 Welcome to KDRT 957 in Davis, California. I'm Pete Pasteur and today we're having a special edition of the programs here on Saturday afternoon. We're broadcasting live from the studio in Davis Media Access and our first guest this afternoon is Tran Fung, or excuse me, Fung Tran from, you're from Sacramento, welcome. Yeah, thank you. And he's gonna be speaking to us in a spoken word. And I've watched this young man perform and I use the word perform, but it doesn't sound like you're performing because you're speaking from the heart. You're sharing your heart with us, you're not performing. I think there's definitely some theatrics to it. It's definitely coming from an authentic place. But yeah, I think it definitely involves something that I've developed over time and a craft that I've worked on. But yeah, I appreciate that. I think coming authentically and from a real place is where the performance actually comes from. Right, right. We're doing this because we're in the middle of a fundraiser, we're trying to raise an additional $5,000 to keep us going through the year. And we're searing on the community. KDRT does a lot to invite artists, especially a lot of artists that have never been on television or radio before. And this is our way of giving them a voice. It's our way of the artist being validated that they have an art and willing to share. And so, and it's the volunteers that have an opportunity to give back to the community. It gives KDRT and Davis Media an opportunity to give back to the community. And by that same token, it gives Davis an opportunity to embrace these young artists. So, I think it's very good that you're here because you are very involved in your community. Yeah, absolutely. So, just talking about the importance of providing platforms for young people, a lot of my grad research was focused on social media and how that's kind of like the venue for a lot of young people to find voice. I think it's a scary space sometimes, especially when it comes to how adults interpret it. But it's really a space where they thrive and feel like a lot of identity. And so, I appreciate the opportunity to be here and share my work. But yeah, a lot of it is grounded in making sure that we amplify the voices of our young people in our community. Because oftentimes they're not in spaces where they're involved with policy and making decisions, but if we're really gonna be about young people being our future, they have to be plugged in now, not later on. So, yeah, definitely all about it. And the one thing I forgot to mention is that if you'd like to donate while you're listening or even while you're watching, go to kdrt.org and you'll see a notice there for donate. Send us $5, $50, $500. We're more than willing to receive it. So, Feng, I think you're from Sacramento. Were you born in Sacramento or? No, actually born in Stockton. Stockton, okay. Literally I got out of the hospital and my family was like, well, we're moving to SAC. To SAC, okay. And then you spent a little time in the Bay Area. Yeah, I went to college out there at UC Berkeley and then I went back to Sacramento, worked for about four, five years in SAC and at UC Davis. And then eventually I had an opportunity at College of Alameda. So I was in the Bay Area for about a year and a half. But just three weeks ago, I decided to be full-time and do my art. And so I moved back to Sacramento to support my family. So yeah, literally you're catching me at the very infancy of me committing full-time to this art. What a leap of faith, my goodness. That really is a leap of faith. It is, it is, absolutely. Do you sleep at night? Oh, I try to, I try to. Yeah, yeah. A lot of it is, yeah, is it gonna work out financially? But also I think it's excitement, the anxiety of like, now I can commit to everything to this. And there's a great book out there. I think it's The Art of War. And so you're just dedicating yourself to your craft and sometimes you're scared of your own potential, right? And so when you're investing, you're at nine to five into what does my art look like in the next evolution? It's a scary venture, but that's the journey you have to commit to growth. We're looking forward to hearing you now. Good luck in your venture. And if people want to visit you online, where can they go? Yeah, you can go to my website. It's www.FongTranFONGTRAN.com or you can give me on social media, at Fong Poetry, Fong Tran Poetry. Okay. Well, you're on your own there. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. Yeah, appreciate it. Awesome. So I decided to start off on a really exciting piece. This one's called History Textbooks. Yeah, I hope you all like it. Yeah, they say those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. So it must be the case that he who wrote history wanted to rendition, regurgitation, relapse to repeated mistakes, because all I see when I watch the news, are headlines that match the chapter titles of my high school history textbooks. World and war and Western thinking run on repeat like broken records, Eurocentric euphemisms like Western expansion, exploration, manifest destiny, and spreading democracy are just tactful translations from the truth as slave trade, colonists, imperialism, exploitation of your natural resources, and a bad excuse for