The Brooklyn Rail

Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born in 1976 in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam before his family moved to the United States. His work explores the multifaceted qualities of memory, be they historical, social, personal, and how those qualities inform our present moment. On the occasion of Nguyen’s exhibition, Lullaby of Cannons for the Night, he spoke with poet and translator Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng about his kinetic sculptures crafted from bomb fragments, the two-channel video installation which makes use of the song lyrics of Vietnamese poet and musician Trịnh Công Sơn, and the unsettling relationship of idolization and extinction.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng (Rail): Tuan, since your work is made of materials transmitted from the past—memories, legacies, hauntings—let’s begin with ancestry, shall we? Can you tell me some stories about your parents and their upbringing?

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: That’s an interesting first question. My father was born in Hanoi and my mother was born in Hải Phòng. They grew up in Saigon in the late fifties, sixties, all the way to the end of the seventies—1979. So they grew up during this period of what we know as the Vietnam War, or the American War, depending on which perspective one takes. I think for the most part, growing up in Saigon in the sixties and seventies was a fun time. It was cosmopolitan. There was a lot of influx of Western pop culture. There was a big rock scene. There was a big cha cha scene. My parents were big cha cha dancers. They loved to dance. My father was, I guess, a romantic. He played the classical guitar, had long hair, was kind of a hippie, tried to avoid the war as much as he could, got drafted in the last six months of the war. My mother came from a very large family of eight children. I don’t know much about the intricacies of my parents’ growing up, but I know that they had lots of fun. There was a lot of chaos, but they didn’t talk about that.

Rail: I like that they remembered dancing. Amidst all that chaos, the first thing they, and you, recalled is that they had fun.

Nguyen: Isn’t that funny? One of the first memories I have in the US is—I don’t know how many years we had been here—but there was a big dance party. A lot of the people who immigrated were probably in their mid-twenties, and I remember seeing lots of cha cha and rumba and bolero at this party. I was really young, but remembered this feeling of swaying in an ocean of movement, hips and legs, bodies twirling.

Rail: Besides the dance parties, what was your childhood like?

Nguyen: Besides the dance parties, I was a very confused child. I’ve been trying to put myself in my children’s shoes lately, to try to kind of understand this. When you’re young, everything seems so big. Time feels so slow, right? So elongated. So for me, looking at my daughter, from the time she was born to now—she just turned seven—things feel so fast for me, but for her, it must feel like a lifetime. And it has been a lifetime for her, literally. So my childhood felt so long. So much happened. But I think that’s the way we as children perceive the events that happen to us. Even the smallest events seem so big.

Rail: You know, in your films, time often feels slowed down. So it’s interesting that you think of your childhood also in terms of that temporal elongation.

Nguyen: Time is malleable, right?

Rail: Are there certain books or texts that have influenced your philosophy of malleable time?

Nguyen: I think all of the Buddhist texts that my father had in our house have been quite meaningful. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is one of them. I know it’s a controversial text written by a controversial person. But it came at a time where I was dealing with my father’s passing and transitioning, and it helped me understand a lot about dying and living. Another book which might seem distant from this, but to me is very much in the same realm, is Octavia Butler’s Kindred. These two books are not very far apart in my mind, you know. Kindred was about a woman who was going to the past, visiting a previous life. She was helping her ancestors survive so that she could actually be who she was.

Rail: Kindred’s ending reminds me of the bodhisattva’s arms in your work. Did that image come from Kindred? Or am I making up this connection?

Nguyen: Dana’s lost arm… That is an amazing connection. You know, when I thought about Kindred, that didn’t even come to mind. I came to the image via a person named Hồ Văn Lai, who appears in my film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). Hồ Văn Lai plays himself, and he was a victim of a cluster bomb when he was ten years old and he lost both arms. And then I was drawing from a kind of mythology of Avalokiteshvara, who grew one thousand arms to help alleviate the suffering of the world. And then I was thinking about mudras in Buddhism and the powers they have on the practitioner. So it’s making these connections around prosthetics. Kindred will probably now be another connection, with Dana’s left arm.

Rail: Let’s continue this literary vein by way of swerving back to one of your elders. Could you share a bit about your grandmother, who was a poet?

