Elizabeth Thuy Gordon

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...

  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...

A few weeks ago, just days apart, I had the pleasure of learning that one of my scripts, R Is for Rainbow , had been accepted in not one—but two!—festivals. Anyone who writes and submits work knows that acceptances are jolts of pure pleasure. They're like miraculous blips on a heart monitor that is otherwise flatlining. I'm not dead after all! Which can be hard to believe when the rejections come piling up like snowdrifts or, worse, when the response is nothing. Nada. Zip. [ouch] I'll be attending one production this weekend, when the play is performed at the Heralds of Hope Ten-Minute Play Festival in Silver Spring, Maryland. It will also be one of six plays produced sometime in 2020 for the Stages Ten-Minute Festival near Portland, Oregon, a city my husband and I have long wished to visit. (Portland is reputedly a vegan paradise). R Is for Rainbow is an unusual play for me, in that it is sweet, playful, and happy. (Though I hope not sappy). As such, it's a far ...

My brother-in-law phoned me yesterday afternoon. He’d locked himself out of the house, and could I let him back in? Someone else might’ve been annoyed, but I was thrilled to get the call. More than once I’d done the exact same thing. Accidentally closed the locked door behind me and marooned myself outside. In fact, I’d done it earlier this week and had to call my sister over to rescue me. Luckily, we all have each other’s house keys and live close by. On the way to Craig’s place, I switched on the radio. It was already tuned to WHQR, the local public radio station, and was in the middle of an interview. I tried to fit the pieces together. A man was talking about battling a wildfire, trying to save his house. I assumed this was in California. He spoke of stomping on the fire for seven hours straight, his boots melting, his legs aching. At one point, he said, he tried using kayak paddles to beat back the flames, because his legs were just too tired. When a fire truck finally ar...

Like millions of others yesterday, I watched Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony in front of the senate judiciary committee. Like Anita Hill years before, Ford was there to share what she knew about a powerful man poised to take an even more powerful office. Ford was 100% certain she had been assaulted as a teenager, but was unsure about many other seemingly important facts, such as the date and place of the attack. Her inability to provide this information, along with her 36 year delay in making the assault public, has caused many to doubt her claim. A recent New York Post story is typical of the criticisms leveled at Ford and her faulty memory. “Ford still can’t recall basic details of what she says was the most traumatic event in her life,” the article trumpets. How can Ford be believed, it goes on to insinuate, when she "concedes she told no one what happened to her at the time, not even her best friend or mother”? Ford’s recounting of her experiences forced me to e...

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...

It's mid-December, Christmas lights are up, and the World Series—the "fall classic" that marks the climax of the 27-week baseball season—feels like a fast-fading memory. Except it still haunts me. Not so much the games themselves, although the Series went the distance. And to sports fan there's no thrill quite like a "game 7." But you may have heard about an incident that occurred after Astros hitter Yuli Gurriel homered off of Dodgers pitcher Yu Darvish. Gurriel celebrated his home run by pulling his eyes into slits. Not your typical gesture of jubilation. In fact, a completely nonsensical one—unless you know that Darvish is Asian. And then it makes all the sense in the world. If you're Asian and you're reading this, you know exactly what I mean. You've been the recipient of "slit-eyes." Probably more than once. You know that, as racial slurs go, it's the equivalent of the N-word. If you're not Asian, maybe you don't ...

Yesterday I got an acceptance notice (yay!) from the online literary magazine  Wraparound South , which will be publishing a short essay of mine in audio form. As part of the acceptance, they provided a long list of questions and asked me to answer one of them. (Author responses are included in the "Back Porch" section of their site). The question I picked was "What advice do you have for new and emerging writers?" Here's what I said: I would advise all writers to learn something tangible about the world they inhabit, specifically the natural world, which we too easily forget is the source of all our highfalutin technology. A single microchip takes many times its weight in fossil fuels, chemicals, and water to produce. So even if you’re an ecophobe (which I hope for all our sakes you’re not), you’re still deeply connected to and mutually dependent on the non-manufactured world. If you’re not keen on learning which rare earth minerals make up your laptop, at ...

"We are here! We are here! We are here!" —Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who I didn't plan on writing a Letter to the Editor this morning.  No, I'd awakened from a restful sleep (as evidenced by the damp spot of drool on my pillow), having been serenaded by the patter of raindrops all night. I opened my laptop to check the weather (clearing) and the scores from the midnight tennis match I was too sleepy to watch to conclusion (Sasha Zverev, in three). Then I scrolled down for more news, thumbing past sex offender photos and a bagel shop grand opening to click on “ 5 plays John Staton would love to see done in Wilmington .”  Having recently attended some very good plays here, and anticipating seeing more, I was intrigued to know which works our local theater critic would be advocating. I read his choices (interesting, but no real surprises) and was about to close the tab when my personal spidey sense kicked in and made me look again. And there it was. Or,...

