Saturday, July 19, 2008

Eaves of Heaven   Andrew Pham's new book Eaves of Heaven is out (his previous was Catfish and Mandala). I guess it's been out for a while, I'm not sure.  Mir at Dim Sum Diaries had mentioned it earlier. The Washington Post is reviewing it for tomorrows paper week  Fall from Grace - washingtonpost.com  The New York Times did last week  Book Review - 'Eaves of Heaven,' by Andrew X. Pham - NYTimes.com).  While the campus book store doesn't have either of his books, McKeldin library where I work does have the latter book. I was able to check it out and start reading it. When I finish it I'll have to come back and say more    The book is a curious hybrid form: Memoigraphy I think. A history of his father's family through generations. A biography of his father's life, orphaned, at an earlier age  told narratively in his father's voice.  I know my friend Trân's family forms a similar story of similarly aged people. Trân once told me her father (and his brother) were also orphans; building a life in uncertain times. Losing everything in the wars, beginning again. When she told me this she had two separate scanned pictures of her father, and maternal grandmother. She was endeavoring to put these together in the same frame. Either physically, or photoshop them together if she could manage it. It was a gift for her father. She indicated that her grandmother meant a great deal to her father. Further she recalled a period when she was young, when they lived in her home. "So this is a women who held you when you were a little girl," I asked. "Held me?" Trân echoed, "No." She was not a woman who held and comforted small children. "You look a little like her," I offered, but she was not a woman Trân thought she looked like. Looking at that picture again my thoughts ran to a play I once saw:  La Casa de Bernarda Alba.    When I had gotten the book out of the shelves I found Trân dis-inclined to acknowlege either the book or the author particularly, even as I held it in my hand. As she did Andrew Pham's last book, which another co-worker Yeri did read and like. There is much in the Vietnamese experience which is private I think. Private trauma private fears and unconsoled aggrievements. These are not to be discussed with outsiders.  I think about it still, because I think about Trân a great deal. For emigres, forced choice emigres, Vietnamese and others, who left the land of their birth because of calamity or oppression. There is a tendency to look back upon an idealized homeland. In this aspect it will be the fount of all possible virtue. It will be traditional unchanging perfect. It will represent all against the turning perspectives and shadows of the past for the 1rst, 1.5,  and 2nd generations. The 1.5 generation, a recognized and discussed group The Vietnamese American 1.5 generation : stories of war, revolution, flight, and new beginnings [WorldCat.org], I believe refers to those born in Vietnam, but who grew up in America, such as someone I knew in college, Hoa Nguyen, who came to the United States when she was three. I imagine a 1.25 category for Trân who grew up in Vietnam and did not come here and become a citizen with her family until she was in her twenties. This is the work I think that Andrew Pham takes up with his writing. To tell a story. To synthesis an understanding, a perspective, greater than any he held when he started.  There are four worlds of the Vietnamese living in the west. The emigre community close knit and protective. The joined nation, here the U S. But there are extensive communities in France, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere as well. The remembered homeland. The burden this is expected to carry is too great for any coherant concept of a place. What it loses in concreteness, slipping away in so many sepia-toned pictures of Saigon, perhaps it gains as argument. Against all this the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: roiling hungry locked down. The country - the authoritarian government - that modern (free) marketeers adore. Reliable, free from regulation or the demands of labor  Corporate love for communism | csmonitor.com. Globalizing engagement, many are begining to realize, is a long term, not a short term process. In the short term authortarian governments are only strengthened by investment and the deals they cut. Greater liberty is only gradually extracted by a combination of increasing material well being and increasing awareness information and of possibilities that accompany that.   There is no level on which I can really understand the experience of individuals like Andrew Pham or my friend Trân. I have nothing like it in my life. But in addition to opening a window into other worlds, one thing reflecting on this does is cast a little clearer the Massachussetts in my mind. Not exactly the same as the one up north of Rhode Island, which I left thirty years ago. A vision of a questioning contrarian place, of a nation, that is becoming still and does not exist yet to be traded upon by those desiring comfort, safety security, and wealth over freedom. 11:47:12 PM    comment [];trackback [];

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2008 P Bushmiller. Last update: 8/2/08; 3:31:26 PM.