Hoa Nguyen is a poet born in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, raised in the United States, and now living in Canada. She has written several books of poetry, including As Long As Trees Last (2012), Red Juice (2014), and Violet Energy Ingots (2016), which was nominated for the 2017 Griffin Prize. In her writing and teaching, she is a strong proponent of contemporary poetry. To that end, she started Skanky Possum Magazine with her husband Dale Smith, which ran from 1998–2012, founded her own school of poetry that offers reading-based generative workshops, and has lectured at a variety of institutions, including Princeton University, Bard College, Poets House, the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio, and Toronto Metropolitan University. She was a guest editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2018 and a judge for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Her newest book of poetry, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (2021), blends biographical history of her mother, Nguyễn Anh Diệp, with meditations on language, loss, displacement, and the encounter between past and future. Drawing on archival material, mapping the ghostly imprints of her mother’s life before she immigrated to the US, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure explores identity and inheritance in the context of loss and reconnection to homeland. As Nguyen traces her mother’s complex and extraordinary history, she experiments with the linguistic tension between English and Vietnamese. She breaks apart harmful stereotypes about East and Southeast Asian people by juxtaposing racial slurs and culturally appropriative language with the freedom of her mother’s career as a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe. Of her poetic subject, Nguyen writes, “My mother’s story has all the features of a hero: a person of extra-human qualities living through exceptional times.”
Christina McCallum spoke with Nguyen about her writing process, her experiences crafting A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, and the implications of her art on a broader cultural scale.
CM: Did you always know that you wanted to become a writer?
HN: I think I always wanted to be a writer, secretly. And a poet. Stories, song lyrics, and poems have long been my fascination. My writing began in elementary school with illustrated stories assembled into small books, full of angst, humour, and absurdity. One featured a disfluent, talking frog who had a series of adventures with friends. Another portrayed a disadvantaged puppy who matures into the world with a journey marked by gains and losses. In Vietnam, there is a custom where you present several objects to your child on their first birthday: a pile of money, a pen, a stethoscope, a pair of scissors, and other vocational symbolic objects. The item the child reaches for foretells their future occupation. I grabbed the pen.
CM: Can you tell us about your writing process? Where do you turn for inspiration? What prompts you to begin a project?
HN: I’m inspired by my encounters and relationships with language, people, events, history, and place. I tend to accumulate materials slowly and produce a book every five to seven years, but my aim is not toward a project or thing, and more about a gathering, an impulse, desire, curiosity, and a seeking of presentation.
CM: How do you balance writing and teaching? How are the two connected or separate for you?
HN: Once in junior high I took a personality test in class called “Job-o.” I can’t find reference to this anywhere online, but it was a Meyers-Briggs type of test that was supposed to help students find their calling — or as the test’s name implies — our future “job.” Mine said that I should be, in this ranked order, an artist, a teacher, and a therapist. I’ve realized that the test was perfectly accurate. A poet is an artist; I am a teacher and am called to teach, and, as one astrologer put it, also a “professional Pluto,” one who helps people transform through my art and pedagogy.
My teaching allows me to immerse in criticality and creativity as I dig deeply into the work and life of writers. From this engagement, I come to new understandings of patterns of context, community, and history (both literary and social). It all keeps my creative cycle refreshed and my mind and pen moving.
CM: What is one piece of advice you would give to new and emerging writers?
HN: Locate and maintain a close circle of trusted, committed, creative people that you can call upon and gather with for collaboration and inspiration. Artist friends can act as a source of inspiration and support, founded in relationships and shared values, and become trusted readers for your work.
CM: Tell us about your most recent book of poetry, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure.
HN: In A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, I take on a convulsive period in history and evoke my mother’s life as a celebrated stunt motorcycle rider who leaves Vietnam with her mixed-race child (me) to never return “home.” I began writing it in 2013 having arrived at my first-ever writing residency at the Millay Colony. I turned to the I Ching to initiate it, throwing my coins, the result of which provided me with meaning and message in hexagram 51, Chên/ “shock,” the arousing thunder, which signals disruption, loss, and chaos, themes around which I found expression. Chên grew to animate the book and informed its title.
I wanted to tell my mother’s story as a poet, against typical modes of storytelling, a narration that does not seek to summate but rather to summon, to be in dialogue with difficulty, allow for the obscured, give language to the difficulty of memory and retrieval, with retrieving the irretrievable. Working inside of the shape of the poems felt like a kind of mapping, a care and attention when contextualizing. A poet and scholar once referred to the whole, with its management of image, form, and fragment caught in song as a “cartography of ghosts.” I wrote the book as a set of poems that could act to contest and resituate, weave across time, to work with that history and summon it into new, dynamic positions, to give voice to liberatory thinking, and a path out of silence and silencing.
CM: I was doing some research prior to our conversation, and I learned that you travelled to Vietnam before writing Treasure. Can you tell us what that trip was like for you? Did you have a vision of the way your poetry would take shape beforehand?
HN: When we immigrated from Vietnam, my relationship to kin, land, culture, and language were severed and my mother had no desire to return there — until her elderly years when she wasn’t physically able to go. I arranged the trip to join with poets based in Hanoi who ran AJAR, an independent press of English and Vietnamese language literature. To prepare, I requested a tarot reading from a trusted friend and drew a significant card — The Tower, an emblem I intuitively linked to the hexagram Chên as it, too, was an emblem of chaos and rupture, a sudden one as though “struck by lightning.” When I drew The Tower in the tarot reading, I was nervous — it was a momentous trip, full of personal meaning, and one that I was taking alone. I worried that it meant my return to Vietnam would feel like a nervous breakdown!
