sing. So this is something that for me has been so alive and has been a force for me to move forward.

00:46:14

Almost every year, Thay gives a Dharma talk and he says, I would never want my disciples to be in a place where they don't suffer, that they only know happiness. And every year it's a drag on me, because the origins of that was that when I was, after my first retreat in 97, I wrote him a letter, an aspiration letter, I was like, what, nine or 10. And for the first time, I actually saw our elders, our aunties and uncles, laughing and singing. Like, because usually when you see them, they're head down, grinding, working. They're at the nail shop, they're at the banh mi shop, they're just working so hard. And for the first time in this retreat, I saw what Vietnamese joy looked like. And it was such a shock to me, because my mother was laughing, my father was laughing. I didn't know my father could smile, like it was such a surprise to me. And so I wrote him this letter, and I said, you know, I wanna ordain, and I wanna be in a place where I'm happy in the morning, happy in the afternoon, happy in the evening, and I want everyone to share that happiness too. And every year since, he goes, you remember that letter? He was like, never. I will never let you be in that place of that… He's like, you want to be happy in the morning, happy in the evening, happy… He's, like, what an illusion, right? And every year he would drag me because of that letter I wrote, just on the dot. He'd be like, Nho, remember that letter? I'm like, I do, god, let it go. But it makes me think of, you know, listening to both of you again, it's all, again, like Phap Huu said, it's so, it's so rich. To think, you know, when I'm listening to Ocean and it makes me think of like, I think Marx, it was a Marx quote, where he said, you're conditioned by conditions not of your own making, right? And it is to say that you are a product of conditions that you did not create for yourself. And so therefore, like don't be, like there has to be some sort of grace when you approach yourself or the way that you perceive and you treat yourself. And then your comment on what does it mean to be a practicing Buddhist and that it takes courage. And it takes a lot of courage to sit still, to slow down and actually to turn around to face it. I've been on this thing, cause I was on a airplane recently and I like to watch like nature videos on the airplane. And there's this video of the sea turtles and they were telling the story about how hard it is for sea turtles to lay eggs on the beach and how long it takes. Like how there's a lot of intervention to make sure the sea turtles don't go extinct and all that stuff. And then, you know, 30 years later, the sea turtle returns back to the very place that it was born through a very like arduous and like challenging trip. And at the end of the trip, where they're about to land on the shore to lay their eggs, the music starts to change. And suddenly there's a shark that comes. And they're like, you know, at the end of trip, there is a shark. There's always these, you know, the school of sharks that come by and like it becomes a very tragic story when they follow some turtles who are like running away from this running away, trying to swim away from these sharks. They're exhausted and they can't keep up with the pace of the sharks. And there's one particular turtle that was swimming and then decided that she wasn't gonna swim anymore. And so she then just turned around and started facing the shark. And because she had turned around to face the shark, her body had turned and her shell had blocked the shark's mouth now. And the shark couldn't bite her anymore. And in fact, because she turned around and she faced the shark, the shark was like, kind of like grabbing, like sort of like snapping at her shell and was pushing her towards the shore faster. And I just thought, wow, what a Buddhist story, where the turtle's like, I'm not running anymore, I'm just gonna turn around and face the very thing that is about to kill me and eat me alive, and then actually take that source of immense fear or immense threat to your very existence and turn it into a force that pushes you to where you're trying to go.

00:51:00

Fear becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes progress.

00:51:03

Yeah. And I often think, you know, when I reflect on that moment and reflect on us sitting here and being here, I think one of the things that I learned from listening to you both and listening to Brother Phap Huu here talk about Vietnamese joy, I think about how, again, the opening of imperfection, how that informs so much of our being, not just present time with us, but in the past and also in the future, where, you know, when Thay was calling for peace during the Vietnam War, he would have… I went to interview these aunties and uncles that were of his first cohort in the School of Youth for Social Services this past year, and this auntie said, after a long day of collecting bodies and burying them, doing funeral rites, building schools and teaching children, trying to at least maintain some sort of stability in the village communal life, they would come back home and Thay would say, let's pick up a guitar. And everyone would just start singing together. And singing and singing and singing. And he said that moment of collective joy, even in the midst of this burning hell that everyone was witnessing, was a thing that actually drove everyone and motivated everyone and inspired everyone to get up every morning and face what the reality, what the conditions were offering, were imposing on them at that moment. And so when Brother Phap Huu says, joy is an act of resistance, I take that very seriously. And I used to think that in our Plum Village retreats, when we had our […] or our […], you know, the times we would get together, it was so scrappy and it was so, I just thought it was so silly and I'm like, we're not serious meditators. But actually, as I'm growing and as I am getting older, I'm realizing how important that joy is, and then I'm listening to these Dharma talks all from Thay, and Thay is like, our practice is a practice of joy. Yes, we take suffering seriously, but joy is the name of the game. And so, I don't know, I just wanted to name that because what you guys were talking about really sparked a lot of curiosity in me to understand what is it that brings you joy? How does, what is your relationship to joy in the context of all of your complex and multi-fold identities?

