 Thank you, Paul. Good evening. Thank you very much. It's always daunting to be doing anything with your father at all. And it's also an honor to be with him tonight. And I really want to thank Paul Singnorelli for putting this together. As he said, we're going to be talking a little bit about the Vietnam War tonight. And before we get started, I just wanted to say that I feel rather indulgent in talking about the Vietnam War, something that happened quite some times ago, when we actually have a situation in Rwanda, in Bosnia that we need to pay attention to, that we're not paying attention to enough in this country. And so I do feel rather indulgent. And I appreciate your being here tonight and to look at the Vietnam War through a perspective of myself and of my father. Let me quickly mention where the ashes are came partly because no one had talked about the kind of experience that my father went through. He speaks English, but he prefers to write and speak in Vietnamese. He wrote his memoir about 12 years in Vietnam. I started translating it. And then I decided that what my uncle decided that was a bad translation. So I said, well, I'll just go and write my own book. But it is the story of my father's capture in 1968 in Hue, in the Tet Offensive that many of us will remember. And it's also about what happened to the rest of the family during that time of the war from 1968 to 1975 when I left Vietnam in 1975. And also about life in America for me and what it means for me. Do I call this country home? Does he call this country home? And we differ on that at times. And the conflict that my father and I have gone through over the years on this issue of home is partly described in where the ashes are. One of the things that I've been mentioning to people that have been curious, if you look at him, if you look at my father now, you wouldn't realize that he spent 12 years in prison. And it was difficult for him. He can tell you later on if you want to ask questions about that time. I keep saying that he wasn't tortured. But I keep reminding myself that to live in a room where you pace back and forth two steps one way and two steps the other. And when you lean your back against one wall, your knees touched the walls in front of you. I would call that torture as well. He doesn't talk about it very much. So I write about that. And it's difficult for me to write about my father and to realize what he's gone through, to read his memoir. One of the things that I always wondered is what I would do in that kind of situation, how I would survive and how he came out with such sanity. And one of the things that my father did, that he described a lot in his own book, was to write poetry. In prison, he didn't have paper, he didn't have permission. And so he would compose poetry in his head in order to keep his mind functioning in order to stay sane. And then when he finally was released in 1980, we sponsored him to come to the United States. It was a process that took four years while my mother was in South Vietnam as well or in Vietnam. He came to the United States the first 10 days in San Francisco. My father sat down and wrote out all these poems that he composed in his head for many years in prison that he'd kept in his head because he was afraid if he'd ever uttered a word of it in Vietnam, he'd be put back in prison. And it was very difficult for me at that time to try and read this poetry. I wasn't prepared to deal with his years of prison, but he was very calm and quiet and disciplined as I always remembered him. And in 1991, he was able to publish these poems, both in Vietnamese and some translated versions, which is a book that was published by a group in San Diego. So he's going to read from that tonight and I'll read the English versions of it. Let's get started with that. Ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Mr. Paul Signore, director of the volunteer services, for giving me the opportunity to present my poetry to such a distinguished audience. This is a collection of poems composed during my years of captivity in North Vietnam. It recalls the long march from Hue to Hanoi along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the daily life of a prisoner in solitary cell. It also reflects the efforts to overcome the complete isolation and to survive. To give you an idea of what is a Vietnamese poem, I will read one of the short pieces of the collection and I will ask Dick to read the English translation. This book has been published as Dick has mentioned in 1991 in San Diego with the English translation by some Vietnamese scholar. The title is Tính Toa. In English it's Sítín Stíl. In English it's Sítín Stíl. In English it's Sítín Stíl. In English it's Sítín Stíl. In English it's Sítín Stíl. In English it's Sítín Stíl. This poem has been composed in Tanguyen, North Vietnam in 1970. Thank you very much. There are two English versions of this. One is called