Nguyen: I think writing poetry was her way of hiding her points of view through, you know, things like flowers or the autumn sky. She was a romantic but I think she was also quite political. As a woman growing up in the thirties, forties, fifties, she wasn’t encouraged to be outspoken or to put her ideas and perspectives out there. Poetry was her act of resistance.

Rail: Is there a poem by her that particularly moves you?

Nguyen: There’s a poem that recounts her return to Hanoi after being gone for so long. When I first came across it, what struck me was this idea of return, and it was upon my returning to Vietnam that I came across this poem. I felt connected to her, even though her return wasn’t transpacific like my return, it was just from Saigon to Hanoi, but for many, many years it was impossible to travel between the north and the south, and I felt that in her poem.

Rail: Can we read her poetry together? Let me read her fragment in Vietnamese aloud, then perhaps you can read your translation? I can also read from mine. And then we can keep talking.

Nguyen: That’s a nice little exercise for a Tuesday morning.

Rail: I know.

Tôi Về
by Thư Linh

Từ buổi xa quê cát bụi mù
Lạc trong kỳ ảo của thiên thu
Đường dài thăm thẳm chân chồn mỏi
Sương quyện mơ hồ gió lạnh ru
Chỉ ngại lối xưa trăng huyễn hoặc
E rằng nẻo mới cảnh hoang vu
Tôi về tìm cái tôi còn, mất?
Thi hữu đừng chê khách viễn du

Nguyen: I have this obsession with quê, and quê is something that’s quite remarkable in Vietnamese culture, particularly in Vietnamese literature, and it’s something that’s very hard to translate. I just wanted to say that before I read the first line, because the first line automatically conjures up this notion of quê, or homeland, but “homeland” doesn’t quite contain the Vietnamese usage of quê.

Returning Home

From the time I left my homeland, amidst the dusty haze
Lost in the strange illusion of perpetuity
The endless road, even longer with my weary feet
The misty fog blends with the lullaby of the cold wind
Hesitant of the old route, mysterious under beguiling moonlight
Fearful of the new paths that lead to desolate territories
I return home to find the self that remains, the one gone?
Fellow poets, do not mock this distant traveler.

Rail: Thank you. It’s always fun to have a couple of people translate the same thing and then see how they differ and where they meet. My translation is a light reversal of your grandmother’s fragment, and also kind of an elongation.

Nguyen: Will you share?

Rail: It’s called “Rewinding the I.”

Rewinding the I

A far-roaming one she is. A long-distance strayer. A guest from outlying lands. Having introduced herself she now asks her poetry friends round here to kindly not mock her foreignness please. She is returning to her former homeplace. She is rewinding. She is rewounding. In search of the lost I that remains. Or is it the time that remains. That old alley she recalls is flooded with false moon. This new street ahead seems just as desolate. Damp fog is winding onto her. Dream haze coiling into her. Cold winds braiding into hair. The road is so long, so long and the feet are tired. Lost in the odd mirage of the thousand years. Far from the soil of birth. Far from the birth of soil. And the eyes, the blind I’s, are again swimming as dust.

Nguyen: Beautiful. There’s this recurring theme of bụi, all these dust motifs in Vietnamese poetry, or in Vietnamese literature in general. Why do you think that is?

Rail: Perhaps it’s connected to the influence of Chinese poetic imagery, especially Chan Buddhist imagery. The idea that the world is all dream and all dust. Dream and dust are what we’re made of. The English equivalent, I suppose, is “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” We come from the earth, and then we come back…

Nguyen: We return to the earth.

Rail: Are you aligned with this dustiness?

Nguyen: Yeah. I mean, it makes complete sense, right? It’s an idea that’s lasted for so long. We come from the earth. Everything we have that enables our survival comes from the earth. We’ve come to a point where we’ve extracted so much of it that it’s become dangerous. But we will return to the earth regardless.

Rail: Something that poetry and earth share, for me, is a quietness. You’ve said that compared to words, silence feels more familiar to you. You grew up in this difficult silence of a diasporic family, as you put it. And yet, your grandmother taught you that silence can also be strong and loving. These days, where do you live in the zone of silence?

