Stupid Power

a Stupid Power is a useless ability or behavior that one possesses that could, potentially, under the right circumstances, at the last minute, under great duress, defeat Evil and Save The Day. like being Invisible when no one is looking.

though my Stupid Power in grad school used to be the Procrastinater, it was so powerful (or rather, grad school so sucked the lifeforce from me) that my passion and work ethic deteriorated to such an extent that i quit grad school (see previous blog). i suppose it did defeat the Evils of OverEducation & Social Ineptitude and save my days from Toxic Academic Personalities and Intellectual Ennui and return my love of books to me. and anyways, i mean how much bigger could my brain get, right Uyen?

this morning as i blearily roused from the sofabed to the sounds of my niece getting ready for pre-school and dragged myself into the jack-and-jill so uuubiquitous in tract homes, i had a flash of intuition about my stupid power. unfortunately i gave up coffee earlier this year and so hadn't yet made my post-Viet Nam secret morning cup of joe to get me through. i forgot it somewhere between puzzling out making the sofabed and weo, now as i enjoy a double shot of G7 (apparently the coffee of ASEAN heads of state).

so in the spirit of viewer driven content and democractic principles upon which this nation-state was founded based on philosophy and land stolen from the indigenous peoples, i'm willing to take constructive suggestions on the nature of my Stupid Power. comment away.

i already know what my darling eee-eht-eoo spouse is going to say, and no, saying eye-KAY-ah and UUU-bik-kweh-tus does not constitute a stupid power, nhé! yu top rai hia! TAO YÊU MÀY!

my favorite things

an ongoing compilation of things that are like golden warmth suffusing my innards. i started this list while in san d after my ba ngoai had a second stroke in may to eke out a small corner for rainbows.

rainbows remind me of my childhood in honolulu. the lush fragrance of verdant foliage, the kelly green and vermillion squished tree frogs on asphalt, vivid hued kapiolani after the rains. the rainbows on the mainland are so pastel and faded in comparison.

manzanita tree "mountain driftwood"
wildfire-propagated native shrub to the Western chaparral region being nothinged by the langoliers of sherbert sub-/urban simulacra, sprinklers and palm tree imports in a neverending story about the failure of the imagination . the Pallid Manzanita is a federally protected endangered species that grows in Oakland and is usually uprooted willy nilly by to protect the Hills property values. my burl of manzanita from fifth grade camp in Cuyamaca and an egg-shaped rock from ong ba ngoai's house on Auburn are the remnants of my childhood mementos after my stepdad's accidental shed explosion and thievery by psycho ex.

barn swallows
take a walk through a meadow during champagne & strawberry-hued dusk of a golden summer through an aerial ballet of swallows flitting, roll and court catastrophe on a trackless roller coaster of agile grace.

miniature donkeys
my favoritist stuffed animal was a melancholy white & red jack that i chose from my mother's mysteriously procured bag of stuffed animals one easter, though sorely tempted by the teddy bear, because i thought no one else would love him and so rescued the donkey from neglect. he unfortunately was donkey-napped by the aforementioned thief. though i have loved horses ever since i used to gallop along playing Unicorn on the playground, and read every Chincoteague book, i am won over by the canny perserverance of the humble donkey. and wouldn't a small herd of jack & jennet be just the way to keep the acreage trim?



pygmy elephants

melancholia 45 rpm

treading foggy liminal space
returning to the land of the living
from dwelling in the valley of death's shadow
emerging, blinkblinking at the intense luminescence of life--
eyes shaded against the glare
shielding those who would fall into their shadowed chasm.

going about the rhythm of living
like a flintknapped needle
dropped in mid-song
tracing the worn spiral grooves on a vintage record
muffled and hollow echoing of remembered voices
revolving inwards
dis-syncopated

vinamese booklist

i was asked recently to assemble a list of VN books for a young brother incarcerated and hungry for knowledge. so this is the partially annotated list i generated with the help of tuyen and loan who *actually* read the books during grad school. i am in awe of their big brains.

• Gangster we are all looking for by Le thi Diem Thuy. fiction. refugee. plotless poignant vignettes kinda like House on Mango Street or Wild Bully Burgers

• Before the Revolution: Vietnamese Peasants under the French by Nguyen Vinh Long b/c i hate the french and think all viet people should reconsider their francophilia. i never think of salt or tires the same way after reading this.