US military. Americans played this red, white skin, blue, Superman, Syria, several mentalities. Third world nations being left with nothing, but privileged lands, broken homes, and false promises of American dreams. US history textbooks are written like a bad version of Lord of the Rings, and I've been born since the first book. America's Frodo Baggins, Uncle Sam is Gandalf, and the evil Sauron has made out to be every youth of color with the hoodie, skittles, and iced tea. Men and women in a hijab or turban are someone with a family crest on their chest, gang validated as a thug-rated tattoo. World's history is just American propaganda. Last year's communists is this year's terrorists, the blatant bastardizing of brothers of color just to beat them down. So maybe history doesn't repeat itself, but sure does rhyme a lot, and we are just caught up in a bad fairy tale. If you do not tell your stories and write down your own histories, then someone else will. And I'd say, and it's the man that someone is usually really white, really old, and really male, and the alphabet soup at the end of his name, PhD confuses him, confuses what he understands to be facts, is really just a glorified opinion. So please, sir, expert your way out out of wrongful omission, please tell my young students that Vinnie means people. My people, my history, is more than just two textbook pages about a war, but where are peoples? Are cultures a way of life? Please tell my young students that their peoples' history in helping the USCIA in the secret war, watch this little goddamn secret and know what knows about it. We must reclaim the history that has yet been told to us, and if hypocritical historians can ridiculously rent on this racist one-down of bias narrative, then I can too. So from now on, the migration of Vietnamese people, since the fall of Saigon, would now be known as manifest beautification, because goddamn it, we look good, and this post-racial myth that believes we are all the same, and not a beautiful diversity, many different. Well, that stuff, it really don't make sense. We're more like a salad bowl, but I don't like American salad, so we're like the papaya salad of America. And my mother, my mother is a real POW, not a prisoner of war, but being in a refugee camp for eight months, she was in a prison of warriors. We will write our own stories. We will make our own histories upon canvas, upon page, upon walls, upon mines. Cool, so yeah, I hope you liked that one. And so I know this is not Sacramento, this is Davis, but I feel like I was gonna do this piece because I feel like we're sister cities. Davis just being the white, richer sister. But I feel like we know about each other's politics, and I feel like it could relate. So this is, I actually wrote this for my 30th birthday. Recently I hosted a big benefit concert, and I was like, I have to write something new. And so this is called Sacramento Solidarity. If Sacramento was a woman, she would have been raised by a single mother, breastfed on some pho and steak tacos. She wasn't White House polished, like I-80 billboards made her out to be. Sacramento was heavy brown sweet, she was mixed. She had resting beef face with a side eye that can cut anybody. She wore a leopard print hijab with hooped earrings, and her favorite cultural food was fried chicken, probably from San Jordiz, not the porch, probably from Popeyes, not KFC. She didn't get into fights for her, she got into fights for you. She was loyal, knew her history, and always remembered she was stolen land from a walk native Americans. She was hot, like devastating 100 degree, five day forecast hot, like risking major foot burns, trying to walk out in some $3 rainbow slippers from VinFat supermarkets, and she reminded you why you miss the water so much. James Rutter, community pools and American rivers, she reminded you that you need to go work out, but then she reminded you you need to renew your three year Costco membership 24 hour of fitness, but then she reminded you you need to pick up like your mom's Costco cards, cause you don't have your own, and then she reminded you as much as you think you're a grown ass man, you still depend on her as your mother. Sacramento had a long string of bad relationships, like there's this one dude that called them the Maloofs. They had a really good run in 2002, almost got a ring, but this Robert Horry from LA, home wrecked them on home court. He had the audacity to try to leave her to go to Anaheim. It sucked, there was a lot of back and forth, but it's cool now, she's going steady with some brown dude. They got a stadium together, but they keep on making bad financial decisions with their Demarcus cousins, but it's cool, they'll figure it out. Growing years, Sacramento needed, never needed the success of Kings to feel like she was royalty. Her unwavering love of self was always the trademark of her monarchy. She is a queen among politicians, that play these game of thrones that think they run the city, but know that it's always been its people that keep this city running. When millionaire owners sell our sports teams, it was never met with devastation, rather just known all too well frustration, because we've been through betrayal before. People of color have always known these lessons, being