SN: What is the most recent poetic thing you’ve seen or heard?
DKN: This minor character’s art exhibit in the recent Amazon Prime adaptation of David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, starring Rachel Weisz. The character, Greta, is an Asian American woman who cooks and takes care of the twin OB/Gyn doctors. Throughout the show, she collects their detritus (used tampons, hair, soiled clothes etc.). You have an uneasy feeling about it all (like, is she trying to get their DNA to clone them?), and in the end, you witness her solo art exhibit in which she plays her mother giving birth to her (Greta’s mother died while giving birth to her)–and all of the twins’ detritus is collaged in the gallery space. It’s fantastically eerie, uncanny, moving, astonishing. I’ve been meaning to look up the artist whose work this exhibit was based on.
SN: That is haunting, yet beautiful. I have to watch it now.
So how has motherhood been treating you, Di? How is Peregrine doing since the last time I saw her?
DKN: Oh, parenthood is like singing a song on one note that lasts even as you run out of breath–it’s magical, wonderful, exhausting, torturing, and somehow, time is accelerating. Peregrine is really enjoying interactions with strangers–waving, saying hi, blinking intentionally to get others to mimic her. It was such a wonderful surprise to see you again after decades–and for you to gift your children’s book to Peregrine. And for you to meet her!
Steve, how has parenthood shifted / changed you? How has your relationship to your daughter changed as the book you wrote (To Baby, From Daddy: A Love Letter from a Father to a Daughter) remains the same age (that is, the book is a time capsule of the moment when you were writing it, but both you and Stella are aging every day)?
SN: Parenting has uniquely transformed my perspective of being patient, present and understanding of what our time here truly represents.
You know that little girl you saw running around the park that calls me daddy? I’ve been waiting to meet her my whole life. When you’re young and uncertain, it’s incredibly difficult to maintain that focus through all the turmoil and agonizing moments in life, but I always kept that motivation in my mind that I would get to be with her someday. My book is a compression of moments that happened on this journey to fatherhood. Just like a time capsule, whenever I open that book up and look through it… it feels like I’m rediscovering all of those beautiful memories again for the first time.
DKN: She’s like the house in a way. A vision you worked toward.
Someone once told me that in their culture, babies/children choose which parents to be born into–so, I like to think that Peregrine chose me and my spouse, and Stella chose you and your spouse.
SN: I’d like to think that’s the way it was always meant to be, and I wouldn’t change it for anything at all.
DKN: Me too, and I am curious and remain open to how our paths (individual and combined) might unwind as Peregrine and Stella’s unfurl in the coming decades.
SN: Raising this next generation of Nguyen women is a trip! Is there any advice you have for me being one yourself?
DKN: I would like advice myself, honestly. Perhaps the advice I’ll share is advice I wish I had for myself as a child, and advice I’m trying to follow with my own child: try to listen as carefully as you can, make (safe) spaces for all the emotions, and foster all the gifts–and have fun with your daughter! I think I overheard that children thrive when they can see that their parents are happy. So let’s try to live in ways that bring us joy.
SN: I’m with you. Also, let’s make a vow to not pass our trauma baggage onto them. They deserve much better than that. They really do have the potential to be the best versions of us.
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and forthcoming collection, Root Fractures (2024). Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she currently teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Steve Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American director, writer, artist and producer. Nguyen and fellow director Choz Belen formed Studio APA, a multimedia collective that specializes in the production of animated films and music videos. Nguyen has worked as a production assistant at Universal Pictures (Jarhead, Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift). Since 2006, Nguyen has written, directed and produced over fifty feature length and short independent films ranging from a wide variety of genres.
In 2012, Nguyen co-directed and produced an animated film, Hibakusha, which chronicled the early life of a Hiroshima bombing survivor, Kaz Suyeishi. The animated film stars Karin Anna Cheung, Connie Lim, Daisuke Suzuki, Jane Lui and William Knight. The film was dedicated to the American Society of Hiroshima-Nagasaki A-Bomb Survivors in an effort to spread awareness for nuclear disarmament and was completed on the 67th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, August 6, 2012. Nguyen and the Studio APA crew have toured with Hibakusha throughout the United States since October 2012, and the film has been screened at the Japanese American National Museum, Vietnamese International Film Festival, Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, Dragon Con in Atlanta, University of Michigan, UCLA, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, San Diego State University, UC Davis, UC Riverside, DisOrient Film Festival, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, and California State University, Fullerton. Hibakusha has gone on to receive nominations and awards, including the Special Achievement Award and Best Animated Short at the 2013 International Uranium Film Festival held in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.
Nguyen released his first children’s book on June 2020 with Sky Pony Press and Simon & Schuster titled To Baby From Daddy, which feature his own illustrations and personal composition of paternal love and advice to his daughter.
