November 27, 2014

Teresa Mei Chuc

I TOOK NOTHING

and broke it in half.
As if mocking me,
there was an
even greater
nothing and I
felt myself falling.

I took my falling
and broke it
in half. It did
not stop the falling.
I plunged deeper.

I took this depth
and gathered it,
the darkness
with all of its
stars, and
put it in the wings
of a bat.
I watched it
retreat into
the deepest
of caves
where it screams
and listens to
its voice
returning
from stone walls.

from Rattle #44, Summer 2014

__________

Teresa Mei Chuc: “When I hear my voice from the most profound depths within myself and I listen and embrace it compassionately no matter how beautiful or terrible or frightening the sound, it is a great and healing gift.” (web)

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March 10, 2014

Teresa Mei Chuc

THE ROAD

I say my children are
like lightning bugs.

I see how they
glow in the dark.

Sometimes, it is
the only light I see.

from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

__________

Teresa Mei Chuc: “I write because it is oxygen and food. I write because it makes me feel human. I write because I believe in stories and life. I write because I believe in love. My eldest son was four (will be fifteen years old this May) and my middle son was two when I became a single parent. I have been the only parent in their lives since. After two divorces, I have been living alone with my three sons, taking care of them and working as a full-time public school teacher. It is very difficult to be the mother and father, to have to try to be twice who I am and to have enough love to fill the spaces of two parents. When I look at my sons, I know that I must continue to be and I must continue to write.” (web)

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August 5, 2013

Review by Teresa Mei ChucA Large Dent in the Moon by Monty Campbell, Jr.

A LARGE DENT IN THE MOON
by Monty Campbell, Jr.

FootHills Publishing
P.O. Box 68
Kanona, NY 14856
ISBN: 978-0-941053-24-2
2013, 57 pp., $14.00
foothillspublishing.com
Also on: Kindle / Nook

The first time I read poems from A Large Dent in the Moon, I was in a hotel room in Boston. I was staying with the poet and editor, Susan Deer Cloud during AWP, and the next day, before my return to Los Angeles, Susan gifted me I Was Indian, an Anthology of Native Literature Volume I (Foothills Publishing, 2009), which she edited. There, standing by the bed, yellow-orange rays of the sunrise through the windows, I read five poems by Monty Campbell, Jr., and was completely blown away.

Marina Tsvetaeva, a Russian poet, wrote: “I can eat-with dirty hands, sleep-with dirty hands, write with dirty hands I cannot.”  This is how I feel about Campbell’s poetry collection, A Large Dent in the Moon. Campbell writes with an unflinching honesty and integrity about the Native experience, the urban experience, the human experience, and the experience of life on Earth.  Campbell writes of profound sorrow and suffering, yet continues his hold on beauty in a voice that is haunting, piercing and full of love and compassion; it is a sound as from the poem “Sound” in the collection:

Sound is a blade
cutting through human forest
sharpen the blade
in kitchen sink.

Sound as in the sound of the poem, “On Ancient Land,” in which I feel the presence of “Cayuga ghost warriors,” “the sky world,” “Mohawk corn,” and “rusted out cars.”

Campbell’s words have the power to move. They come from the depths of the universe and grow from deep within the earth. They make you feel; they sing off the page like the violin in the lines that brought tears to my eyes and haunt me: “in the distance there is a violin singing to us/ singing songs unknown to bullets,/ notes unsung since baked from mud” with such pain and beauty and love. Coming from a place of war and violence myself, born after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam, and fleeing the country after the war, I know this violin and these bullets. These poems radiate light and love; they penetrate and warm my heart.

In the poem “Organic Turmoil,” I was moved by the “plump little birds,” the “humble grass,” the “violin singing to us.” The poem ends with the lines:

they must have been happy once,
before they wanted more,
before they made weapons
from the bones of each other.

These words carry so much sorrow in their arms, and I relate it to my own life—how things would have been if the Vietnam War didn’t happen. It is also in this recognition that I later realized, and others in the war realized, that we did “make weapons/ from the bones of each other.” It is in these lines, cut so smoothly like the side of a diamond, that this clarity, this horror, is expressed.

It is difficult to write about violence, including the violence felt by Campbell’s own Native American Cayuga tribe, but to be able to sing it in a way that makes the silence open like a flower is a feat that Monty Campbell has mastered, and he has drenched that flower in the nourishment of moonlight and starlight. It is in this opening that violence can be transformed into compassion. The blossoming of a flower can’t be rushed; the opening of petals takes its own time as silence does to open. We are blessed to witness and read words that will transform us.

A Large Dent in the Moon is a gift and food for me because the poems make me feel human. And to feel human is a blessing. Campbell writes, “I’ve opened the skin of our alphabet,/ I’ve stripped the earth of pavement,” and in reading his poems, I felt my heart open much like a flower’s and I felt that I could feel the earth in my toes and the moonlight on my petals.

