FICTION

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The Story Silence Tells

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Last week I participated in  Southern Griots: Preserving Local History Through Storytelling at the Cape Fear Museum. Organized by Athenian Press , the event featured a lovely array of artists in different genres (poetry, playwriting and screenwriting, dance, filmmaking, music). We shared our work and talents, each of us emphasizing art's ability to lift up, preserve, and pass along human stories that might otherwise be lost. The night before, in anticipation of the event, I kept thinking about stories. Not just those we tell, but those kept secret. As an Asian-heritage person, I know that silence is woven into my cultural legacy. My Asian-American friends and I have talked about the frustrating silence of our Asian parents, about the lack of demonstrativeness, both physical and emotional. Other cultures have this too, of course. Brits are famous for their "stiff upper lip." And Appalachian hillbilly culture, despite its propensity for tall tales, is known for endur...
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Poem in Appalachian Review

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  A slim package came yesterday in the mail. The Spring 2020 issue of Appalachian Review , which includes my poem "Almost Heaven, or Mixed-Race Roadtrip Following the Fall of Saigon." Past contributors to Appalachian Review include Pinckney Benedict, Wendell Berry, Wiley Cash, Nikki Giovanni, bell hooks, Silas House, Fenton Johnson, Barbara Kingsolver, Maurice Manning, Ann Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Neela Vaswani, Frank X Walker, Crystal Wilkinson, etc. etc., so I feel I'm in excellent company.  The journal used to be called Appalachian Heritage , a name that too many people, according to its website, associated with "a simplistic view of Appalachia as a place frozen in a quaint, bucolic, homogenous past or, at worst, a particular ultra-conservative brand of politics and identity." Hence, the name change.  It's a shame that the word "heritage" has come to carry so much ugly baggage. But it's w...
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For My Friends in Wilmington, With Love

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Eight years in the Port City changed me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. While I say goodbye (but not farewell), I want to share a little of my journey and what I’ve learned along the way. It’s hard saying goodbye to places. I learned this as a child, when I was taken away from Saigon, the city of my birth, and brought to Oak Hill, West Virginia. My mother and I were, literally, strangers in a strange land. According to the census of that time, West Virginia was 95.1% white and 4.8% Negro (the government’s term, not mine). By my math that means 99.9% of the population was not like us. If not for a cheaply framed photograph of several black-haired, tawny-skinned people hanging in our hallway, I would not have known that any other Vietnamese existed. Except for the horrifying images that later appeared on the TV. But that’s a story for another time.  No one attempted to teach me how to handle a loss like that. Loss of homeland, culture, kin. And so that first experience of leaving a...
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