A while back my brother-in-law asked if I wanted to collaborate with him in putting on a poetry event here in Wilmington. Yes, I said, before he proposed hope as a theme.  Hope, of course, forms the basis of all my writing. Just kidding. Early on, as a poet in college, I wrote a poem mocking Wendell Berry's "The Peace of Wild Things." It was a scathing lampoon, and accomplished too. One day I'll dig it up and post it here. Earlier, in high school, I wrote of tortured love, depression, the impossibility of closeness or connection. Earlier still, in grade school, I penned story after story of human cruelty toward other animals. You could say hope was my essence, my obsession, my brand. If you were an idiot. So as the day of the event draws near, I've been turning my attention hopeward. I remember being in a meeting of Unitarians where the leader eloquently made clear that hope, not optimism, was the thing. I wish I could recall her exact words, but her con...

The bluffs you say the bluffs and I try to imagine them holding his ashes a smidgen of him nestled in a crevice which remains dark and cool despite the Shawnee sun beheld by damselflies the river singing him lullabies all day and all night in all seasons never mourning never guilt aggrieved   just her green   sacramental waters soiled with tears flooded with prayer.

Yesterday a friend and I visited the riverfront farmers' market in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. We got there late. It was hot. People were walking away carrying armfuls of flowers, lugging showy striped watermelons, tugging tired children out of the street. We worried about the dog's paws and looked for shade under the vendors' tents. We passed tables of summer vegetables, racks of flowy clothes, scented soaps and lotions, a knife sharpener, bakers, potters and a pickle makers, a woman selling mussel pearl jewelry, an dog biscuit duo giving away samples and profit. We bought some kombucha. Fell for the child who asked,  Can I pet your dog?   At the end of the market, just before we turned to go back, I saw the one thing I hadn't expected to see: a car just like his. Yellow-and-black like a wasp and I was stung. I gasped and cried out, reflexively turning away to face the water. My friend put her arm around me. The tears did all the talking. A car just like...

Possibly it's due to the recent death of my father. Or maybe it's just a matter of my own aging, but I've been finding West Virginia coming into my poems lately. It was the place my father was from, the place my paternal grandparents lived and where my family often visited when my brother, sister, and I were small.  My paternal grandmother was Mary Elizabeth Gordon. I was named after her. The first time I ever found myself starstruck was seeing her in her Moose Lodge finery the year she was crowned queen.

Our writing is inspired, in part, by our obsessions—those images, memories and concerns we keep spinning in our heads. Carolyn Wright, poet Yes, certain images, memories, and concerns keep spinning in my head. One of these is Vietnam, the land of my birth, the country that gave America nightmares. Being biracial is not incidental to my identity but essential to it. And it wasn’t me that made it so. My white classmates taught me well the lesson that “one of these things is not like the others”—they were the others and I was the one. And of course there was my mother. Her face, her voice, her tiny body. Other, other, other. As children, one of our most primal sensory experiences is the sound, the cadence, of our mothers’ voice. My mother’s voice spoke with a Vietnamese accent, used Vietnamese syntax. Although I don’t speak Vietnamese, though I can’t understand the meaning of the words, the sound of that language is a sweetness in my ears, a tugging in my heart. Can you imagine? Being ...

You have to protect  your writing time.  The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.  —William Goldman Although bright and airy, my Wilmington cottage has been, for the better part of four months, a kind of “cave” for me. Not a safe and quiet place to hibernate, but a safe and quiet place to generate. Ideas, poems, stories, plays. The writing I’ve found so hard to do elsewhere has been possible to do here. It’s not just the place itself, though that certainly helps. The easy weather, the life bursting forth so abundantly and beautifully all around me. But the writing has also come, I think, because of the way I’ve hunkered down. Narrowed my focus. I’ve put blinders on to limit my vision, diminish distractions, and it’s worked.

I'm spending the winter of 2017 in the South. Deeper in the South than I've ever lived before. I'm so far south in North Carolina that I'm practically in South Carolina. In this part of the south, flowers bloom in wintertime and palm trees grow alongside the pines. In fact I'm looking at a palm tree outside my window as I write this. It's a common species, a Windmill Palm ( Trachycarpus fortunei ), but every time I see it I’m still astounded that it's only a few feet from my front porch. My writing cottage—that's what I’m calling it, for now, anyway—is in an ungentrified part of Wilmington, not far from downtown. Ungentrified, as in a euphemism for black. I'm not white, but my neighbors don't know this. I mentioned it to Tracy, a neighbor who makes extra cash mowing yards on this block, but I don't think he really heard me. He must not know many writers, because he likes to joke with me about telling a friend there’s now a writer in the nei...

I remember it was on a school bus. Was I in middle school? Maybe. But wait, I didn't take the school bus in middle school, so it must have been elementary school, when my family had first moved to Tennessee from Florida. No matter. The bus was bumping along a narrow, wooded road on a steep hillside. The road followed the winding path of a creek that lay like a dark ribbon of shine in the ravine below. We were all in shade and I was a little bit scared. Sometimes the bus's right wheels went a few inches off the pavement, and I imagined how easy it would be for us all to go tumbling down the ravine into the murky glimmer of that creek.