Sítín Stíl. The other one is called Quietude. The Sítín Stíl is by Professor Huynh Chan Tham of Yale University. The English adaptation called Quietude is by a man named Phuong and from Texas, I prefer the one by Cold Quietude so I'll read that. As my crossed legs freeze to the thick stone floor, I no longer feel the spinning earth. I have sat motionless for two years in one spot, night after night watching the moon wax and wane and constellations faithfully bloom every evening beyond the trellis of thin bars on the jail window, an indelible image of stillness, undisturbed even by the drifting clouds. In pain and sorrow I sit here, placid amidst the moon and stars. No ocean storms or hurricane can disturb the high hilltop I am on. I sit in this temporal world while moonlight purifies my soul. The terrestrial pink dust that settles outside the prison gate does not stain my grey prisoners shirt. I sit here while my cold numb heart continually kindles its fire of faithfulness. Even though my flesh and bones might turn into stone, like that rock resembling the fabled mother holding her son to watch for the return of her forever-gone husband, frozen in her eternal weight atop the mountain. Here is the other poem composed during the long march from Hue to Hanoi. It was composed when I crossed the 17 border, the 17 parallel, that is the border between the two parts of Vietnam. When we stopped before dawn in our long march northbound, the bamboo trees faint shadows bore heavily on my tired shoulders. The murmuring breeze lulled the hillside hamlet to sleep. After the air raid, the night was strangely quiet. Nothing was left standing, banana trees, cassava plants, hedges. We finally came to a battered thatch hut, where a small torch flickered. I hung my hammock and shook the dust off my travel-worn shirt. I realized the real sufferings caused by the war between the two parts, lending an appreciative ear to our landlady's story. Morning followed morning, misery succeeded in misery. My younger brother was killed in the Che Tien Western Mountains, and the upper Laos jungle is holding my two older brothers' remains. Each day I wait for my beloved until daylight fades and stars die out. But moonlight over Binhai River keeps my anguish alive. Even the rise and corn wither for my departed husband and silently lament the fate of the warrior's foreman wife. Who is the cause of our separation of bombing over there and anxiety over here? On a swimming hammock engrossed in my thoughts, my heart was heavy when a rooster's crow heralded the midpoint of my march into exile. Ladies and gentlemen, another poem composed in North Vietnam in 1973. Relative sufferings. For six years past I have waited behind the prison's iron bars for the day when I return across the river. The setting sun disappears too quickly beyond the high mountain, leaving my lonely existence to the dreary blast of an eternal winter. Relative sufferings. For six years past I have waited behind the prison's iron bars for the day when I return across the river. The setting sun disappears too quickly beyond the high mountain, leaving my lonely existence to the dreary blast of an eternal winter. Resting my back against the stone wall, I feel chilled to the bone. Looking at my misery in the face, I find life freezingly cold. Gazing through the jail opening at the mountain rock to size it up, I try to estimate the extent of my suffering in days to come and judge my present misfortune still negligible. Oh, Benhai River. I have spent these six years fidgeting on the mountain slope like a brook struggling to flow toward the open sea. The Benhai River is the river that divided North and South Vietnam for the war years. This is the other one composed in Hanoi in 1969. I have spent these six years fidgeting on the mountain slope like a brook struggling to flow toward the open sea. The setting sun disappears too quickly beyond the high mountain, leaving my lonely existence to the dreary blast of an eternal winter. Looking at my misery in the face, I find life freezingly cold. Ngo ngang chan chiếu, đợi chờ chim sống gà trưa, không gian quá thiếu, thời gian quá thừa. Trân vướng buồn hai thước, một bước đi lên, một bước ngừng. Lòng vướng dặng ngàn no nước, nhớ tự do, như hổ nhớ dừng. Ngày tháng đá đành không vội và, ngãn dòng lịch sử cũng ngừng trôi. Hòa đàm chưa vỡ tường bang giá, tiến quật còn cao ngọn lựa sôi. Sa cách tất găng gạch dày àm đàm, tiến đọc khẽ đưa sang, cũng vang nghiệm giao cảm. Cùng một dòng rông, cùng chung chiến tuyến, cùng một tấm lòng bể nhiều sao xuyến. Đắm chìm đêm tối màn te, khao khát tự do sứ mạc. Hoa thấm tình thương, lòng người diễm lẹ, đất ngát muôn hương. Nghe rồn về từ mấy đại dương, sống chiến đấu trông tim thế hệ. Lá rộn ràng chờ gió viễn phương. Thuyền chính nghĩa căng buồn vật bệ. Giao rực hồn rối thịt truyền mình, đăng đêm tù chói nắng bình minh. This happens to be my favorite poems of his. Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language, and it's very difficult to translate from Vietnamese and to get the richness of the sound, as well as the words into English. But that's no excuse for me. On a common front, one of the ways for my father, he doesn't want to talk about this very much, one of the ways for him to survive in prison when he was being constantly interrogated by his captors was to compose poetry that showed a certain kind of defiance and to go through the sessions with the captors without telling the secrets of the south. I hope that you can get that from my reading on a common front. Nightfall with its shadows exacerbates my plight and sets down my sorrow under the longen trees. Wind and rain swell under the eaves, where a hurricane lamp swings and spreads its jaundiced light. Somewhere in the 40 tiny cells behind heavy bars, someone heaves a sigh of distress. This group of inmates, helpless birds from all around, battered by a tempest are cast here, away from home with broken wings. Each night, watching my own shadow, I feel solitude deep in my soul, and I hate the strangers of my bed. Each morning I wait for the birds' early song and first cocks crow, and remember I have got too much time to spend in too little space. Footsteps I can find in a two-meter cell in which I make one step forward and stop after the next. I imagine the vast expanses of my country and long for my freedom like a tiger for his jungle. Not only days and months cease to elapse, history also stops in its tracks. The peace talks have not broken the icy barrier, and the intense heat of the war has not subsided. We are only a few inches apart, separated by the thickness of a tarnished brick wall. Through the wall of a faint noise can resound with communion, because we flow in the same stream, stand on the same front line, hold the same beliefs, and spread by the same aspirations. In the shadow of the bamboo curtain, I crave for the Fatherland's liberty, the sweetness of love, the gentle nature of the people, the multiple sense of the land. I can feel from distant oceans the waves of struggle in the hearts of an entire generation. As tree leaves the weight abrees from afar to rustle, our cause will sell on a sweeping wind across the sea. Vivatiously my soul tickles and my heart throbs, viewing the moonlight in the prison as a dawning ray of hope. You can ask him how he held his hope up during this time in prison. I can't begin to understand it in order to try and answer it. I'll take a seat while I go through my version of the story. I'll bring him back up if you'd like to. When my father was taken away in 1968, it began to teach me a lesson that, you know, life is a strange thing where one day your parents are just going to disappear on you. And I was nine years old when I was captured, taken away. My mother tried to give us as normal a life as possible under the circumstances. So we went to school. I was nine years old. I played the games of a schoolboy during the day. But at night we'd go back to having nightmares. We'd go back to waiting for the rockets to arrive at night and to wake us up. The war intensified. We didn't hear from my father for many, many years. We never lost faith either. We couldn't believe that he would be killed or that he had died. So we kept the hope up. And we went to a town in central Vietnam to live where he'd been assigned to work there as a civil deputy governor of the region. As the war intensified, we get to 1975 when central Vietnam was slowly being overtaken by communist forces from the north. And my mother ended up sending me to southern Vietnam to stay with uncles. She was going to come with me the next day. She was a principal of a high school that had been taken over to be used as a refugee camp of people coming from the north. She got stuck behind. So I left Da Nang and went to Saigon with a sister who was mentally ill. And from Saigon a month later, in April 30th of 1975, 19 years ago, my uncles in Saigon, my aunts, took me out of Vietnam. We went to a little island off the coast of south Vietnam and from there sailed to the island of Goam and then went on to the United States. I want to read you of that time in April since it's 19th anniversary. This is not that camp we went to to wait for the American ships to take us away. We were fearing a bloodbath. It was an incredible fear in south Vietnam. After 1968 when my father was captured, 3,000 people had been buried alive by the communist soldiers. And so when we were in Saigon in 1975, we were truly afraid of a bloodbath and of that kind of condition. So we all ran away. For the next few mornings, we sailed outside the entrance to our barracks to wait for news of the American ships that were to take us away. Each afternoon we lined up to receive a few litters of drinking and cooking water. At all hours, officials from the crumbling Saigon government and others connected with the American forces