Lucy Nguyen Memoir Published
Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 13:18:38 -0500
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Lucy Nguyen memoir published
Review of A Dragon Child: Reflections of a Daughter of Annam in America by Lucy Nguyen-Hong-Nhiem
Lucy Nguyen-Hong-Nhiem has published a memoir that will not come to the attention of university bibliographers in the normal course of business. In this review I will recommend the book to the attention of everyone who buys English-language books on Viet Nam and explain why they haven't seen it come in on booklists.
The title of the book is A Dragon Child: Reflections of a Daughter of Annam in America. The title is in white letters, blank space across a valley floor of green paddies seen from a helicopter or a house on the hillside. Lucy is on the back in a bust shot, with her life story in two paragraphs and a statement of her current position.
The life story is well known to anyone who studies Vietnamese literature in the United States, and to everyone in New England who worked to bring the Asian refugees from the Cold War into American society. Lucy taught in Saigon before 1975, when she came here alone and penniless with four small daughters, wrote one of the first doctoral dissertations on Vietnamese Francophone literature, then made a career teaching French and establishing the Asian side of multiculturalism in the Five Colleges system that serves western Massachusetts.
The administration of the University of Massachusetts supported the writing of this memoir with paid leave to one of its valued leaders. That is to say, the manuscript was not developed in a writing workshop or supported by a research grant. A person with a job is giving an account of herself.
The unusual, steady quality of the narrative fascinates me. The author isn't interested in showing what a good writer she is, or in relating the data to present trends in university scholarship. She covers her life, going from place to place, year after year with the respect a professional historian might show for chronology, for what happened in what order in what place.
No amateur's flashbacks, no canned history from random authors, no sensational discoveries, just a life recounted by a strong mind with literary gifts. Although she keeps firmly on track, the author includes all the matter that a strictly public figure would leave out: family life, ghost stories, her mother's folk tales, what people had for dinner and who cooked.
I wish Phan Boi Chau had written his life this way. Lucy's narrative is a mine of detail that is difficult to get elsewhere.
For instance, we have been talking on the the VSG list about the daily life of Catholicism but still I don't know how the racial order worked in church. Well, Lucy has the Montagnard communicants sitting on the floor at her church in Kontum.
We have talked about how the revolutionaries of Tet '68 based themselves in the most loyal RVN neighborhoods of Saigon, which their American allies simply leveled. Lucy lived next door to one of those neighborhoods.
Anyone who studies modern Vietnamese literature knows of the Tu Luc Van Doan, the modernizing literary movement, and has wondered how the love poems of the Tho Moi and the willful romances of such novels as Doan Ket played a role in daily life. Well, the father of Lucy's children was the son of a mandarin who left love poems copied from those first newspapers for her in a crook of the tree under her balcony.
So he winkled her away from her family in the fine modern manner, but then put her to work immediately as daughter-in-law, shopping and cooking and bearing children for a lineage right out of Nhat Linh. There is one thing like this after another throughout the book, detailed stories that bear out and expand on the great themes of modern Viet Nam.
The story of Lucy's father is another example. In the US we would call him a poor boy who made a modest success late in life, running his own farm with small staff. In Viet Nam, of course, the party which hijacked the revolution demonized and impoverished these useful citizens. Everyone knows the awful third act of that story, but Lucy shows the second act, the daily life of a prosperous farm.
Her portrait of her father's self-educated Confucianism, and that of her better-educated, well-born husband, bears out what Shawn McHale has been saying about Confucianism in Viet Nam, that it wasn't scholarly or sophisticated. We see her dad memorizing some precepts and encouraging his daughter to just follow the Master.
Every page in the book rings with this kind of truth, actually observed and thought through by a particular person with a memory that resists the smoothing of time. It's the real stuff, as when Lucy tells how everyone in Saigon in 1975 thought the Americans were going to put the refugees to work as slaves on plantations on Guam.