grounded at home, that we billionaire owners and politicians leave in bandwagon, Sacramento grew up learning how to fight, just go to work, never backing down from challenge. These politicians try to stake claim on cities they don't even know, labeling us the city of farm to fork, or the city of trees, planting seeds that never grow. No, Sacramento is a city of proud immigrants. Know that our pride may be quiet, but it has always remained powerful and relentless. If you translated farm to fork to immigrant, they probably cuss you out with a confused look and be like, duh, what is that? Like that make no sense. We've been doing this stuff well before, why people try to make it popular. My Sacramento always stays ready. Knows the difference between McKinley Park and Oak Park, El Dorado Hills and the Heights, South Sacramento and El Grove. She tell you the difference is Calvin Boulevard. That's exactly how she figured out where everything is. She'd be like, is it by the five or is it by the 99? She knew where all the hoods were, right? By finding all the liquor stores and fast food joints, she didn't know what exactly what gentrification was, but she knew at least how to question it. How's it any good when you make a poor place nicer, when you have to make all the people in it move? People ask me all the time, what's that to do in SAC? A simple question with answers that just fall in closed ears and deaf minds. I wish I told the truth more often. I'd say, you can run. Run into at least five people from your high school at Walmart. You could drive, drive down Stockton Boulevard and get boba milk tea and a burrito on the same block. You could sight see. See into the eyes of your high school sweetheart. Instantly remember how you awkwardly learned to fall in love for the first time and try to puzzle piece the most sincere way to tell her congratulations. I'm really happy for you. Sacramento is not a Disneyland. She's not bedazzled herself with cement stars and Hollywood boulevards. She doesn't show off her overpriced dance clubs. She's more than a Capitol building or a tower bridge that leads into a midtown of hipster bars. You see, there's a difference between a place that's designated for its tourists and more for its people. A place that's less about its glitz and glam and more for its heart. A place that's less on attraction and more of a home. Cool. Yeah, so this next piece is real recent, real new. And just like I said, being an artist for the first time, I think a commitment to artistry is always committing to growth and always committing to the most vulnerable part of yourself as a way to push the art. Because art is always evolution and growth. And so, yeah, this piece is called Superheroes. I always wanted to be the superhero. I wanted the katanas, the batmobiles, the power morphers, the samurai swords, the super saiyans, the transformers. Childhoods before and after school were wide-eyed fixations on TV screens. Losing myself, the stories about saving the day and sword fights, the gun shootouts, saving the girl from the bad guy, putting the bad guy behind bars, the crowd applause, the glory. I surrender to these stories every single time, even though I always knew how it ended, because these narratives are always bent onto the side of hope. When you're a quiet Vietnamese kid that lived under a house of negativity and neglect, you latch onto the very little light you can find. I created a secret identity in superheroes because it couldn't make a regular one at home. Big brothers and fathers weren't around to teach boys to become men, and so we learned life lessons from cartoon-cape crusaders. That makes sense, right? Missing father figures replaced by action figures. Superficially learning that these superheroes can only be made of gold that can never break nor rust, but the psychosis is essentially flawed. Flawed in this idea that you can never have any, but you still cross country one miles to prove your heart of steel, climb skyscrapers and towers to prove you have no height to fear, community service others, because you never need to serve yourself, play social justice poet savers on performance stages, because I might never need to save myself. And the comic book page turns. The damsels in distress that you tend to love so much uses your own superpowers against you, your ego, the one that you said you love so much, and called her your superwoman, shows you your online dating account. Okay, Cupid shoots her green arrow straight through you. Your destined life partner and sidekick finds all your fangirls and sidechicks. When you think you're the hero, your absolute greatest fear is knowing that you could be the villain. And so you riddle her with fabricated falses that become dark and dismal. Batman caves in, boulder ups and avalanches over, ways like an impossibility that you can never uncover. You learn to suppress the truth, like you've always known how to superman suppress your emotions, suppress your weaknesses, suppress reality, live out reckless fantasies that you feel no repercussions for, suppress the fact that maybe you are just like your cheating father that you made and grew up and hated to be with great power comes great responsibility. Being a man I need to learn with great privilege comes necessary