in Vietnam arrived on trucks that shuttled between the airport and the camp. All feared of their common bloodbath. Performers from a CIA-sponsored anti-communist radio station went scorned in the barracks next to ours. At night, Vietnam's well-known traditional fitler, Li Ling, played sorrowful tunes. That music is enough to rot the inside of my stomach. I complained late one night when my uncle found me sitting outdoors on the steps to the barracks. When helicopters began landing on the cleared airway behind the camp, we knew our departure was near. That evening, tribal soldiers hired by the Americans took us down to the docks. Small boats would take us to a ship moored in the bay. The soldiers ordered us to leave our luggage behind, assuring us that the bags would be brought to our boats. Later, they told us that refugees from a nearby holding camp had stormed our compound and stolen our belongings. I lost all my clothes, my books, and the photographs of my parents, sisters and grandparents. I still had a handbag, a discarded military container designed for mines, which contained a toothbrush and some underwear. Crouched in the darkness, we waited on the beach. The tribal soldiers exchanged gunfire with Republican sailors trying to board the American ships. It was near midnight when the soldiers took us on a cargo ship, the Pioneer Challenger. Standing, sitting, squatting, lying curled up against each other, people covered every inch of space on a steel deck. They looked like worms. My relatives and I were dazed. We stared at each other in silence, suddenly aware that we'd been on a losing side, and now we're deserting our homeland and our ancestors. Images of my mother and sister swelled in my head. My chest and stomach burned with shame. It was April 30th, 1975, the Dave Vierkong tanks rolled to victory in the center of Saigon. The war had ended. The war in exile began on the dark blue waters of the South China Sea. For hours of flotilla of small boats brought more people out to the ship, each fighting the wind and waves to climb the iron steps that swung precariously down its side. High up on a ship's deck, I couldn't hear the shouts of the man below as they struggled to tie their boats to the larger vessel. Or the cries of mothers as they passed infants and small children up the ladder. Dozens of people fell overboard, helicopters circled overhead, taking turns landing on platforms extending from the side of the ship. More hoards of refugees emerged from each helicopter before it was pushed off the deck. An ugly mass of empty smoking still sinking slowly into the ocean. Squeezed on a pioneer challenger, I sat frightened and utterly alone. No one in my family had thought it necessary to talk to me about the plan to leave our country. I had obeyed my uncle accompanying him as a refugee. All I had were the clothes on my back. My father was in prison in the north. My mother stuck in the now. You Quinn, I left in Saigon, deep in the seclusion of her ailing mind. As it was, my mother made her way to Saigon. In the end, she lost her job. She went to Saigon first to look for it for myself and for my sister, You Quinn, and returned to her job later, but she lost it because she'd abandoned her job basically. Because of her connections to the former government, because of my father and that she was... the job was taken away. So she ended in Saigon and began to sell noodles on the streets of Saigon after 1975 in order to survive. By this time, we'd heard once from my father after the peace treaties were signed in Paris, and we knew that he was in prison in the north in 1973, but by 1975, I left the country not knowing where my father was, whether he was alive or not. I left with my uncles who didn't want to take responsibility for my sister, who was mentally ill, so we left her in Saigon with an aunt. I came to America and the first place I came to was Fort Smith, Arkansas. I guess I don't have to say much more, huh? I first set foot in America on a May afternoon in 1975 in the middle of flat miles of rain-blurred green fields around Fort Smith, Arkansas. America's image has changed for me in the years since my first steps on its soil. I've enjoyed New York City both as some excitement and its picture postcard wintry beauty after a snowfall, and the idyllic golden hills of Northern California that rolled toward the wine-grown valleys. I have lived many years among the faultless architecture and steep, windswept streets of San Francisco, but I have never had reason to go back to Fort Smith, Arkansas. At times, I have thought of the soft cream fields I saw that afternoon, as though they had been a part of me all my life, and sometimes for brief moments, I have missed them the way a person misses his home, his memory of it filtered and made attractive by time away. In that May afternoon, the light rain over the fields, the expanse of space, the softness of time, all of these