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The Writers Post VOLUME 7 NUMBER 2 JULY 2005
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FEATURE INTERVIEW BY
RAVENSYARD PUBLISHING LTD. WITH UYEN
NICOLE DUONG, AUTHOR OF Daughters of the river
Huong
The following interview with Uyen Nicole
Duong was conducted by the publisher in advance of the publication of
Daughters of the river Huong in July 2005. RY: How did you come to write “Daughters of the River Huong”? Duong: I’m not sure anyone – even the writer – can fully understand all the
sources for a writer’s creative energy, but in the case of this book I know
that several themes at work for me were the city of Hue, the River Huong, and
the native people from Champa. My
mother, who is from Hue, has played an important part in my creative life
since childhood. All Vietnam veterans who served in Vietnam, I imagine, would
remember Hue and the battle there during the TET offensive in 1968. Hue was
an imperial city, and represented the past glory of the independent Vietnam
before French colonialism. Control of Hue was very important and one of the
reasons why the battle in 1968 was so intense. I know many American veterans
of the Vietnam War remember Hue. One time at a social gathering at a
filmmaker’s home in California, I was introduced to a Vietnam vet and when he
found out my mother came from Hue, all he wanted to talk about was the battle
for the imperial city. In a way, this made me sad that my mother's hometown
was associated only with the bloodshed of war in the minds of the American
public. For that reason, I want to bring Hue and its motif into my novel. The
River Huong, commonly known among tourists as the Perfume River, is the
landmark of Hue. It is associated with the beautiful and romantic women of
Vietnam. It also has historic significance independent from the famous
battle. One of the last Vietnamese monarchs, together with two mandarin
strategists, plotted a revolt against the French protectorate government during
his boat trips on the Perfume River. Of course, it was unsuccessful and the
young king was exiled. Hue and its River Huong are also associated with the
past kingdom of Champa, annexed into Vietnam as of the 15th century. I have
always been interested in the indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, including
the Champa heritage. In 1991, a Vietnamese friend of mine, a psychologist who
had studied Carl Jung, told me I looked more like a Cham woman than a
Vietnamese. This gave me the idea to pursue a creative urge. I conceived the
novel during the same year. Initially,
the epic novel was called The Queen of Champa. Later, I also wrote a short story called “The Young Woman Who
Practiced Singing,” and a non-fiction piece called “The Coffins of Cinnamon.”
I then combined all three themes into one body of work, which I called the
“Fall of South Vietnam series,” consisting of 3 independent yet related
novels. Daughters of the River Huong is the first of the three novels in this
series. I am trying to sell the other two novels in the same series, “Mimi
and Her Mirror,” and “Postcards from Nam.”
RY: How much of the story is autobiographical? Duong: My story is a work of literary fiction. It is not an autobiographical novel.
However, the voice of each protagonist in this family saga is authentic. The
things I wrote about were based on what some acting teachers call my own
sense-memory recollection, a stage acting method pioneered by the actress Uta
Hagen. I learned about this sense-memory recollection when I attended acting
school. I learned how to tap into my private feelings in order to render true
sentiments to my creative work. It came very naturally to me and I brought
the sense-memory recollection acting method into my fiction writing. Many
critics and writing teachers would say an author's early work is quite often
thinly disguised autobiography. But remember writers also learn the number
one principle: write what you know. River Huong is what I know. RY: What was your vision in writing River Huong? Duong: I wanted to capture the beauty of my home culture, and the sorrow of
its women in the form of literary fiction. I followed the heart of Madame
Cinnamon, who was a principal character but never spoke directly in the
novel. RY: Do you expect other Vietnamese-Americans will enjoy River Huong?