accountability. I never held the weight of it all. I never tasted my own poison. I can barely swallow the venom that my masculinity and stonesty could conjure up until I saw how meaning left each syllable I spoke, how I was the bane of every broken bone. I saw the vengeance in your words, saw the vengeance in your eyes. The story feels so typical. Another man's fantasy, superhero fantasy becomes another woman's love tragedy. I'm sorry you're the one to painfully remind me how truly ordinary of a man I am full of faults with so many wrongs I haven't written poems for. This, this is not about apologies. This is about owning up to the damage that I've done. This is about tracing the bad blood that come from toxic fathers to ill sons. This is about learning what the truth is that it will hurt, but somehow some way, it will always set you free. Some stories don't always finish with the happy ending that before you ever learn from your faults, you must understand how deep and entrenched these earthquakes run. This girl was never meant for you to win over, just like the day was never meant for you to save. Sometimes the lesson is not about being the hero, but more about remembering what it is to be human. Yeah, so that was probably one of the most challenging poems that I've ever written, personal, vulnerable, but I wanted to stress it took a long process for me to even get to that point. And something I really wanted to share was I went through a journey of like therapy and meditation and really dedicated myself to commit to what the issues were in that poem. And I know for a lot of communities of color, like mental health is one of those stigmas that a lot of people don't tap into. And I had to really get over myself and realize that that was a resource for me. And I really encourage folks to, whatever that process is for you to seek support to get the help that you need. I always had this idea that it was only for crazy people, but in reality, I think in this time more than ever, do we really need to think about our own mental health are not only like physical balance, but the balance that's up in here because it's pretty, it's a lot of chaos going on right now. And so doing the work here is really important and finding community to support you. So yeah, this is my last poem. This is my favorite poem that it's about my favorite person in the whole wide world. It's about Vietnamese mothers. And I actually wrote this, this is one of my oldest poems. I wrote it when I first got into poetry for the very first time and I was in college. You know, I took this class called Poetry for the People presented by June Jordan at UC Berkeley in the African-American Studies Department. I took that class because I was told if I just wrote a poem once a week, I would just get A and so I just took the class because I ended to boost my GPA up. So I took it for a very insincere reason, but it ended up completely changing my life. And then that's very same semester that I took that class. I graduated and it was the only other time that my mom came to college and saw me, you know, experience at UC Berkeley. The other time was she dropped me off at the dorm. And yeah, and so naturally I was like, hey mom, so what did you think of the poem? My mom was like, it was good, it was good. I didn't know you're a rapper. So, mom, if you see this for whatever reason, yeah, I'm rapping. Y'all both who, Meru Kongu, Namkan Chai, Namkan, with the autumn wind, the mother lullies her child to sleep in five minutes of the night. She stays awake all mo, hi, ba, bom, not measures, mo. While other mothers may greet the kids in loving Betty White voices, my mom, she only speaks to me in direct orders, take out the trash fong, refill the rice. Now, as a kid, there was things I didn't quite understand. For example, I didn't know why our garage was to be selected as an unofficial storage place. For half of Sacramento's rice supply, there was no way I was gonna refill that rice. Well, my mom heard that prices for rice were about to go up. I swear this woman cleaned out every Asian supermarket like it was the end of the world. Take out the trash fong before I even opened the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink. I already had to discuss it this way so that potent smell of baby diapers and fish sauce hit me like a punch in the face. I reach out to grab the Washington charging bucket that we apparently call a trash can, type the Ranch 99 grocery bag, take it out of the dumpster, out back. Mom, I swear I've seen these things about trash cans, trash bags with straps and odor blocking protection. I don't know why we haven't upgraded like just a little bit, but there's at least one thing I understand. Our nose warmed to the smell of fa, mom, I swear I've seen these things about trash cans and odor blocking protection. You see our mothers, they don't love by their words, but by their actions. They don't give kind of heart compliments, but direction in their food. Their food is a signature of their love because they don't hug and kiss the way other mothers do. Hi, when she doesn't cook, she sews with steadied, weathered hands, she sews with sincerity and confidence. Every stitch landing in exactly the right place, sometimes sister prom dresses don't fit in a big family budget. So