Chán Chết
". . . Chinese and Vietnamese culture are way ahead, both in the time line, but also culturally, in their wisdom."
Anyone I talk to on a daily basis isn’t allowed to read this because you’ve already suffered enough. ❤️
Ocean Vuong is doing linguistic determinism1 again,2 this time while interviewed by Hua Hsu for The New Yorker (April 10, 2022). Here is a part that made me laugh.
There’s another poem, “Old Glory,”where you recount all these everyday phrases (“Knock ’em dead,” “I’d smash it/ good,” “You truly/ murdered”) that remind us how much of our speech is casually inflected with violence.
That poem was very uncomfortable to write and even to read. It’s a found poem: you take these pieces and put them together. I wanted to do something that only the poem could do. Only the poem could show us that. We hear these phrases all the time, we might even say some of these phrases, but they’re diluted in the larger context, and they come at us sporadically through the day, through the media, different voices say them. We don’t notice them. But then, when we take out all the other context and just stack them together, it becomes brutal in its truths.
I was trying to explain this to my aunt, this lexicon of American violence, and she was utterly horrified. She’s, like, “Why would they use those words?” ’Cause in the Vietnamese context—and it might be similar to Chinese—words are like spells. If you talk about death, death visits you, so you don’t talk about death at the dinner table. There’s a lot of taboo around speech and how it brings forth the darkness. And so, for my aunt, it was totally foreign to her, you know? That’s what I wanted to create. I wanted to create a foreign experience of something very familiar.
Right. In Chinese, there are homophonic puns, so that in Mandarin the word for “four” sounds like the word for “death,” and the number is tainted by association. So even the word for a number conjures something taboo.
Chinese and Vietnamese culture is so much older than America. And I think, in this sense, America is still immature. I would argue that the way it renders and handles language is still quite primitive for a nation and a culture that has so much technological prowess. It’s actually quite archaic in how it imagines the capacity of language, and, and in this sense, Chinese and Vietnamese culture are way ahead, both in the time line, but also culturally, in their wisdom. On good days, I believe that America might end up with that wisdom eventually. We often see these foreign countries as “behind,” but we only measure that in G.D.P. and technology. But when it comes to the spiritual wisdom of how to handle something like language, Vietnam is way ahead, and I hope America catches up one day.
Everyone thinks their people are the singular best at emotional repression and/or clinical depression, the only ones who keep a plastic bag of plastic bags under the sink to reuse, obsessed with ghosts, the most melodramatic and most stoic. Everyone believes that their heritage greets life’s hardships with dignity and humor best, which is very annoying and corny but sometimes sweet in its willful, self-soothing persistence. And in any case, it’s far less annoying than forgetting to be proud to have a sense of humor. You end up saying things like “in the Vietnamese context, words are like spells.” Many people don’t know this: our little brains simply can’t handle non-literal language, they’re too full with ancient spiritual wisdom. These are side effects of the yellow skin, which is why the Chinese also struggle so much with violent idioms.
There’s a very funny version of this anecdote right there! It is absurd that the aunt should be horrified at death-referencing figurative language. Chết cha, đói/khát/buồn ngủ/buồn/chán muốn chết, sợ chết khiếp, sợ hết hồn, cắt cổ, tụi Astros bị diệt chưa, tao đặp mày chết. It is very moving and human to not only not recognize but reject the foreign in oneself, and the poem succeeds fine to me if all it asks is “Take a look at these phrases, have you seen these all here like this before?” It’s ascribing significance so surely that makes me chuckle and despair.
And then all the monolinguals nod along and clap for themselves.
I know that at some point, probably here, I’m just someone screaming on the Internet about how skeptical I am of decadence—but it does make me so sad.
Tonal languages, he (to be fair, offhandedly) posits, create more attentive children. This, naturally, is why Vietnamese-, Yoruba-, Navajo-, etc. speakers are inherently better, more careful listeners, unlike speakers of any other languages, where you never have to pay attention to anything. See also Kevin Nguyen, Eavesdropping on Ocean Vuong’s New Book, N.Y. TIMES, May 25, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/books/ocean-vuong-earth-briefly-gorgeous.html (“As a writer, Vuong believes speaking Vietnamese gives him an advantage. It’s a tonal language, which requires the listener to pay attention.”). And “in Vietnam,” unlike anywhere else, among anyone else, of course, “there is much dependency on the body. . . . One needs the body to remember the poem, sing the poem, pass it along.” PBS NewsHour, Vietnamese American poet contemplates his personal ties to the war, YOUTUBE (May 3, 2016).
“And my family, the people who raised me, their Vietnamese is about third, fourth grade level, which means mine is third, fourth grade level. I get it from them. And I just thought, I’m, now that I’m a writer, I want to translate, I want to learn more meaning. And when I started to use certain words with my family members, they’d say, ‘well, what is that? What’s that word?’ And I realized I don’t want to learn anymore. My English has already surpassed everything that they know, as far as linguistics. Vietnamese is the only thing I have left with them. Every new word I know in Vietnamese is one word further from them.” What a confounding and convenient line of reasoning, based on the idea that a lack of formal schooling or literacy rewinds a speaker’s overall fluency to that of a child. Is it arrogant of me to think this arrogant! See also Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn, Ocean Vuong Wrote One of the Summer’s Most Anticipated Books. He Doesn’t Care If It “Matters to Whiteness.”, MOTHER JONES, June 4, 2019, https://www.motherjones.com/media/2019/06/ocean-vuong-on-earth-were-briefly-gorgeous/ (“At the end of our interview, I asked Vuong, 30, to reflect on the importance of language, asking if he speaks Vietnamese and whether he ever writes in it. He tells me he is fluent but he consciously decided not to learn how to write, to stay connected to his family.”).
Chán Chết
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