things soothe me. For the first time since my chaotic departure from Donung, then saigon, Fukuq, and the ocean journey and the days of harsh sunshine and exhaustion in Guam, I felt a sense of comfort. It might have been just another ordinary May afternoon in Fort Smith, but it embraced me in the fragrance of something I had not known until then in my life. It was peace. Yeah, it was peace, but I didn't know that after a week in Fort Smith, Arkansas, I was taken to Fort Chaffee for a week, and then ended up in Ohio. I had a brother who had been sent to Ohio to go to school in 1966, so I went to join him in a little town in Ohio called Sylvania. Obviously, I didn't take well to Sylvania, and I want to read you a little bit about living in Sylvania. The search for peace, safety, and freedom justified my departure from Vietnam, and I found them all in the United States. The voice of reason nagged at my conscience, reminding me to be grateful that I had survived the war and that I had found the door to America open. But like a scorned lover, I could not believe any future happiness was possible. On the streets of Sylvania, Ohio, I kept looking for heads of black hair. American coffee disappointed me. The oranges were bitter. The people had no style or sophistication. Life was bland. Moe as close to that tree as you can, and then when you get over to this side, keep going back and forth in straight lines. My brother didn't explain, flinging his arm out to accentuate his words. I was being initiated in the suburban ritual of mowing the lawn. It had turned hot in June. I pushed the mower around languidly, sweating in the afternoon humidity. Every two weeks, I would pull the mower out of the garage and strive again to get as close as possible to the tree to cut perfectly straight swaths across the yard. At those times, I hated the heat and the lawnmower and the sound of the two girls next door splashing about in their swimming pool. I hated my self-pity and my tears, which were mixed with sweat. I began eating great quantities of ice cream every afternoon, as if the pleasure I got from its milky substance could take away my frustration and sorrow. I hated feeling guilty about leaving my parents and sister behind in Vietnam. I hated not being able to find a job and not having any friends to talk to or things I could relate to. I hated being dependent on my brother for food, money, rides, everything. I did not like the tidiness and the hyper-efficient ways that made life in America so artificial. I hated Ohio. The smell of fresh-cut grass even now brings back to me the memory of the heat of a Midwestern summer and the sadness of life in exile. On my brother's front lawn, I could see the other houses up and down the street. No way in sight was there anything but cars and various colors and houses in shades of blue and gray. No one ever walked on the primmed sidewalks. And there were lawns, neat, clean lawns, big and small, rectangular or square, flat or graded, wheat-free seers, brochure lawns, simple, imperious or ornamented. Sylvania was lawn country. And for me, the lawns began to stand all that was sterile and uniform and conformist in America. There's some Vietnamese in the room today. Did you eat a lot of ice cream when you first came to America? See, that's why you're thinner than I am. So after three months in Sylvania in Ohio, outside of Toledo, I decided I would look for something more sophisticated. So when a friend came to visit me, so, you know, can you take me to Canada? I have some friends up there, they have a phase in Montreal and you could go hang out with people and talk to people and stuff. So he took me up to Windsor and we went to Detroit and I got scared. Frightened for the first time in my life. Really frightened. And then I didn't have the right immigration papers so I couldn't cross the border. But there was no going back to Ohio now. So I went to Virginia. I went to Washington, D.C. I went to Virginia, ended up working where I had to wear a cowboy hat. And I had the cowboy shirts with the red checkered stuff and the jeans and cowboy boots. And I would greet the customers as they came in with my accent in English. Howdy, partner, may I help you? But I went through a year of high school in Virginia and it was rather posh neighborhood for people who were high ranking officers in the army and working at the Pentagon and my uncle was there because his wife had worked for the American in Vietnam. But while I was going to school I had this one little incident I want to read for you. I missed a formal dance midway through the school year. When the next dance took place I agreed to go. Wearing my uncle's dark brown three-piece suit and my platform shoes I left the house feeling sophisticated. Marie Lundy was waiting for me over at the school. But as I approached the building lightning struck. Everyone else was wearing western outfits. I shot back to my uncles. Somehow