Nguyen: We’re talking about dust and returning, and for me, the imagery of dust is one of silence, like a settling. The other thing, I guess when I think of dust, it moves around and moves about by the wind. People pick up dust, and dust attaches itself to carriages and shoes and travelers, and dust travels. It travels. It moves about, but it doesn’t voice its opinion. It is a kind of witness.

When I think about the active observer, this idea of an active observer or a witness, I think of silence. Both my grandmothers were Buddhists, and my paternal grandmother was a very quiet woman. She was a very convincing woman when she spoke, but she didn’t speak much. It struck me that she was probably in her head a lot, thinking or maybe trying not to think. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell, because I was so young, but I find myself very much like her in that I find myself inside my head often, trying to be silent inside the head. There’s a difference, right? You can be quiet on the outside, not speaking, but inside you could be a complete shit storm. And so I am looking for that silence inside where I can find a real quiet center.

Rail: I like that poem you shared by Pablo Neruda, “Keeping Quiet,” especially that line about a huge silence that interrupts the sadness. Silence and dust are also linked together in your film, The Sounds of Cannons Familiar Like Sad Refrains (2021). At the scene where they detonate the unexploded ordnance, dust flies up. We get a bird’s-eye view of the explosion’s dust, but it all felt so silent. The silence of the dust flying up stays with me.

Nguyen: The explosion happens, and the loudness, the sound of the bomb being detonated, lasts maybe a few seconds if you count the echoes, and then after that, it’s complete silence. And in the film, there’s a cloud of dust that expands to hundreds of meters tall into the sky, but it’s actually a cloud that’s settling. It’s land that has been tossed and agitated, dispersed into the air, and it’s kind of settling down back into the ground and, in a way, returning home. So that moment, for me, when I watch it again, seems spectral. It seems like an apparition. It’s like a ghost of itself. There’s a beautiful connection between silence and dust. We couldn’t actually film close up—we tried to place some cameras near the bomb, and we built all these boxes and structures to protect the camera, but we just couldn’t get a good angle of it. I think the most poignant angle is the angle from above where you just see the cloud of dust. Which is something that we’ve been looking at a lot these last few months, this last year.

Rail: It’s been difficult to look at the news. It is a repetition of what we, as Vietnamese, and I’m sure many other peoples, know well.

Nguyen: It’s interesting that you say that, and I say that too, but we know it…

Rail: Visually. You’re right. We don’t really know it.

Nguyen: We know it as inherited memory.

Rail: And yet in a way, it feels real. The transmitted wound can consume the memory and the mind. You’re right, though. We should honor the difference between the people who were there and the people who, like us, came after.

Nguyen: I think the way that memory functions, and trauma, which has become such a used word lately—the way that trauma functions is fascinating, right? Just in the fact that we’ve spoken about those experiences that we didn’t really have. But it feels so real sometimes. I wonder how that operates. I guess my work has been trying to figure that out: how memory and the body work in relation or in opposition to each other.

Rail: This is a digression, but I have to make this connection. Right now with your red hoodie pulled over your head, you look a little like Bodhidharma in these Chinese paintings of him wearing his vermilion robe. Bodhidharma was often portrayed as this almost surly-looking monk with very strong, firm, exotic features to emphasize that he came from elsewhere.

Nguyen: Bodhidharma, he traveled from South Asia to East Asia and brought ideas of Buddhism. Is that correct?

Rail: Yes. He’s regarded as the first patriarch of the Chan tradition.

Nguyen: Didn’t he also bring martial arts?

Rail: According to the lore, yes, he also founded Shaolin Kung Fu.

Nguyen: As he traveled, he came upon various animals and he learned their different fighting techniques. Tiger style and snake style and praying mantis style and so on and so forth.

Wushu, kung fu, those forms are quite beautiful. They’re almost like dance, rather than a practical form of self-defense. The techniques aren’t as harsh or as pragmatic as something like boxing or Muay Thai. They’re kind of these ritualized dance forms almost. If you’ve seen a Wushu performance, it’s kind of like ballet.

Rail: Martial art is indeed a dance, and an animal-inspired one. Ballet is more geometrically formed, don’t you think? The regimentation of the body into this perfectly proportionate, athletic vessel.

Nguyen: Almost like a machine, no?

Rail: Yes, whereas the way martial artists look at the body feels, to me, closer to the animal world in a weird, fascinating way.