Instead, rather than that sort of difficulty, what happened was a chance encounter with the “wall of death,” the structure that the flying motorist artists of my mother’s motorcycle troupe called “the barrel,” inside of which they performed their stunts riding vertically on the wall, hands-free. Up to that time, I spent my days walking, wandering, and documenting. I had been writing, alone in my hotel, feeling, trying to figure this trip out, myself and my diaspora, inheritance and rupture, relaying my experience later that night to my mother.
Then, on the last day of Tet, I found myself in a park far from my hotel, Lenin Park, which has a large lake with sad looking swan boats you can rent, numbered trees, green grass that most don’t walk on, and level, paved places to run. Because it was Tet, families were out in their finery, milling about and enjoying the pretty day. At a distance I noticed one particularly special feature erected, something not there ordinarily. I easily could have walked past it, not knowing what it was, but a woman’s recorded voice was announcing something very loudly and insistently over and over in Vietnamese. I turned to my host and asked, what is she saying? And when she told me it was a motorcycle circus performance on the “wall of death,” I couldn’t believe it. I went in to take part in the audience, who looks down at the performance from above, took pictures and videos, exhilarated, astonished. About halfway through I started to cry and cry. It was an amazing event of serendipity to be able to experience it live and then, when I was photographing from afar, I realized that the structure of this performance site, the actual structure of the wall of death with the canopy on the top, looks like a tower. I had been “struck by lightning” by the chance encounter with the “wall of death.”
CM: Treasure draws quite a bit on archival material. How was this creative process different from the way you’ve approached your previous books?
HN: Yes, Treasure differed in that I was interested in the ways the book could interact with archive. An archive becomes a repository of information that shapes our narratives about ourselves as a people in a moment of history. I was interested in what gets preserved in the archive, what falls out of the archive, what remains unarticulated. My interest was in presenting archival next to investigative materials, to draw out some of those more ghostly imprints, to let the absences come forward at the same time as the materials are coming forward. There’s a relationship between people and perspectives that go missing or obscured; I was interested in writing with the tensions between what’s there and what’s not there.
CM: Did writing about your mother, and doing such extensive research about her history, alter or shape your perspective of her life?
HN: Most of my life, my mother didn’t speak of Vietnam, gave it few details. It was mostly an unknown, a languagelessness, an impervious surface, a smooth, raised scar. There was evidence of the before-life, but it remained unstoried, not fully narrated, a site of unknowing. The period in which I was writing toward Treasure coincided with a long and final decline in my mother’s health. This meant I was attending to and caring for her when I wasn’t working my several jobs. It also meant that we had time and occasion to speak intimately, and, in that gift of advanced age, where long-term memories of one’s young adult life come into the foreground, my mother was more willing to speak about her life as child, teenager, and young woman in Vietnam. In return, I was able to share my experiences and pictures from my travels to her homeland. And the poems I had written based on her life.
CM: As a biracial writer myself, whose mother has ancestral origins in East Asia, I often find my most intimate and emotional work to be that which responds to the way Asian women have been represented and treated in North America. I think this type of work is particularly urgent now given the rise of pandemic-driven violence against members of Asian diasporic communities. Was your work with Treasure rooted in this urgency in any way?
HN: Yes, absolutely. As I was preparing for the launch of my book, a white US American man went on a killing spree that targeted Asian American women. March 16, the day of the Atlanta Spa murders, was also the anniversary of the My Lai massacre. Simply labeling the My Lai massacre a war crime or the murders in Atlanta a hate crime individualizes the problem when in truth it is a systemic and cultural one. This issue has many layers and dimensions to it: anti-Asian racism, class, misogyny, sexism, and the history of Western colonialism. In the long history of US wars and occupation in Asia, there’s a dominant tendency — in English-speaking countries, in Western countries — to discount the death and suffering of Asians. This is seen as a matter of policy. This is seen in the ways that history is documented and shared, how it’s circulated as story. Fetishization and sexual violence against Asian women has always been a part of these wars. These wars have had a particular impact on Asian women, both abroad and in North America.
The violence extends to a dehumanizing lack of context or representation in the media. If represented at all, non-European cultures are depicted in one-dimensional ways and as removed from contemporary society. People by extension are made one-dimensional, in service to dominant narratives, or disregarded. Women like my mother tend to be portrayed in the West, if they are portrayed at all, as nameless and interchangeable. She could play the part of a body, a victim of violence and/or a sex worker, that suffers and dies, typically as prop, background, or in service to Western characters and their stories. There is a lack of “narrative plenitude,” to borrow novelist Viet Nguyen’s term. All of which to say that was motivation for writing this story, in English, and complexly, to counter the stories or lack of stories out there for women like my mother.
And yes, also, in some way, to counter a monolith of identity assigned to people of Asian descent in North America that includes the story of “model minority.” The model minority construct is an aspirational smoke and mirrors, a strategy of white supremacy with its racial hierarchies, to use as a wedge and argument that offers up “Asian success” to avoid responsibility for or addressing historical and structural racism and the damage it continues to inflict on Black and Indigenous people in Canada and the US.
CM: Are you working on anything new at the moment? What has been the most fulfilling part of being a writer for you?
HN: My current writing continues to be interested in transtemporal storytelling as I consider the sacred alongside other boundless forms of kinship. I remain inspired by language itself and am drawn to the ancient origins of poetry and song, to where music and language, ritual and magic meet. I am interested in how language can sing and interact across time and thus circulate as true time — as “quantum probabilities of resonance and reference.”
I think what I love best in poetry is a kind of pressing into and against the damage of the past, the concerns of present conditions and the very real worries over possible futures — while offering potentials and possibilities for something else, including beauty and wonder.