I had failed to notice and no one else had mentioned that it was a square dance. Marie waited patiently while I changed. I was hopeless on the dance floor jumping and kicking completely out of step and unable to hook arms in the right way or follow the dance leader's calls. We abandoned the dance and Marie took me to a pizza hut. It was really classy in Virginia to go to a pizza hut. Sitting on her red blouse, short white skirt and white boots and ignoring the stairs we got she soothed my embarrassment with her big eyes and managed the kindest mile. I wish I could find out where our address is. I could send her the book. This time in Virginia was also odd. It reminded me of the time in Vietnam where you go through it a daily life and listening to the rock and roll radio station their WPGC in the afternoon go down to hang out with classmates at 7-eleven and then at night drive around in cars like Mustangs and go down to the donut place called Crispy Cremus. There was a Vietnamese woman there who every time I came in she'd give him this whole box of donuts go go go go run run run take it. But it was a real time because I'd do that and then go home and have nightmares about my mother and my father. I would have nightmares about visiting her in a hospital going from floor to floor to floor to floor not finding her or if I'd find her she'd be on a stretcher being taken away in a helicopter and I'd wake up and go back to school and it was just odd to be in Virginia and then I got a job after I got fired from Roy Rogers I started selling paint for a place so in Williams we cover the world and then I went on commission, I was selling paint and this man walked in and said I want some cream paint and I said what do you want to paint how much do you want? He said I want to paint Fort Belvoir and it's a huge fort it's like painting the Presidio here so I made commission on that and went out and bought my first car a VW and paid cash with it but that wasn't enough to pay for school so I ended up in California and lived in San Diego for a while and began to work with Vietnamese people as a social worker and then slowly moved to I moved up to San Jose I don't want to admit this but I lived there for a year I go back there and I feel really strange and then I moved to San Francisco and while in San Francisco I got a job so I became an American citizen because the job was in Indonesia and I'll read you that part about becoming an American citizen I decided in one short moment to get US citizenship until then the thought of formally becoming an American had always pained me I had filled out a few applications since 1980 the year I became eligible but I always discarded them I would simply be disloyal I had come to dislike America for what had been done to the Vietnamese and to Vietnam during the war even as I lived in its cities and among its people I remained alienated from American culture the most powerful force that was forcing me from submitting the application was the feeling that acquiring American citizenship would forever sever my link to Vietnam I took comfort in the fact that I was applying for citizenship only to return to Asia to live among my own people yet shame clung to me like a heavy summer shadow I succeeded in having the application process speeded up and within three weeks I was summoned to the Immigration and Naturalization Service in San Francisco the woman who met me for the citizenship test smiled gently her white blouse blue blazer and red neck bow making her look the part of a civil servant she wanted to start the test right away the panic set in with her first question did I know who designed the American flag Calvin Klein I ventured he designed everything else in America had me and what takes over if the President of the United States should be unable to fulfill his duties Alexander Hague I said the lady laughed and moved on to ask what the requirements were to be a presidential candidate I had studied that in political science class seven years before in Virginia well I said you must be a U.S. born well that's good anything else you can't be mentally ill the woman opened her mouth her eyes bulging I wondered whether she would ask me if I was a football, hamburgers, chivalr lays I survived a few more questions before she said you're really funny you know that by the way she added congratulations at the courtroom ceremony a week later I stood among 300 other soon to be Americans the judge managed to move me with a well-rehearsed speech about the American tradition of accepting immigrants and about the democratic principles of the founding fathers next to me stood a great Filipino in a sky blue blazer of a pattern bell-bottom golf pants an American flag in his hand another pin to his lapel he repeated the judge's lines word for word during the swearing-in ceremony loudly pledging allegiance to his new country he then turned to me with a big smile and perhaps