<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nDuong\u2019s poems emphasize a female perspective and Vietnamese survivors: a father and children who are trying to make a new life in a culture that sometimes feels hostile and foreign. Duong, whose family initially left Vietnam in 1975, also uses the language of poetry and memoir to uncover meaning in ordinary moments, often centered on recognizable San Jose locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She writes how she and her siblings carry \u201cclothes, pans and secondhand sandals\u201d into their rental home north of Tully Road; sleep three sisters to a bed; and ride in a car with her older brother on Story Road to buy beer, listening to REO Speedwagon on the eight-track and hearing him reveal he was molested when the family was living in a refugee camp in Guam. She also writes about a much-older brother who fought the Viet Cong in 1972. He nurses his sense of displacement in the United States by drinking too much and vowing to return to Vietnam to \u201ckill the communists.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Duong\u2019s poems recount other trauma. She and girlfriends, as young as 9, became targets for sexual objectification and abuse by older men or boys \u2014 a common plight, she said, of immigrant girls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Entering her teens at Yerba Buena High School she found herself straddling two identities. She was the \u201cmodel immigrant\u201d who attended church on Sundays and studied so she could go to college. But she also got into her share of trouble with her friends, latchkey kids like herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe created our own fun, cutting class, getting into fights, going to night clubs with fake IDs,\u201d Duong said in an interview. In a poem, she describes the allure of boys, identified as \u201cVietnamese gangsters,\u201d who became the focus of concerns about youth \u201csuper predators\u201d in the 1980s and 1990s. Duong writes that a 15-year-old boy called \u201cBabyface\u201d let her hold a gun he planned to use to rob a jewelry store. \u201cHe\u2019s saying he likes me, that I look sweet,\u201d Duong writes. Later, she hears on the news that he\u2019s been arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison for assault with a deadly weapon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Duong\u2019s father remains a powerful and complicated presence in her poems. He had to raise her and her siblings without their mother, who stayed behind in Vietnam for 20 years for reasons that never became clear to Duong. He grew up French colonial rule wanting to be an artist but was pushed into the seminary, then the military. Coming to America meant a crushing loss of status that could be humiliating, including when he collapsed in his car muttering after being scolded in a supermarket checkout line. But he always doted on Lan, his youngest child, and would announce at every family celebration: \u201cI carried her in my arms when she was 2 years old, from Saigon to America.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Duong told the audience Thursday that not wanting to hurt her father is the reason she took 25 years to write her poems. He\u2019s part of that older generation who\u2019d prefer she keep silent. But, she said, \u201cI wanted to commemorate his life and breathe life into the complexities of his personality, and by extension that older generation and the difficult choices they had to make. I do bare it all: The good, the bad and the ugly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Martha Ross <\/strong>| Features writer<\/p>\n\n\n\nMartha Ross is a Bay Area News Group features writer for The Mercury News and East Bay Times who covers everything and anything related to popular culture, society, health, women\u2019s issues and families. She has previously reported or edited for Bay Area news and lifestyle publications, including Walnut Creek Patch, and Diablo, Oakland and Alameda magazines, as well as The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand and The Economist. She graduated from Northwestern University with a BA degree in German studies and from Mills College with a MFA degree in creative writing and English.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[The Mercury News] The poems in Lan Duong\u2019s debut collection offer a personal view of a momentous time in Bay Area history: When San Jose became home to the largest concentration of Vietnamese people outside of that Southeast Asian nation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88895,"featured_media":54428,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[2153],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\u2018Dirty stories\u2019: Vietnamese-American writer\u2019s refugee life in 1980s San Jose becomes poetry - DVAN<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n