Tsvetaeva wrote, “for the path of comets/ is the path of poets … They are: an explosion, a breaking in—” The poems in A Large Dent in the Moon is a comet’s path, made of ice, dust, and small, rocky particles of the sun, vaporizing, streaming out of the nucleus of human experience, from “a sweet song/ melting in the/ dog piss snow” to “a lake rising in our/ own reflection.” Perhaps this explosion is an explosion of the heart into the world, an outward breaking in.

“Death of a Bird” is filled with such magnificent lines:

this bridge has let men
jump from its ledge …

if only they had your wings,
if only someone was really
trying to look inside of them,
a smile could change the lives of millions, fuck it, billions.

We are reminded of the power of a simple, kind human gesture and that:

we are all just the same animal,
it could make us realize that
our feathers could also, someday,
be lying on this bridge.

This poem weaves words that are a breath that brings us closer to each other and to mother nature. With this metaphor of a bird we can feel our potential for life and death … so birdlike.

These lines from “On the Cliffs” are some of the most beautiful lines that I have ever read about listening, celebrating, being:

I hear the crack of
glacier sculpted walls,
scented of ceremony,
a whispering river
into the ears,
Lakota song
to the broken heart …
can’t evade this moment,
luminous, silken
star formations
blinking messages back
and forth to New York,
back to birth and before,
into any soul
who would listen,
I understand now, why
so many songs have
been written.

It is that moment of listening to the stars with Campbell in his poem that, I too, understand “why so many songs have been written.”

Campbell writes:

My heart
dives like an
albatross into
the train yard.

And as Campbell’s heart dives, we dive with him into the train yard. In this place, in this beating heart of complex tracks, there is no holding back what we will witness there; as in life, there is no holding back. And where will we go from here? This review is a small shimmer of the path of this diving, the vanishing traces of a train. Here in the train yard, I can feel that “outside the moon is glimmering blue,/ we are the same as the moon.”

__________

Teresa Mei Chuc was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and immigrated to the U.S. under political asylum with her mother and brother shortly after the Vietnam War. Teresa, a fellow and teacher consultant of the Los Angeles Writing Project (a chapter of the National Writing Project), teaches literature and writing at a public inner-city middle school. She has a bachelors degree in philosophy, professional teaching credentials in primary and secondary education, and a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her first book, Red Thread, was featured in Rattle’s book interview series.  (www.tue-wai.com)

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March 31, 2014

Editors’ Picks

for Spring 2014


Mezzanines by Matthew OlzmannMezzanines

by Matthew Olzmann

Melodic free verse narratives that drift surreal to highlight the absurdities of modern life have been in style for some time—maybe it’s all the absurdity of modern life. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a poet who does it better than Matthew Olzmann. Usually I’m happy when I can find a half-dozen poems in a book that I would publish, but I have to say that I’d probably publish any of the 45 in Mezzanines. Engaging and surprising throughout. “Rare Architecture,” which we nominated for a Pushcart in 2010, is quintessential. And essential.
          —Timothy Green, editor (Feb. 16, 2014)

. . .

Living in the Nature Poem by Mary Harwell SaylorLiving in the Nature Poem

by Mary Harwell Sayler

In an era where so many books seem to be written to have been written, Mary Harwell Sayler fills over 100 pages with genuine purpose. With an ear for the poetic line and internal rhyme, and an admirable concision, she explores the appearances of God in what’s left of the natural world. There are a few too many poems, perhaps, but if you’ve ever wished that Mary Oliver could clone herself, and grow up in a different environment, so she could write from new settings and perspectives (and I have), Sayler might be the answer.
          —Timothy Green, editor (Feb. 1, 2014)

 

Readers’ Picks

for Spring 2014

Black Stars by Ngo Tu LapBlack Stars

by Ngo Tu Lap, translated with Martha Collins

Black Stars transports me to Vietnam filled with nostalgia as the poems weave rivers, sky, stars, and forests haunted by the dead and the living: “Thirty years later I still see them/ Millions of breasts cut from suffering bodies.” In this river of poems, I can feel the scars of war in both the land and poet and, at the same time, I feel my own scars from the same war, “Scars not even the dark night can hide.” Lap speaks to the river, and to me: “You write to remember/ But sometimes you write to forget.”
          —Teresa Mei Chuc, contributor/subscriber (Feb. 23, 2014)

. . .

Greenhouses, Lighthouses by Tung-Hui Hu
Greenhouses, Lighthouses

by Tung-Hui Hu

I had the pleasure of hearing Tung-Hui Hu read in Chicago a few months ago, and was struck by his imagery (always a help when listening to poems for the first time without having a text to follow!) and the quiet, precise way his poems move. A wonderful collection. From “Windfall Apple”: “The hand has rules: everything that is loose may be gleaned./ A hand counts and gathers the weight of a single apple,/ returning over and over to the moment of having.”