• Watermark: Vietnamese American Prose & poetry edited by Monique Truong

• Dream Shattered: Vietnamese gangs in America by Patrick Du Phuoc Long a counselor's social/cultural take on why kids join gangs

• Even the women must fight: memories of war from north vietnam by Karen Turner

• Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh (memoirs from a VC)

• Novel Without A Name by ThuHuong Duong contemporary Vietnam writer, unromantic gritty look at war, got her censored

• Diary of Dr. Dang Thuy Tram will be publish in English in 2007, the "Anne Frank" of Viet Nam, entire vietnamese text is here

out of print but really great anti-war writing from the 1970s. well worth it if you can find it.

• We Promise One Another: Poems from an Asian War. 1971. comp. Jacqueline Chagnon & George Luce written by Vinamese folks from all sides during the war and translated into English by Chris Jenkins and chị Tuyết. her woodblock print on the dedication page is tattooed on my back.
  

• Lotus in a Sea of Fire by Thich Nhat Hanh buddhist opposition to the war

• Women and revolution in vietnam by Arlene Eisen

• Women of vietnam by Arlene Eisen Bergman these two books are almost interchangeable.
  

• Reflections from Captivity by Phan Bội Châu, Hồ Chí Minh, edited Tran Khanh Tuyet, Christopher Jenkins poetry from two famous anti-colonizer patriots
  

my disclaimer is that i havent read any of the below but they sound good:

• From Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath edited by Philip Mahoney American & Vinamese i assume
  

• Viet Nam: Borderless histories edited by Nhung Tuyet Tran prolly more academicky, non nation-state look at VN history, prolly inspired by the geo-body analysis of Thongchai Winichakul in Siam Mapped
  

• Vietnam an illustrated history by Shelton Woods

• Voices of Vietnamese Boat People oral historys

• People's History of the Vietnam war by Jonathon Neale (Howard Zinn follower, member of ISO, typical white hippy Left take on VN war)

• The Lotus Unleashed: The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Vietnam, 1964-1966 by Robert Topmiller looks at the nonaligned third force, buddhist self-immolation against VN war

• Patriots: the Vietnam War remembered from all sides by Christian Appy

• Radical origins of the Vietnamese revolution

• Communist Road to Power in Vietnam

• Four Hours in My Lai my lai massacre

• Vietnamese women at war: fighting for Ho Chi Minh & the revolution by Sandra Taylor

• A country, not a war: Vietnam impressions by Harold Turner, travel writing

tonite the dream ends

by the mormon state? really? are they drinking 3.2% beer in celebration tonight?

etchings of Hà Nội and Hội An

Rain on Lo River

Trần Nguyên Hiếu

artist whose artwork my siblings and i discovered in the piles of original-prints-for-sale at the Museum of Fine Arts gift shop. he is one of the only artists in VN to employ the aesthetic and method of etching. we all loved it, dropped down most of our spending money (in dollars!) and got prints. according to his artist statement:

In this works, cold and desultory lines alone, like strands of hair, when knit together become a refine and velvety carpet woven into a poetic, profound and harmonious image. The hands of the etching-artist are the meticulous hands of a jeweller in work which would stifle vibrant artistic feelings. Nevertheless, the ancient streets of Hanoi and Hoi An and the age-old trees in the countryside of Tran Nguyen Hieu have brought us to an aesthetic ecstasy and to an everlasting dissolution.

i'm not sure about the dissolution or ecstasy part--though in his naked lady/japan erotica series (warning NSFW!) certainly i believe the O-word may be apropos. but in his architectural city-/land-scapes, i think what captured my eye is the (post)modern obsession with capturing details photographically, the asymmetric/skewed perspectives (without being all picasso), element of timeless nostalgia/historic weightiness, the juxtaposition of ghostly negative images with a suspended present, the multiplicity of historic/cultural moments that comprise the timeless present and the alienating indifference of the etching method in gothic gangrenous washes from generations of monsoons and humidity.

though we all bought the "warmer" digestable HN cityscape prints, i find the more conceptual pieces intriguing. like the Lo River print above of a fishing village on the a vast river, the dual perspective of off-center bird's-eye-view and the vertical rain is disconcerting, vertiginous enough that it's hard to find one's ground. on a cognitive, visual processing level, i float above the scene. there's a melancholy tone to it and it puts me in mind of the vinamese fisherfolk moored in the Gulf off of Biloxi lost to the ocean's swells during Hurricane Katrina.

we did not see any prints that were this vivid in color (and somehow it doesn't seem right), this is a contemporary snapshot of a street and in the borders around it (click on the photo for enlargement), you can see the faint etchings of historical memory that haunt this lane.





O Quan Chuong Street

Văn Miếu elephant

Temple of Literature, Ha Noi, ca. 11th Century