00:54:06

I like to think of it as heavy joy.

00:54:09

Heavy joy. Say more.

00:54:12

Well, I think, you know, it's easy to fall into the binary of like, enough diasporic tears, enough diaspora sadness. But then the other end of that, this happens in the writing community is like alright, enough, you know, immigrant stories that are sad, let's, you know, smile and grin. And that starts to become disingenuous too, especially in the history of Asian American presence in this country is always in servitude, opening the door after you, sir, smile, and grin. Here you go, here's your laundry, sir, madam. Smile and grin. Pick your color, please, smile and grin. So we are always opening the door and saying, after you, after you. And so the Asian-American joy has often been a performance of legibility and to defang ourselves. Look, I'm just a happy-go-lucky person. I had friends who had taken the citizen test, and in their photos, if they don't smile, they tell them, take it again. So the Asian-Americans smile, and this is, a lot of scholarship has been done about this, particularly in black communities. Like what is, African-Americans have to smile to render themselves a non-threat in order to protect themselves. So the performance, down to the minstrel painted across, blackface traditions is this idea that the joy will save you and the performance of happiness will save you. So I think that's why, you know, we can avoid the ping-ponging of sadness and joy as if they are completely isolated binaries. And that's why I think heavy joy. Joy will wait. And I was raised by women and I think one thing that I think is important to say as a Vietnamese American was that in my household raised by woman, I did not have the stereotypical, like we did not talk about what happened. These women were loose in the mouth. I'm like, you are going to know where you come from, what you came from, and what it costs. So there were four women who raised seven sons.

00:56:48

Wow.

00:56:49

So what I learned was that they would sob telling these stories about what they've been through. And they did that to show us what it costs, because they know that they went from a patriarchal country into another patriarchal county, but they were holding forth a matriarchy in the household. So they made sure we knew how many bananas they had to sell on a little float at five in the morning to get breakfast. They made us know every cost. And they also threw in some myths […].

00:57:34

That means I found you in the garbage trash.

00:57:38

That's the origin story of all Vietnamese kids, by the way.

00:57:42

So mythology, right? And so, and they would start crying with such fervor. My cousins and I were like seven, eight, nine, watching and listening to these stories. And we were never ashamed of crying. We thought it was so powerful. Wow, look at them show up to their histories with their full emotional range. And we thought they were so fierce. And we didn't know that in America, crying was seen as weakness and shame. We even have euphemisms for it. Oh, I'm sorry, I lost control. I got misty- eyed, right? All of these things to avoid saying that we felt something. So we were very lucky to have that education. And in the same breath, they'll start cracking up. So I'm like, oh, this is heavy joy.

00:58:47

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

00:58:48

This is joy with weight. It is not empty, performative, joy that comes out of the fatigue of reality. Because I think about that a lot as a writer and a cultural producer, in that so many Americans or folks on the West, and even Asian Americans community were like, well, why is there so much trauma? Let's get over it. I'm like, well, you tell me when we can get over it and I'll be the first one to sign up. But I think it's important to also push back and say, I'm not writing about trauma. Trauma is subjective. Trauma it's between you and your therapist. I'm writing about violence. And I think the white critical framework often forces us into a trauma negotiation, to a trauma discourse, to actually defang us. Oh, look at them, they're just reporting on their trauma. It's so self-indulgent. It's all about them. But when you push back and you actually say, no, I'm writing about violence. When I recenter the conversation on violence, now you have to ask, where does it come from? Who did it? Who benefited from it? Who still benefits from it, and what are the aftermaths? Now you are in a historical question. You are no longer in this sort of therapy, self-improvement speak. So it's important for us to always push back on those frames and say, and one of those things is that the price of my laughter is the pain and I don't have to choose. And one thing that I want to say to young Asian American artists is that just because a white audience is bored of your pain does not mean you need to start dancing a tap dance for that audience. You get to engage with your history robustly. And it's up to you to navigate that on your terms and not fall into being swayed by audience fatigue. Because trends come and go. Some people will find, you know, diasporic violence interesting. Some people will find it overdone. But you're not beholden to them. You're beholden to how you want to tell your story as thoroughly as you want. Including not telling it at all. That's okay too. And I think giving that openness, you know, one thing, an example that I often give, and I was so touched, Nho, when you said that Thay would be obsessed with Vietnam. Because I think even when we are ejected or leave the homeland, it still haunts us in a different way that folks in the homeland are not haunted in the same way. There was a sentence very similar to the ghost where are you situation. When I was young, my mother would look out the window at night, this one beautiful summer night in Hartford. And there was a full moon over the city. And then we're looking at it together. There's no TV or radio, we're just looking at… The past time that's quite gone now, looking out a window with your mom in the summer. It's a beautiful moon over this desolate city. And she says to me […] That the moon in Hartford will never be as beautiful as the moon in […]. Now, she's not a fool. She knows it's the same moon. But what is she saying by that, right? And what's happening there? She's romanticizing. And this is often the biggest faux pas in Asian-American discourse. How dare you romanticize? I was like, have you seen Paris by Night?