          —Virginia Smith Rice, contributor/subscriber (Feb. 1, 2014)

. . .

Kimonos in the Closet by David ShumateKimonos in the Closet

by David Shumate

The prose poem, with its lack of intentional enjambment, demands of the writer a sense of daring because the turns come not from line breaks but from a willingness to leap. There are a handful of poets working in this difficult genre who can leap consistently and exquisitely, but David Shumate couples this with an uncanny ability to stick the landing. His latest collection doesn’t stick every landing, but it’s as close as we can get in this genre to a masterpiece. An excerpt from “My Desk Sets Sail”:

Again this morning my desk sets sail like a schooner from its harbor. It is a fragile craft easily shattered on the shores. So far good fortune has accompanied me as if soggy old Poseidon were my friend. I lick my finger and raise it to the wind as I’ve seen sailors do, though I do not know what this portends. When I am hungry, I cast out a net. When it’s time to sleep, I stretch out on the deck. I travel for weeks on this little galleon. Rowing with only a pen.

          —Cameron Conaway, contributor/subscriber (March 25, 2014)

. . .

Memoir Poetic of a Naked Cop by Richard Eric JohnsonMemoir Poetic of a Naked Cop

by Richard Eric Johnson

Once history was poetry. Richard Eric Johnson’s Memoir Poetic of a Naked Cop revives that old tradition, recording the author’s experiences as a soldier and a policeman. I say history, not biography, because the poems present sharp, sometimes harsh pictures, not so much the poet’s feelings about them. Mostly free verse but with some rhyme and plenty of wordplay, the poems owe something to Whitman (“Learned Astronomer”) but at least as much to rap. This work excites me because it’s direct and simple, clearly evoking pictures of an era and of a life.
          —Conrad Geller, contributor/subscriber (March 16, 2014)

. . .

The Midnight Channel by Evan PetersonThe Midnight Channel

by Evan Peterson

Evan Peterson addresses famous “final girls” from sci-fi and slasher films—Ripley from Alien, Sarah Connor from Terminator—with both reverence and irreverent humor in this chapbook. Peterson takes the triumph over predator, parent, and fiend alike and weaves his own merry celebration around it. From “The 80s <A Slasher Film Blamed on Slasher Films>”:

Jamie Lee loves Janet Leigh
& audiences love a massive head trauma …

This is a sequel, so up the ante:
different weapons for every murder.

Who are we killing today? <the homeless>
and with what? <antlers>
I love antlers! <fucking hipster>

My personal favorite poem (but difficult to excerpt) is “Ellen Ripley/Alien Sigourney Weaver/1979” which interweaves computer code with lyric lines. As someone with a keen interest in pop culture poetry, I loved this quirky take on familiar horror tropes.
          —Jeannine Hall Gailey, contributor/subscriber (March 14, 2014)

. . .

Red Flower, White Flower by Jennifer TsengRed Flower, White Flower

by Jennifer Tseng, tr. by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen

Ethereal, magical, full of, as Jean Valentine says on the dust jacket, “humor, mystery, grief and along with grief, unguarded understanding and puzzlement, side by side.” I was bowled over by these elegant poems and wondered at the facility with which the translators captured the musicality of each piece, as in the poem, “The Beloved’s Singing Heard Through a Closed Door,” which starts like this:

Like foxgloves, like a coat mending itself
in a dove’s night, ascending then descending
under a bell-shaped light, as one sees
at the threshold of the mind’s immortal view
the yellow house of childhood unhewn …

Tseng has crafted a collection filled with exquisite poetry. This is a bedside table collection, one I won’t be able to shelve anytime soon.
          —Kelly Fordon, contributor/subscriber (March 6, 2014)

Note: Rattle‘s MicroReviews are intended to be honest poetry book recommendations. If you have no relationship to the author of the book you’d like to recommend, you can send 75 – 125 words about why you enjoyed the book through our Submittable portal. Simple acquaintance to the author is not disqualifying, but we cannot accept reviews from family, co-workers, present or former students, or even casual friends (if you met the poet once at a reading, that’s fine; if you stay in touch, that’s not). If any significant relationship is discovered, the review will be deleted and the reviewer will no longer be allowed to contribute reviews. If you’re unsure about whether your relationship to the author is disqualifying, just ask when you submit the review. Reviews are added regularly to the MicroReviews page, and posted for archival at the end of every quarter.

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December 3, 2012

INTERVIEW WITH TERESA MEI CHUCTeresa Mei Chuc's Red Thread
ON
RED THREAD

Fithian Press
P.O. Box 2790
McKinleyville, CA 95519
ISBN-13: 978-1-56474-528-6
2012, 80 pp., $14.00
www.danielpublishing.com

The following interview was conducted over email by Rattle editor Megan O’Reilly and Teresa Mei Chuc, author of Red Thread, a collection of poems that recounts her family’s flight from war-torn Vietnam, and her father’s imprisonment by the Vietcong.