Nguyen: I’ve been thinking a lot about ritualized dancing and how different cultures outside of the West have used different forms of ritualized dancing as a way to heal trauma. We have started to learn or discover that trauma is held in the body. A lot of people say that trauma is held in the hips. Bessel van der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score, was talking about this in an interview I was listening to, and he was mentioning how forms like tai chi or Qigong or even capoeira or other dance forms, like tango even, any kind of dancing is a form of dealing with the traumas that are in the body. Capoeira is especially interesting because it was like a physical form of resistance, but hidden inside the aesthetics of dance, which I find fascinating.

Rail: The history, the spirit, of capoeira is beautiful. In my mind, dance is not separate from ritual.

Nguyen: My brother has a dance school in Saigon, and he has a dance crew that he works with, and they do hip hop choreography. When you see a stage full of dancers who are completely in sync with each other, there’s something magical about it. It’s mind blowing how they become one entity.

Rail: The synchronization of bodies can be powerful. Though I must admit that when I was a schoolchild in Hanoi, wearing the red-scarfed uniform and occasionally marching didn’t exactly feel like a spiritual communion. But I’m familiar with the idea that one is not supposed to stand out.

Nguyen: That’s interesting you say that, because I grew up hearing these stories, because my parents were dancers. They were really into cha cha. I mentioned this to you before, but after 1975, all those dance forms were illegal in the south.

Rail: For a time, many forms of culture were.

Nguyen: Any form of culture was illegal. And so I think there was this saying, like, “cấm ăn chơi, cấm quậy phá, cấm nhảy đầm.” Isn’t that fascinating? No partying, no dancing…

Rail: No disturbance. Don’t disrupt the order. Don’t rock the boat.

Nguyen: Don’t rock the boat. [Laughter] And my parents would hold these small gatherings, and they’d invite their friends to come and dance cha cha, rumba, tango, and all those bolero forms, and they got caught. This was late 1975, before I was born. They got caught. And it was my grandmother, whose poetry we just read, who came out and talked to the police on her children’s behalf, and managed to sway them and alleviate the whole situation, managed to keep my young parents out of jail, just by talking to them.

Rail: The power of a poetic voice. I’m glad to hear of this triumph of poetry over policing. A poet’s voice, I never underestimate it. It can be fragile, and at the same time, quite strong.

Nguyen: You translate a lot of poetry from Vietnamese to English. What is the hardest thing in translating poetry?

Rail: The cadence. Getting the rhythm right. There can be a lot of stock imageries in a Vietnamese poem—you know, the thousand autumns, the homeland, and so on. But if you get the words and the rhythm right, the permutations are infinitely beautiful. Meaning matters less and less compared to the music of the poetry. Sometimes words dance vibrantly in one language and not so much in the other. So the goal is to make the cadence alive somehow, even or especially in translation.

Nguyen: Interesting. So in one language it could be a cha cha, but in another language it can look like capoeira.

Rail: Exactly. A song can have many lives. Translation as reincarnation.

Nguyen: In the film The Sounds of Cannons—I’ve been doing this a lot, and I’ve been trying to get better at it. I’ve been translating a lot of Trịnh Công Sơn songs, because a lot of my films draw upon Trịnh Công Sơn, and Trịnh Công Sơn is a very beautiful writer. You know, first and foremost, he was a poet.

Rail: And a Buddhist one.

Nguyen: And a Buddhist poet, yeah. So it’s been extremely challenging trying to translate lyrics of Trịnh Công Sơn from Vietnamese to English. How do you think I did in The Sounds of Cannons, for his song “Đại Bác Ru Đêm”?

Rail: You did well. Subtitles for Vietnamese movies can sometimes be hilariously bad. I like those a lot too, actually. I want to refrain from the binaric judgements of good vs. bad translations. With your work, I am moved by the line you picked for the title, The Sounds of Cannons Familiar like Sad Refrains. “Đại Bác Nghe Quen Như Câu Dạo Buồn.” You nicely translate dạo as “refrain.” Dạo, to me, also sounds like a wandering fragment of music. “Đi dạo,” you know, “going for a walk.” Perhaps like the song of a street vendor. Your selection of that song is poignant.

