{"id":1068,"date":"2010-11-23T00:01:16","date_gmt":"2010-11-23T08:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dvan.org\/?p=1068"},"modified":"2018-10-14T22:03:49","modified_gmt":"2018-10-15T05:03:49","slug":"diacriticize-the-stuff-vietnamese-people-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dvan.org\/2010\/11\/diacriticize-the-stuff-vietnamese-people-like\/","title":{"rendered":"diaCRITICIZE: The Stuff Vietnamese People Like"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/p>\n Do you enjoy reading diaCRITICS? Then please\u00a0consider subscribing<\/a>!<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n Hello. This is the first editor’s note for diaCRITICS, which we’ve decided to call diaCRITICIZE: The Stuff Vietnamese People Like. It’s silly, I know, but you’ll get over it and so will we. Or maybe we won’t and we’ll change it later.<\/p>\n Who’s that girl? Tila Tequila. Why Tila Tequila? I guess if I wanted a picture of something Vietnamese, I could have chosen a flag (but which flag???) or a dragon or a spring roll or a map of the country (but which map???) or a “representative” of the Vietnamese people like certain unnamed politicians in the USA who are no longer our elected politicians after the November 2nd disaster, er, elections. But Tila Tequila will do just as well to represent Vietnameseness, whatever that is. Plus she is stuff that (some) Vietnamese people like. I like her a hell of a lot more than I like those unnamed politicians. Plus we hope to have some more to say about Tila in later posts. She is, after all, to non-Vietnamese people probably the second most famous Vietnamese person in the world, after Ho Chi Minh. In certain circles, she’s probably the most famous. As Tracy Chapman once sang so eloquently, I’m talkin’ about a revolution. These pictures of Tila as a little girl bring tears to my eyes. This is America, folks! All your immigrant dreams can come true, and one day, your little baby can also become a reality TV star\/trainwreck.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Why now for the first diaCRITICIZE? It’s November 23rd in the USA, and soon we will celebrate Thanksgiving. For those of you who don’t live in the USA, this is the holiday when American citizens who are not Native Americans thank God that they’re not Native Americans; when immigrants to the USA also thank God that they’re not Native Americans; and when undocumented immigrants wish that they were documented so that they, too, could thank God that they’re not Native Americans. So I anticipate a drop in readership during this time and didn’t want to have any attention fade from our worthwhile upcoming posts (we’ll be back on Monday November 29 with “Eye Level: The Photographs of Jamie Maxtone-Graham,” and his work is really, really eye-catching).<\/p>\n After 35 years in the USA, I still find Thanksgiving a strange, exotic holiday. I can remember re-enacting Thanksgiving in elementary school, when we little kids would stage how the Indians brought food to the starving Pilgrims. Funny thing, we never re-enacted the day when the Indians said, why the f@$& did we do that?! Since then,\u00a0I’ve been invited to one or two genuine Thanksgiving affairs with homemade stuffing and cranberry sauce, but in my own home, we eat the canned stuff, and mashed potatoes made from dehydrated white flakes that look like laundry detergent. For a while, my parents had kind friends who owed them a big favor and who were restaurateurs, and this meant that we had the most awesome turkey ever–Vietnamese style, with bean thread noodles and water chestnuts and diced Asian mushrooms for stuffing, and basted in some kind of Asian sauce which must have had nuoc mam. Heaven. If anybody has a recipe for an Asian turkey, do share with me (if I get enough recipes, I’ll put them up online here; I did find one for soy sauce brined turkey<\/a>). Otherwise we get ours pre-made from the supermarket. Or we just skip the damn turkey altogether and eat Vietnamese food with a canned ham.<\/p>\n