Teresa Mei ChucTeresa Mei Chuc was born in Saigon, Vietnam, shortly after the horrendous war that bombed her people and her homeland. She and her family survived, although her parents were separated for a long time. Chuc, her brother, and their mother escaped Vietnam in a ship crowded with hungry, sick, and frightened immigrants. Under political asylum, they settled in California, where eventually they were reunited with her father, who had spent nine years in a Vietcong “re-education” camp.

Chuc writes about war and her personal and family history. Out of her personal history, beyond her cultural heritage, and apart from her family, Chuc finds her own individuality in her poems.

Nominated for a Pushcart Prize for “Truth is Black Rubber,” a section of poems from Red Thread, Teresa Mei Chuc is a graduate of the Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, and teaches literature and writing at a public school. Her poems appear in journals including EarthSpeak Magazine, National Poetry Review, Rattle, and Verse Daily. Chuc is the founder and editor-in-chief of Shabda Press. She lives with her three sons in Southern California.

____________

O’REILLY: You begin the book with an explanation of the title: “According to Chinese legend, an invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break. In addition, the red thread is a protection and blessing cord in Buddhist tradition. It keeps the wearer in the compassionate embrace of the bodhisattvas.” I find this a perfect metaphor for the collection on every level. Even the image of a red thread is so fitting—the color red might symbolize both violence and “blood relations,” family; and the thread the binding between the two. How did you come up with that title, and was it before or after you wrote these poems?

CHUC: The title, Red Thread, came to me after I wrote the poems in the collection. At the time, I was thinking of possible titles for the book. I already had a working title, but I felt that I needed a different title. I was writing a description of the book and included the Chinese legend about the red thread. A friend and mentor of mine who read the description suggested Red Thread as a title. It was serendipitous. Right away, I felt that Red Thread would be perfect for the title of the book—the primordial cord.

It was also the red cord that I wore around my neck with a jade Buddha or Quan Yin, bodhisattva of compassion, pendant. When I was a child, my mother told me that the cord and pendant would protect and bless me; I would be in the compassionate embrace of the  bodhisattvas. Interestingly, we also embody the compassionate nature of the bodhisattvas and provide protection for each other.

In the summer of 2012 at the William Joiner Center in Boston, Massachusetts, I met three visiting North Vietnamese writers who fought on the side of the Vietcong during the war. One of the writers served in the Special Forces, another in the artillery unit, and another was a volunteer reporter for the Mid-central Liberation Army in the South – her father was killed by a B-52 when bombs were dropped by the United States over Hanoi, my father’s birth city. They vividly recounted their experiences during the war, the  calculation, the horror and the suffering, while tears streamed from my eyes. I shared with them my story about our family’s immigration to the United States and my father’s imprisonment in a Vietcong “re-education” camp. We empathized with the pain and tragedy we each suffered on both sides of the war.

Meeting the North Vietnamese writers was a pivotal moment; after a horrendous war and several decades, we, people from the North and from the South of Vietnam, were able to meet and become friends. We had compassion for each other and treated each other with kindness. They desired to know about my experiences and the pain that people like my family experienced after the war when the communists took over the country, and I desired to understand the deep suffering that the Vietcong had to endure during the war. This encounter helped me to open my heart. It meant the world to me that these North Vietnamese writers who fought on the side of the Vietcong felt sorrow about my father’s imprisonment and felt compassion for my family; it was profound. I cherish this human connection which filled my heart with warmth and open spaces.

These North Vietnamese writers are my parent’s age. They could have been my uncles and aunt, and they treated me as if I were part of their family. However, decades ago, we were fighting on different sides of a relentless war. A red thread connected us then and now.  Recently, one of the North Vietnamese writers wrote the following to me, “It is also good that you want to tell the stories of the war prisoners who had been held captive by Viet Cong such as your father. Their stories will have human meaning.” I was very touched by this comment by someone who had fought with the Viet Cong during the war. I know that the people of Vietnam on both sides of the war want to heal, to feel the humanity of us all.

After my father’s release from prison, he said that he hated the color red because it was the color of communism. He associated the color with violence, loss and deep pain. However, the color red was an important color in our Chinese culture and symbolized good luck and happiness. My mother’s wedding dress was red. The positive aspect of the color lost its meaning for my father after the war. Many years later, red posters with Chinese characters of blessings and good luck began to appear on the wall of my parents’ house.  Healing was beginning to take place.