because he noticed the dampness in my eyes extended his arms to hug me I patted his shoulder and turned away how was I to explain to the jubilant man that my tears had not been tears of joy had become an American how could I tell him that they had come when the judge talked about bearing arms for the United States I did not want to explain the images of American Marines pointing rifles at Vietnamese villages in black bachamas thank you so I ended up leaving for a year went to Indonesia and came back here and I came back from Indonesia because my parents were allowed to come to the United States at that point and I found I was reunified with my parents in 1984 it was a strange time to be living with them I was 25 years old at this time and I'd last seen my father when I was 9 and we had to readjust to each other and it was difficult and sweet and wonderful and the first week he spent time writing poetry and I was worrying about how to support them the second week he put on a suit and went down to Holiday Plaza for a job to him 12 years of prison all these years of war didn't really matter now there's a new country and they've taken on to this country very well my mother started working for a program to help women with infants and just only retired last year at the age of 70 meanwhile I left this country again and went to work in Europe and then finally came back here and my parents are starting to accept me again now um if you have questions for either of us I'll bring my father back up here so please join us but I'd like to start by just asking if you can explain a bit about your family's politics because you know I get the feeling that they were very connected with the your government and I'd like some explanation of exactly how deeply they were thanks well my father can tell you about our family politics I mean I look at it this way maybe he'll tell me that I'm wrong which he often have to but definitely we were anti-communists we were working for the he was working for the South Vietnamese government I would point something out when during the time that we're talking about from the 70s on or the late 60s South Vietnam was ruled by the army of South Vietnam my father had nothing to do with them didn't care for them, didn't care for that style of government but because of his patriotic feelings he worked for the government and became a civilian and refused to join the army and went to school to be able to sustain himself as a civilian and worked in the government he under degree in public administration from Michigan State University and from the public administration institute in Vietnam as well and worked that way that brings up the question of me wanting to go back to Vietnam to live now because I look at it in a culture context that is home for me that's where I grew up that's where the values are that I appreciate that's where there's a kind of lifestyle that I appreciate but my father differs with me so it's still a socialist country ruled by paranoid men he doesn't think I should go back and live and it's dangerous there's an urgency there you don't have the kind of problems that you have in this country you have other problems that are more immediate and you need to worry about it like putting food on the table every night and that kind of urgency drives you to be and behave differently okay thank you I hear your father talk a little bit about how he remembered the poetry and how he constructed it and just the whole process of what that was a seller in North Vietnam is not to have a desk a pen and a piece of paper we cannot write out and write out this poem whose spirit is against the policy of the North Vietnam so I don't have any paper I don't have any pension I don't have any desk so I have to think over the subject to choose the words and to to try to have the music of the world and I try to do it mentally and I have to memorize it I think I think this is a very good question because when my memoir was published some critics asked me almost the same question they asked me how you can remember this detail after almost 15 years I think the main reason is because I was in a very special situation you are in a cell living lonely years after years and you have to think you cannot stop thinking so we have to think over and over the same problem so you cannot forget it so I remember this detail when I was writing my memoir it's much easier to remember this thing and to fix this thing by some words poems are short and so it's much easier to remember the poem and to memorize and to keep it in your head and the first time I came to San Francisco in 1984 the first thing I have to do is to sit down at the desk and to write out this poem thank you I have more questions Did you write poems before you were captured by the communists and how did you find your poem in prison? actually I like a poem and I have written some poems when I was almost 18 years old so I had to practice