She has an utterly idiosyncratic, absolutely correct English translation of TuLuc Van Doan. She calls it the "self-sufficiency" literary movement. I call it "Self-Reliance" movement, because I think the echo of Emerson is appropriate. Most Asianists call it "Self Strength" to echo either Confucianist self-cultivation or Asian nationalist intellectuals.
Both are tendentious, since Nhat Linh and his colleagues knew about as much about Confucius or Lu Xun as they did about the New England Transcendalists. In their practices they were self-sufficient, making it on their own and encouraging readers to do the same.
Lucy was one of them. Her narrative is even more important for the account of her new life in Massachusetts than it is for her life in Viet Nam. Every informed Western man who has gotten to know a Vietnamese woman has noticed how the woman's story and that of her family encapsulates and illustrates the modern history of the nation.
Half of the men write a book proposal, which shows up sooner or later at my desk, the last resort for publication on Viet Nam. There are a raft of such books that have won through to publication, the most thorough of them by Mai and David Elliott. You get sisters and brothers and classmates in different factions of the nationalist revolution, cousins working in different regions of the country.
Mai's book is a better example of this kind of overview than Lucy's. Lucy follows herself. We don't really hear why this one or that one was in prison. There are neat facts, like Vo Van Kiet vanishing from his post as her teacher in Saigon only to reappear in the news as head of government of Viet Nam in the 1990s.
But the story is Lucy, not the nation of Viet Nam, which perhaps is why all the fascinating, odd facts which dispute received ideas get through. The story of Lucy also leads to the value of this book which makes it unique so far among memoirs by Vietnamese in English.
The sustained, disciplined narrative does not privilege the romantic days in the old country but follows through into a new area for scholarship, the establishment not of the Vietnamese American community but of Vietnamese people within the university system of the United States.
Sooner or later if we were lucky someone would have put this together from memos, but here it is from the horse's mouth, the story of how exactly how the University of Massachusetts system, out in the Yankee farmland, brought in the Southeast Asian refugees.
Lucy stresses her class perspective on education, which a social historian might not share. She went to the very best boarding school in Indochine, and it shows. The nuns treated her exactly like I was treated at the very best boarding school in the United States, throwing her into classes well above her level and demanding that she learn.
In Rudyard Kipling's great novel of our colonized world, Kim, the Tibetan lama insists that if the British must send the half-breed protagonist to school, he must go to the best and not the second-best school. The lama knows that at the second-best school they teach you to follow the direction of those who went to the first.
So when the social workers want a refugee to get a quick course at a technical school and go to work, Lucy insists that anyone interested must first get a chance to try to make it at U Mass. A student can always fall back to community college if he or she finds that he needs more preparation.
She's a dragon. She didn't set out at age 37 to get a doctorate in the humanities in a new country as a single mom with four small girls in order to help the system put other people down. She reports on the life of Vietnamese communicants in the Roman Catholic church in the United States with the same proud spirit.
Lucy argues that the racialist and colonialist ways that informed the church in Viet Nam persist overseas. She goes into detail about how Vietnamese congregations establish themselves as tenants of the established parishes, and how the careers of individual Vietnamese priests struggle with these issues.
I first heard Lucy's story when I read her first book, The Far East Comes Near, where she collected autobiographical accounts from students of Southeast Asian origin and published them with an earlier version of her own narrative. Joel Halpern, the anthropologist who edited that book with Lucy, remarks in his preface to the new memoirs that The Far East Comes Near has now become an historical document.
Back in history, when I first read the book, I asked my friend the translator Huynh Sanh Thong who Lucy was. He told me about the kids, and the husband, and the doctorate, and the teaching, in vast approval. Thong is a great fan of self-sufficiency.
I have been calling the author Lucy because the book says that is what they called her when she was born. Actually it was Luxia, for the fireflies on the Dakbla river the night her mother gave birth to her on a boat. The book is full of stuff like that, more than any commercial or academic editor could have left in.
This is why it is important to readers for authors to control their own work. Lucy was in fact one of the authors who came forward when Huynh Sanh Thong started Viet Nam Forum. He did it with money that had been raised for him after the fall of Saigon to go around with a tape recorder and take down the narratives of the Vietnamese refugees to the United States.