WHEN I FIRST SAW DADDY

he was like an Egyptian cat;
skinny, foraging, and stern,
just released from a Vietcong prison.
He told us he hated the color red.
Sixteen years later,
he wears a red sweatshirt and smiles.
The pin tip opening in his heart enough
to let in a driblet of red.

The title, Red Thread, has deep meaning for my family and for me on many levels, and these meanings flow through the arteries of the collection.

O’REILLY: The poems about your family struck me as deeply honest. I’m not sure if your parents are still living, but even if only internally—as a result of that gut-level loyalty we often feel to our family—did you struggle with how to write about them in this book? Did you question how much you would reveal and how open you would be?

CHUC: I think my first encounter with this question was a few years ago when I wrote a prose piece in a series of vignettes titled Year of the Hare. It was an intimate look into my father’s experience with PTSD and the inner and outer violence that resulted; it was an intensely personal and revealing piece. However, I don’t think I could have written it another way and do it justice. I could not have done my father’s experience or our family’s experience justice if I was not completely honest to the best of my ability in telling the story.

To break the cycle of and perpetuation of violence against oneself and others, one needs forgiveness and compassion. To develop these, it is necessary to gaze unflinchingly into suffering, one’s own and the suffering of others; I think this is one of the most difficult and most important things to do. It is so much easier to look away. As Rainer Maria Rilke says, “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” At least in our deep gaze, in forgiveness and compassion, we can begin to heal our own hearts.

I think I have never been so close to my family as I am now. Through the process of writing these poems, I was able to connect with, understand, and appreciate my family in profound ways that I was unable to before. Writing about my grandma, my father, and my mother helped me to understand them and my relationship with them on a much deeper level. Writing about my father’s experiences helped me to appreciate and understand what he went through and the causes of his PTSD. This writing process was a thread that helped to re-connect us. For a while, my parents and I were disconnected as a result of PTSD and fractures within ourselves—some of the many consequences of the displacement and continual violence caused by war.

I think it was important for me to write honestly and openly about my family; they are an important part of the narrative. Our story was not just a narrative of events, but of relationships and people. Sometimes, history is written in a way that magnify events while the people in the events are reduced to a number. Intimacy and humanness were important to me in my writing process. I wanted to show the connection between the micro and the macro, the physical and the spiritual through the people in my poems.

There is a part deep inside of my parents that does not want to forget the war and our family’s experiences. There is a part deep inside of me that does not want to forget. And there is a part deep inside of us that does not want the world to forget. Perhaps, if I can write honestly, something crystalline, transparent can form. Hubert Selby, Jr., also known as Cubby, was a writer I admire. I think it was at one of his readings that I heard him say something like this – “in writing, one of the greatest gifts you can give is your heart, hold it, beating in your hand for the reader.” I try to do this in my writing, give my heart.

My parents don’t read literature in English, so I was very happy when some of my poems were translated into Vietnamese by Ngo Tu Lap  and Da Mau Literary Magazine  (published in Vietnam), and my parents were able to read them. Van Nghe Vinh, a literary journal in Vietnam, recently published my poem, “Names,” in Vietnamese. Having been exiled after the war, it was very meaningful to be held in the arms of my motherland again. Through poetry, my family’s story is re-entering the country. It is profound for me to embrace and be embraced by a language that was forcefully taken away. It is a circle the way a needle makes a suture.

I felt that there were gaps and emptiness in the spaces of the narrative about the American war in Vietnam. I looked into these spaces as I wrote my poems. I grew up watching movies about the Vietnam War; the story would focus on the American soldier’s experiences, so there were pieces missing from the narrative. I remember towards the end of one of the  movies was the fall of Saigon and Vietnamese people fleeing the country, being saved by Americans, but the unfilmed narrative after that continued and still continues, though many people from the era are beginning to pass away.

I recently read When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip about her life during the war. I could really relate to the book and cried, sobbed, through each page. It was a difficult read because it re-opened many fissures and wounds, but I needed to read the book; I needed to see the war through another perspective, the experience of Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese, a woman and an immigrant. Hayslip, who suffered violence from both sides of the war, emerged with forgiveness and compassion. She wrote with such honesty that the effect was piercing. In 1988, hoping to help heal the wounds of war between the United States and Vietnam, Le Ly Hayslip returned to her village of Ky La in central Vietnam and started East Meets West Foundation. Her work there included helping victims of Agent Orange.

Similarly, Kim Phuc, the little girl in the iconic picture who was running naked during a napalm bombing in Vietnam, is an inspiration to me. Running The Kim Foundation International and acting as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the Culture of Peace, she transformed her suffering into good. When I think of her, I am reminded of what we can do, how we can transform something so terrible through an open heart. I think, in some way, I try to do this in my writing; at times, this entails revealing what may frighten me most.

NOT WORTH A BULLET

A bullet is made of
copper or lead.
Gunpowder is
poured into the case.
The firing pin hits the
primer at the back of
the bullet which starts
the explosion. Altogether,
the bullet and the case are
typically about two inches in length
and weigh a few ounces.

