OF CULTURE, BOND AND BONDAGE: THE VIETNAMESE WOMAN WHO BLINDLY LOVES

CREATIVE PROSE

BY Uyen Nicole Duong, copyright 2009

I have had the most incredible Vietnamese crepe (banh xeo) in my life at a public housing complex in Denver.  Not just any kind of Banh Xeo, but the kind they make in Binh Dinh, or Nha Trang, central Vietnam. The mother of a Vietnamese young man invited me to their home. They’ve lived in Denver’s public housing for the past 10 years. She works in a restaurant to support her son. In that small kitchen, she stood and cooked. She must be about 5 years older than I. Very petite and young-looking, like most Vietnamese women.

The young man had looked me up at the University. Then he came in to see me.  He is not one of my students, but he offered to help me with my research about Vietnam, free of charge.  He spoke accented English, and told me he wanted to become a medical doctor only to do research and to help people. The young man is intelligent and ambitious.  He said he was born post-1975. Under communist Vietnam, he never went to school. He fished instead.  He learned to read here in America when he became a boat person at the age of 12. In America, he relied on the Vietnamese Catholic Church to have a sense of community and to learn how to write Vietnamese.   American public education took care of the English.

I left their house with a full container of banh xeo and a bag of books. The young man has collected all kinds of Vietnamese books for me, all the books that I had already read and knew pre -1975, like the whole collection of Tu Luc Van Doan (modern Vietnam’s first Independent Pen Club writing in the Roman alphabet).  He did not know that I had read all of those books pre-1975. 

What is scary to me is that the young man has told me he is now very upset that some Vietnamese man in California who allegedly heads a movement to free Vietnam has been arrested and awaiting extradition as a terrorist.  This is the young man’s hero, because the family believes that this Vietnamese Californian is leading a respectable resistance movement that will eventually overthrow the government of Vietnam.  As Catholics, the family is hardcore anti-communist.  Of course I know all this, the “resistance movement” business, simply because I have listened to first-generation Vietnamese talk, and have been sent their debates via the internet. 

My Tulips Have Grown East, 

watercolor on paper digitally inverted DNN C1998, 2009