The irrepressible anti-colonialist refused to turn his fellow men and women into research subjects, objects to be mined for knowledge. That had happened to him in the most gruesome manner when he arrived in university research years earlier, producing Vietnamese phonemes, not even morphemes let alone words or thoughts, for a linguist. As a scholar, Thong thought that people should speak for themselves.
Knowing researchers like Thong and knowing about teachers like Lucy have been guiding influences in my life. I've known more central professors of literature, men like Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Frederic Jameson. Listened to them lecture, watched them walk around campus, read most of what they have published and most of what they have read.
At 45, when their other students are heads of department, I still rub elbows as equals with their students in turn, who disengage when I use the plain language that the professors of their professors used in daily life. In life Said was a preppy English professor, Derrida an utterly conventional Ecole Normale dandy, and the man Fred Jameson is the blunt general manager of a rambunctious literature department.
But the students of their students, and the students of the students of Spivak and Baba and the rest, went to the second-best schools and learned to follow directions, to speak in polysyllables when discussing our postmodern and postcolonial lives. Lucy could have been one of the apostles of this obfuscation. She isn't that much older than Trinh T. Minh-ha.
In her memoir Lucy tells us enough about her own scholarly writing for me to see why this didn't happen. She stops the narrative to tell in detail what she found out when she wrote her doctoral dissertation.
She wrote about the works and thought of novelist Pham Van Ky. She didn't write about Vietnamese Francophone literature in general, or relate a single work to some present current of literary scholarship. She met the man, reviewed the work, chose several novels and sat down to figure out what the man was saying.
The dissertation has been and will remain completely uninteresting to me until the day when I need to know in a hurry what Pham Van Ky spent his life doing. Sooner or later that will happen and I will grab for Lucy's dissertation.
What Lucy did, and what Thong did as a translator and belles-lettriste and publisher, is what I think of as literary scholarship. The rest is chatter I can work up for myself quickly if I have to. But the chatter is privileged by the professions of the humanities.
A good Bourdieu man, I can demonstrate this quickly with reference to Lucy's own field. At the top we have Karl Britto applying critical theory at length to a few passages from a few authors, as a professor at Berkeley. In the middle, we have Jack Jeager at the University of New Hampshire and now at Louisiana State, first reviewing all of Vietnamese Francophone literature and now the entire work of Linda Le.
Down at the bottom, working at one of our great university systems but as an adjunct and an administrator, we have Lucy. All three of these scholars are my indispensable colleagues. It is the uniformity of their high quality that allows me to observe that the material specificity of their scholarship, their usefulness to people who care about the work itself, is in upside-down relation to the prestige it has won them.
This insight brings me to the reason I have bothered to write this review. I did it because I want this book in the libraries of the universities of those who subscribe to this list. Even those who buy books for libraries like mine, which regularly buy all the university press books on Viet Nam, will not notice Lucy's memoir in the regular course of business.
It did not come out from a university press or one of the commercial presses who cater to our interests. It is from iUniverse, a company you can find on the Web doing a good job of bringing out the manuscripts of those authors who wish to publish a book on their own account.
It beats putting the manuscript in a drawer, what Lucy's neighbor Emily
Dickinson did. As matter of fact, her contemporaries Walt Whitman and Mark Twain published their best books themselves, to financial success. But I have a hard time convincing authors that if you really have something to say and you really know who needs to hear it, you are best off publishing yourself.
It is a truism from a business perspective, but authors generally aren't about business. They are about public recognition and the prestige their worth deserves. They want what Nhat Linh had, self-suffiency to be sure, but a self-sufficency that has young mandarins and young convent girls acting out the plots of your novels with their lives.
That is not in the cards for Lucy's book. However, I am sure that A Dragon Child: Reflections of Daughter of Annam is already serving its purpose among the many who know Lucy's life and work. I recommend it to others around the country, to put on the shelves for those who will come looking for it in the future.
Dan Duffy