My father said that
the Vietcongs
told him and the other
prisoners while in
“re-education” camp
that they were not worth a bullet.
They would work for the Vietcongs
and then die.

A bamboo tree is smooth, long
with roots that hold the earth
with the strong grip of O’REILLY
knuckles and fingers.
They are used to build houses,
fences, etc.
A bamboo tree can weigh sixty pounds
or more and be twenty feet tall.

The prisoners were forced to
walk barefoot up the mountains
and carry bamboo back to the camp.

Due to the weight of the bamboo,
they were only able to carry one
at a time.

O’REILLY: How old were you when you immigrated to the United States? Do you have many memories of your life in Vietnam?

CHUC: I was two years old when I arrived in the United States. The memories of my life in Vietnam consist of a few photos and stories my parents, grandma, and brother would tell me. Since I was born in Saigon shortly after the fall of Saigon, it was a difficult time for my family. My father reported to “re-education” while my mother was still pregnant with me, my mother gave birth to me and took care of my brother and me on her own. There were very few pictures of my time there. Taking pictures was not a luxury we had then. There was a picture of my brother and I; I must have been about a year and a half and my brother about four years old. We looked so poor and sad and we both had a worried look on our faces. I didn’t smile in the pictures of me in Vietnam. There was a photo of my mother, brother and I that I found in an album; she was holding us in her arms and there was a deep sadness in our eyes. My mother showed me a photo of me on the boat. I was two years old, sitting on the floor with many people, and crying; I looked so sick in the picture. This was when my mother told me the story that inspired the poem, “Immigration.”

IMMIGRATION

It is October, when the winds of autumn blow strong in
the Pacific.

There are over two thousand of us, sardines,
barely human and starving. We sleep on the floor and
wash ourselves with seawater. People are sick.

When someone dies from sickness, s/he is wrapped
in a blanket and tossed overboard during a Buddhist
chant.

I was only two years old and cannot recollect the dying
next to me, nor can I recollect my constant coughing nor
can I recall seeing my mother’s worried countenance as she
contemplated our future, how my constant crying made
her want to jump overboard.

Sometimes, my parents would talk about their experiences over dinner. Over the course of many years, I heard stories here and there. At times, I would ask direct questions. On a few occasions, I asked my father about his experience in “re-education” camp. It was difficult for me to ask about the experiences, because I knew how sensitive it was and sometimes I didn’t know what information or stories would come up and sometimes I would not be ready for it. It was hard for me to hear about the suffering, especially my mother and father’s suffering.

Once, we were talking and my mother started telling us about my aunt’s boat that was attacked by pirates and how the women on board were raped. She told us that my aunt was about eight months pregnant at the time and lost her child because she had to sit next to the boat’s hot engine. Many boat people faced similar fates. In addition, they had to purposely “sink” their boats, so that countries such as Malaysia and Singapore would rescue them and allow them to enter. It was a very dangerous thing to do and many people, including children, drowned as a result.

Usually, the stories started off as casual conversations on various topics that would somehow lead to a story about the war and our immigration. Typically, these conversations occurred over dinner, so the kitchen was a place where many stories were shared and where we learned about our history.

O’REILLY: Thinking about poems like “Playground” (which ends with some of my favorite lines in the collection: “a room full of people without furniture,/drowning in a sea of sand, sand they had believed held water”) that contain so much suffering and sorrow they seem about to shatter the page, I’m interested in what the process of writing poems on such a personal and painful subject—the violence and oppression of not just a war, but one your own past is rooted in—entails in terms of process and technique. Are there ways in which you prepare yourself to write poems like these? Do you engage emotionally with the content, or do you need to detach yourself to some extent?

CHUC: Thank you. I remember growing up as a child wondering where my father was, having to deal with questions of war that was really beyond my comprehension, but having to ask such questions at a young age. I was very sensitive as a small child. I remember other kids referring to me as “fresh off the boat” in a kind of derogatory way and I remember feeling different and not wanting to be different. Like every kid, I wanted a normal childhood.

When my father was released from a Vietcong “re-education” camp, I was nine years old and saw him for the first time. Then, my life changed forever in a way that I did not anticipate. The post-traumatic stress disorder that plagued my father’s psyche and heart translated into daily life and so my childhood was a matter of survival which included some of the most severe examples—a knife being thrown at me and being chased with an axe. My life was inundated with threats of punishment and violence. So, these instances were a matter of my father’s PTSD, but I didn’t understand this until I was older. At the time, I just had to deal with it and it was painful. I remember crying nearly every day of my childhood. This was too much to deal with as a child and I didn’t want any of it; I wanted to have a peaceful life, but this trauma would continue to haunt me into adulthood until I knew that in order for me to survive and have peace within myself, I had to face this war and explore it into the deepest, darkest corners. I deeply wanted to forgive my father, the Vietcong, and the United States, and in order to do this, I knew that I had to face my profoundest fears and pains.