writing poems when I was very young it's so suddenly that I started to write poems when I was in prison for me and for him my uncle as I said his wife worked for the Americans and we got put on the list to leave the country by the Americans that were about 100,000 people left at that time in 1975 on the south do these poems follow traditional Vietnamese patterns of classical literature or are they sort of in a modern English-American idiom this is a very good question we have in Vietnam what we call the ancient poem written according to some very definite rules but after we get in touch with the Western civilization we have to adapt some modern rule and so I used to write the poem according to the ancient way but I do have some poem written according to the Western style we combine the new and the old one side my question to you is how do you see yourself as you know you can get long enough so we work out lucky enough to understand the culture better than the people who came after us my question I guess is how do you see yourself different than your so-called older generation like your sibling your brother the next question is what is the whole challenging thing you see as a generation like I asked facing here in America that's a good dissertation question for PhD proofs but it is a question that I ask myself constantly Tony and I suppose other Vietnamese do too yes I've been here for a long time for 19 years now and I came at a young age so that I could adapt easily to life go to Krispy Kreme listen to rock and roll song and all that sort of thing at the same time I see myself as sort of a bridge between that older generation and that younger generation and so if you ask me how I feel about what difference there are my father can tell you he's very different from the way he lives than I live he lives within the Vietnamese community he goes to book readings in Vietnamese he watches Vietnamese videotapes I do some of that at the same time I write in English and I have American friends Western friends, English friends and I learn other things as well and so that difference is that I have the chance opportunities have been educated over here as well so that I can do those things and yet I know within me sometimes I can't intellectually recognize it but I know that I have certain Vietnamese values certain Vietnamese traditions my wife whose English is always baffled by that so I function daily in a western setting I'm very westernized then when I'm home by myself with her I will react in certain ways she goes you're being very Vietnamese indirect and sometimes patient or overly patient and so I see myself as a bridge with that younger generation as well where I have something that I took with me when I was 17 when I left the country 16 the younger generation now intellectually know about Vietnam they've read books about Vietnam about their homeland they care and are curious about Vietnam they don't have the kind of this is generalization but that kind of deep emotional thing that I have that I want to go home I want to live like the Vietnamese in Vietnam and I believe deeply that I can do that I think they have more doubts than did I do did I answer your question did you have a question what writers do the both of you admire and perhaps emulate first of all I like Hem Nguyen I used to read the French author and I like Antigy I like François Moria I like Romain Roland I like Paune Valérie just to mention some of them when I was 9 years old when my father was captured I inherited the library I decided to move into his library so I had his library so I grew up reading Berlin and Baudelaire and books about Richard Nixon and Mao Tung in America I think I've there are particular people I want to mention there are people who I'd like to be able to you know in certain books that I wish I could have written Rin Malin from South Africa his memoirs of Exxon and of being back in Africa is terribly how do you describe it it's a wonderful book V.S. Nightpole is a good writer to me I like him Paul Theroux as well he's a very good observer of things other questions I thought somebody else might ask you this but since they haven't I would love to know how you managed to keep a hope in your heart while you were in your little cell and so on yeah I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know and I'm trying to mumble to them I think this is one of the cruises question how to first of all how to overcome the complete isolation and how to survive I think the only way we can survive in such conditions is to hope I think I was in the right way so I will succeed so I hope even in some dark days of the there is a time in activities I keep to maintain the hope in my heart I express it in some of my poems and I think when the poem was published some of the readers write to me and tell me that you give me hope because in this condition you can hope so now we can hope now thank you very much