she searches store rack samples and sews overnight, working her nonstop magic, humming the lullabies of olden time to the hum of the sewing machine and she creates a masterpiece. She sews this together at the scene between generations, reconciling language barriers and cultural misunderstandings that get stretched so thin they eventually break and when those breaks happen, they need to repair. See, Rita is a stitching, making it stronger than ever before, ready to be stretched and challenged again. Now, do you all know family sitcoms like Full House, Family Matters, Home Improvement, Fresh Prince of Bel Air? Well, I grew up watching these in-between dinner family social. They gotta mean something, right? I deduce every 90 family sitcom plot in a one-holistic summary. One, kids wanna do something, parents won't let them. Two, they do it anyways. Three, everything that can go wrong goes wrong. Parents catch them to get angry. Parents have epiphany, go full-on talk. Kids apologize, parents apologize. Always be for these, son. Thanks, mom. Hugs, kisses, and the credit start rolling. Yeah, this don't look like Vietnamese mothers. You see, Vietnamese mothers love, doesn't always look pretty with skittle rainbows. It's not child-parent talks with loving background music or Disney Channel smiles or corny lines or life philosophies. You see, our parents practice what you call assertive guidance. But in America, they apparently call that child abuse, though. But you know, our mothers use tools of love, right? With all authority, like the fly swatter, the feather duster, the broomsticks, what the actual broom part, or the slippers. Cause you know, they gotta back up just in case. And a mother's eyes is proper parenting. Their acts of love may be misinterpreted as statements of violence. For example, that'll sit down like, directly translating means I will kick you until you die. But you know, in mother's love language, what that really means is, son, I will use all my strength to teach you. My said, big die thou, oh, you about to know the back of my hand. Son, you will understand the soft tenderly caress of a motherly's touch. Tell ya, all right, don't you bother you got more to do in life. Oh my God, I have never met a child like you. Oh my God, I've never had a child as special as you. You see these words, these scars on her heart. Traumatizing reflexes are never stricken more than the other side by what a mama says. The pain that she inflicts on us, there's nothing to the pain that she feels every single day. Boom, the faded photographs of a family posed in front of a camera on the stand. A sea-foot tone and worn rat cracks reminder of a life before. Communist warfare in the South escapes our motor boats, wreaking of gasoline, pirates stealing the last of a food, drink, and sisters, moving from refugee camp to refugee camp to unknown terrain, having a side lap all over again, working six days a week, 15 hours a day, every month of the year, hard, arthritis, hands, past carcinogen, poison, paint, for fingernail, glimmer, and they really ask why. Vietnamese American women are five times more likely to have cervical cancer than white women. It reminds us that we will never suffer the way she did. Now, she no longer lullies us to sleep, tucking us in and kissing us goodnight, but she is always there, not just with the autumn wind, but when they're confronting tornado earthquakes through landslides, measures, days, months, and years. She is drought, the sacrifices our mothers make for us to never thirst, waves crashing down on us like flash waters and stir-fried chopsticks, streams connecting and nurturing our lives, one generation at a time, rain, abundant like the food you bring to our tables every single day. There is no way for us to repay her for what she's done for us, but through the words of this poem, we love her, we honor her. Thank you, mom. Come on, Matt. Thank you so much. Yeah. Yeah, awesome. Thank you, boy, that hit you right here. Yeah. Do you, when you write one of these poems, are you completely exhausted after you put all of this emotion on paper? Yeah, I think writing, yeah, if you meet any writer that's always like suffering, struggle, yeah, because you're not trying to write something completely ordinary, and sometimes you do that, right? You just free write, but I think most writers are attempting to write something that pushes them, and therefore is something new for the world. So it is a struggle. It's definitely like you're pushing yourself and kind of all ends. So it's a great struggle though. I feel good after I've pushed myself to put something on paper. It's always a struggle to just put words on paper and then keep going, and sometimes it takes a couple of days to get back into a piece, but yeah. Right, right. Well, we certainly want to thank you for, I say this to many artists that come before the camera or before the microphone. I can't say I'm an artist, I can't say I'm a musician, but people like you who come and stand before an audience and share their most inner thoughts, we owe you a huge gratitude because we see ourselves in your words, so thank you for doing that. Yeah, thank you. And thank you for appearing on KDRT. Yeah, absolutely, thank you for the opportunity. Thank you, thank you. Bye now. Bye.