Normally, when a part of our body, such as our heart or stomach, is hurting, our natural response is to stop doing what we’re doing that is causing the pain. The hurt is our body’s way of telling us to stop. So, as I explored my family history and the American war in Vietnam, I had to do what was not natural—I had to look into a subject matter that caused me a lot of physical, emotional, and mental pain. At times, as I was writing these poems, I could feel my heart ache, my heart palpitate, and I just had a feeling of overwhelming emotional and physical discomfort. At times, I was filled with a deep sadness.

I had to prepare my mind to visualize what it was like during the war for my family. I had to allow my mind to visualize my father’s experience in “re-education” camp and the torment and abuse he had to endure; I had to feel his sorrow and suffering. I had to visualize my mother’s grief in being separated from her adoptive parents and my father. In this deep, dark, hurtful place, staring straight at it, luckily, I was able to find some love, beauty, and compassion and these filled my heart as I wrote as well. This process was especially difficult because it brought back the childhood trauma of not having a father, and then the subsequent years of living with a father who suffered from severe PTSD. However, after the initial amalgam of emotions while writing the poem, going back to revise, I allowed myself some emotional detachment and focused more on the music of the language and the structure of the piece in order to let it fully form.

I had to write this narrative, because I had to separate it from my physical body, where I stored the pain, anxiety and memory in my muscles and cells and it was eating me up from the inside. My body held onto the stories because it didn’t want to forget. Writing it down, I didn’t have to forget and I didn’t have to remember. Writing my family’s story and writing about the war was, for me, a basic need in order to survive, and my medium of energy output, output of emotions and thoughts is through poetry, so this was the best way for me to communicate. As Grace Paley says, “write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.”

The unrestrained nature of poetry allowed my emotions and thoughts their freedom to be expressed in a way that they needed to be, but it was also a lot of work to hone this massive amount of energy so that it can be contained in a small poem. I felt an almost urgent need to document my family’s experiences for them and for my children. I forget who said this, it goes something like this—”we are minor characters in a bigger story,” and I felt that growing up—I felt that there was this big story about war and humanity and my family was part of it, not by choice but by chance.

I contemplated the subject matter of war since childhood and started to work on the poems about ten years ago. Only in the past two years, I was emotionally ready to read about the American war in Vietnam, to expand my writing about it, and to dig deep into my own family’s experiences. Literally, a few years ago, I could not open a book about the war, my body just froze up with anxiety and I had to physically distance myself from the actual book.

COCKROACHES

A proposal by someone to my mom
after the Vietnam war: Why don’t
you sell your baby, you don’t have
anything to eat?

A response by my four-year-old brother:
No, don’t sell my sister! There are lots
of cockroaches for us to eat!

When I returned to the country
eighteen years later, I saw them—
large, brown shiny tanks on the wall,

evidence of my brother’s love for me.

__________

VIETNAM GHOST STORIES

Ghost-like beings roam,
carrying the bones of the dead,
their steps heavy with the weight
of fields and fields.
And the dead too—
stories Mother tells
of the ghost with a long tongue
that licks dishes at night.

__________

AGENT ORANGE

It’s difficult to be alone, without
a mother’s touch, in a crib like a
baby except one is not.

A son taught to live with a thirst
for a mother who loves her child though
one of his legs is too short, the other too long.

He sits, arms bent and limp, but do not
avoid him; he wants to interact. His swollen eyes
and misshapen head leans back. In a dream
Mother holds him close, as if by her embrace alone,
she will somehow right the wrong.

The chemical traveled through her placenta,
to the womb where small limbs that needed
to form couldn’t, where the tiny body,
the size of a fist, no longer knew what to do.

It was named for the orange band
around each fifty-five gallon drum.

Orange as a sunrise that permeates one’s soul,
how its rays cover the sky
and the earth with a deep orange,

rising as those bodies also rise.

I also wrote about other wars. The poem, “Playground,” was inspired by a clip in a heartbreaking documentary that I saw about ten years ago, “Gaza Strip” by James Longley. It haunted me throughout the years—the images of the ball, the boys and the explosion were striking and stark. The poem was in gestation for about a decade and was finally birthed last year. When I wrote the poem, I remember crying a lot. I am very emotionally connected to my poems and the subject matters. Sometimes, when I read the poem, I still cry.

O’REILLY: Are you currently working on any writing projects you can tell us about?