Nguyen: The direct connection to “Đại Bác” and cannons was there, and it was a pretty easy pick, but it wasn’t until I started translating it that I started to understand how Trịnh Công Sơn was thinking about sound and body. Like, the flesh of our mothers and children, like, “Oh, golden flesh.” There’s this really strong connection he makes between the sounds of these cannons far away and their impact on the body, the body of the people.

Rail: He compared the sound of bombs falling to lullabies. There’s so much strength and so much grief in that line. It’s a murderous sound, and yet it was so frequent in Vietnam that it was like the lullabies that put you to sleep every night. And then there was this imagery of a street sweeper pausing the sweeping to just listen to it. This brutal sound was becoming atmospheric and a part of everybody’s lives.

Nguyen: When I was in Quảng Trị doing research for this series of works, one of the things that shook me when I got there was the sounds of bombs being detonated in the distance. You would hear a bomb every thirty minutes, a loud boom and an echo in the distance, all day, every day. It was insane to think about the amount of unexploded ordnance that still contaminates that area, especially that area in Vietnam, because it was so close to the DMZ. Have you been to Quảng Trị?

Rail: I haven’t. I wish I had more familiarity with the dialect.

Nguyen: Yeah, this is a beautiful segue into language, right? When I was making The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, it was crucial for me that the actors spoke in a real daily Quảng Trị accent. But I think, because people from Quảng Trị are so conscious of their accent, they soften it up, even subconsciously.

Rail: I don’t like that there is a dominant “correct” accent in Vietnamese. People from certain provinces feel obliged to adjust their accent according to the northern one.

Nguyen: There’s this saying that a friend of mine told me a while back, they say something like, people in the north get the first part of the word wrong. People in the center get the middle part of the word wrong, and people in the south get the last part of the word wrong. We’re all getting it wrong.

Rail: We’re all equally wrong, [laughter] as this species called human, I absolutely agree.

Nguyen: I really appreciate this conversation, because there are these connections between dust and silence and the body and language and translation and song and lyrics that you managed to connect so nicely.

Rail: Reading poetry together helped. It grounds the tone of the space. It’s like this gesture you did when you were talking about the settling of dust, which looks like a tai chi gesture to me, the sinking of the breath down to the belly. Reading poetry together is like sinking the breath together. The bodies are suddenly in sync.

We should reroute back to your work. The branches of some of your kinetic sculptures resemble the forms of trees. Other works recall celestial animals like dragons. Can you share some thoughts on the natural world and the supernatural world?

Nguyen: I made this film in 2017 called My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires, which looks at the natural world from a specifically Vietnamese point of view, exploring the folklore, exploring how tales of animals have integrated themselves into the history of Vietnamese politics, like Hồ Con Rùa, for instance. We’ve obsessed over these different animal forms and have caused the extinction of rhinos all over the world because of different belief systems. The relationship between the human and the natural world is a fraught one, and it’s ironic that Vietnam, which is one of the most biodiverse places in the world, is also experiencing some of the highest rates of extinction.

And then you think about all the connotations that the different animals carry. Dragons in the East have a very different reception than dragons in the West, for instance, or how tigers during the American intervention in Vietnam were seen as this monster in the jungle, and the US army would be attacked by tigers, or try to kill as many tigers as they could. The inculcation of animals, nature, politics, culture, and tradition is a really tangled web, and it seems like we’re not processing all of that in a way that leads to any kind of symbiosis. We’re just afraid of the unknown, which the animal world still is to us. To a large extent, the natural world is still unknown, and we’re just continuing to destroy it. I’m constantly trying to understand that relationship.

Rail: The central issue I hear from you is that of desire. We romanticize both the natural and supernatural worlds while we consume them all the time. We relentlessly eat and extract from the earth. We use the icons of supernatural animals in our religious texts….

Nguyen: And even sports teams in the US, they’re all animals. We obsess, we idolize, we do all sorts of things. And that is a consumption in and of itself.

Rail: To idolize something while killing it. What a human thing to do.

Nguyen: A very human thing to do. And what we should all do is just sit down and be silent.

Rail: Just sit into the huge silence that brightens the sadness. Simone Weil once said the problem with humans is that we eat when we’re only supposed to quietly look.

Nguyen: That’s beautiful.