CHUC: Currently, I am working on a multi-genre book of prose and poetry about the American war in Vietnam titled Year of the Hare. The book includes interviews with Vietnamese boat people and former prisoners of war. I’m interested to see how the genres will work with each other and what kind of synergy they will create. The prose piece in a series of vignettes from the book, also titled “Year of the Hare,” goes deep into my father’s struggle with PTSD and the inner and outer violence that resulted. The piece was previously published in Issue 4 of Memoir Journal a few years ago and will be republished online by Big Bridge in 2013.

The prose piece, “Year of the Hare,” begins like this:

A FETUS

It was 1975, the Year of the Hare, in Saigon, Vietnam. I was a fetus the size of a half-dollar in Mama’s womb, gulping down amniotic fluid, stretching my limbs out into liquid-filled spaces as my heart beat its first beats. An umbilical cord attached to my belly wound its way to Mama’s placenta, where the food she ate entered my body the way air enters a diver’s body through a gas tank.

A few months later, I plumped out and she began to tilt forward with my weight as I turned and kicked the inside wall of her belly. She stroked the perimeter of her globe to feel my foot. The war was ending, the U.S. was retreating, and another war was beginning. Mama breathed in yellow as the sun made her dress stick to her skin and she tried not to notice the communist soldiers patrolling the streets. Military helicopters twirled in the sky.

Thank you, Megan, for the wonderful, thoughtful questions.

Rattle Logo

June 27, 2012

Teresa Mei Chuc

PLAYGROUND

Happiness is a ball after which we run
wherever it rolls, and we push it with
our feet when it stops.
          —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The tank was the color of desert sand,
it rolled by like a slow-moving beetle
and dropped a glove gently to the ground.
The glove was a baseball glove.
A few boys huddled around
and one of them picked it up.
Inside the glove was a metal ball. A glove and a ball.
Another boy suggested taking the ball apart
and selling the metal pieces.
The boys began to hammer it.
One of the boys held the ball in his hand
and threw it against the wall.
The ball bounced back and exploded in his abdomen.
The dead boy was brought to the morgue.
Women gathered to identify the mutilated body.
The boys who survived walked around with furrowed brows
and a deep silence that only such shock could induce
surrounded by wails—a room full of people without furniture,
drowning in a sea of sand, sand they had believed held water.

from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Tribute to Buddhist Poets

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January 7, 2001

Single Parent Poets

Conversation with
Francesca Lia Block

 

Rattle #41

This fall Rattle presents an issue dedicated entirely to poets who are (or have been) single parents. These 37 writers have not only taken on the most important job in the world—alone—but have also found it fertile ground for poetry. Five personal essays guide our journey, each shedding light on their inspiring lives from different angles.  Whether parenting solo by choice or by tragedy, whether dealing with the stress of sole custody or the sadness of separation, these writers make room for their art, and share with us all stories worth reading.

In the conversations section, Alan Fox interviews single parent poet and novelist Francesca Lia Block.

 

Single Parent Poets

Audio Available Scott Beal Feats of Pain and Daring
Audio Available Russell Bittner Unbounded
Audio Available Francesca Lia Block Spring Lament
Audio Available Teresa Mei Chuc The Road
Audio Available Sage Cohen How to Pray
Audio Available Meg Day What I Will Tell His Daughter …
Carol Denson Transfertle the Plum (Essay)
Audio Available Alexis Rhone Fancher Over It
Patricia Fargnoli Parents Without Partners …
Penny Freeland Incidentals
Louis Gallo Custody
Janlori Goldman The Story, For Now
Audio Available Maryanne Hannan To My Husband, Who 33 Years Ago …
Elise Hempel The Transfer
Audio Available Ken Holland Emily on Tuesday
Anne Ward Jamieson Elephant Drops Dead in the Ring
Audio Available Edison Jennings What to Do with Leftovers
Audio Available Jenifer Browne Lawrence Door Gunner
Hilary Melton In a Quiet Moment
Audio Available Barbra Nightingale My Daughter Calls Me Hag
Audio Available Janet Nippell Sweatheart
January O’Neil Sunday
Gloria Parker Hello Wall
Khadijah Queen Mothering Solo (Essay)
Audio Available Josh Rathkamp In Response to Anyone Who Asks
Russell Rowland Single Dads of Daughters
April Salzano
Metaphorical Children (Essay)
Art Schwartz Skinny Old Man with Shopping Cart
Audio Available Diane Seuss Glosa
Audio Available Robin Silbergleid An Open Letter to Our Sperm Donor
Audio Available Donna Spector On the Way to the Airport
Marcela Sulak The God Box (Essay)
Audio Available Susan Terris Rough Ties: All Mothers Are Single
Audio Available Betsy Fogelman Tighe Girl’s Childhood
Julia Clare Tillinghast Bells
Audio Available Jeanie Tomasko After He Left
Audio Available Barbara Louise Ungar Dead Letters
Distracted Notes … (Essay)

Conversation

Francesca Lia Block

Cover Art

David Navas