Duong: I hope so. The River Huong is well known in Vietnam. I take solace in
knowing that the new generation who was born in the US will hopefully know of
the River Huong's romanticism and place in Vietnamese history via my work. RY: Is your work political? Duong: I have no political statement to make except to note the events and
settings in some parts of this novel were dark chapters of Vietnamese
colonial history. The history of Vietnam is being reevaluated all the time by
the writers of Vietnam, and by Vietnamese-American writers like me. I believe
literary fiction has a great deal to add to the voices describing Vietnamese
history. I hope my writing is of the humanity of this history. I don't wish
to write about politics per se, and I don't want to use the literary art to
crusade for any particular cause. I think that would kill the literary art. RY: How and when did you come to the U.S.? Duong: Via the U.S. airlift, five days before the fall of Saigon. I was 16. RY: Tell us about your family and their influences. Duong: My father was a professor of linguistics at the University of Saigon, Faculty
of Letters. He continued his teaching career in the U.S. but in a different
discipline. My mother was a teacher of Vietnamese literature, who left her
family in order to teach at Faifo, a port town adjacent to a war zone. She
saw her students pulled into the war and various sides of the ideological
battle. The port town of Faifo was a meeting place between east and west,
where international traders and the missionaries first set foot in that part
of the world, on their voyage from India to China. I consider my mother's
action quite feministic for her time: leaving home to teach and rejecting a
pre-arranged marriage in the name of love. She married my father in Faifo for
love. But despite this independent spirit, she has remained a very
traditional woman faithful to Confucian values all her life. I was born in
Faifo. I also should point out that both of my grandmothers were influential
in every endeavor I have undertaken in my life, including my creative
writing, even though neither could read or write even their native tongue,
Vietnamese. This was not unusual for their generation -- the generation of
Vietnamese women coming from the villages of Vietnam, born at the turn of the
century. Yet, this was the generation that survived and bore the bloodshed of
continuous warfare. My paternal grandmother died in California. My maternal
grandmother died in Saigon, only a few years after the communist takeover. RY: How has your profession as a lawyer affected your work as a writer?
Duong: Currently, I am a law professor. I have been making a living and
maintaining my professional standing in the law for 20 years, at all times
maintaining my commitment to excellence in the law. It has been a hard
struggle to combine law and art, and the combination at times has been
exhausting. But I never compromised excellent performance in the law. This is
very important to me because, although I did not choose this role, it
happened that I was the first Vietnamese American female in various places
within the law. This distinguishes me from other lawyer-cum-writers. To
me, law is a beautiful end in itself – containing notions of freedom,
liberty, and justice for all. I will never give up working with the law. It
is not just a day job. If I had wanted just a regular job to earn a living, I
could have done something far less demanding and concentrated on my writing
at night. I do not want to do that. Other writers may think of law as a day
job, in which they plug themselves to wait for that commercial break with
their novel. That's not how I want to live my life. When I say I can do both
law and art, I will do both. I
have found it is possible to combine both. It all depends on the writer's
level of determination and sacrifice. It turned out that all my professional
life I have dealt with the conflicting demands of both the law and art,
internally and externally. In my various law jobs, for example, I have had to
fight a bias that as an artist I did not take my law job seriously. Wrong.
This bias was enhanced because I was a Southeast Asian woman living with
those cultural stereotypes. Further, the law is restrictive, and art is free,
and the creative processes are different. I wrote about this conflict between
law and art in my scholarly research work on law and literature. Yet, in many
ways I have found that for me the worlds of law and art compliment each
other. RY: Your
novel has poetry and music in it. How
does this come about? Duong: Again, I draw from my life experience to write fiction. Music, poetry, the performing art and the
visual art are just as important to me as literature. The only thing that I have not experienced
is sculpture. RY: Who
would you want to be if you weren’t yourself? Duong:
Hm. What a loaded
question! I could name a dozen people
I would want to be, or I could honestly say no one (pause). Maybe Maria Callas. No reader of River Huong should be surprised by this, I guess, since
the novel is textured by classical music and the poetry of Baudelaire. It is the love story of “that young maiden who practiced singing”
(laugh). Ms.
Callas had a very sad life, even scandalous, yet it was the glamorous life of
a diva and the disciplined life of an artist dedicated to the search for
perfection. She was also a dramatist,
in life and on stage. Drama was in
every feature of her face and her expressive eyes, as well as in her delivery
of all the great female roles of the operatic world. Her unique voice was technically
imperfect. It was beautiful yet full of raw edges. In my view, Ms. Callas really lived. And struggled along in
that life. An icon of style and fashion, yet she struggled to stay thin and
to combat skin problems. Alienated and exploited by many, including her loved
ones. She must courageously have
learned to live with solitude and pain in all that glamour. So much hurt by love, and so much driven
by her art. A life full of eccentricity, anguish, anxieties, conflicts and
despair, gains and losses, as well as the limelight of her stage. I think that if I were to desire somebody
else’s life, it might as well be the life of an imperfect, yet immortal
artist who has really loved and has really lived with all the negative as
well as positive emotions. Ms. Callas
did not build the world’s greatest wonder, nor find a cure for cancer, nor
put a stop to a world war, but she left us something so fragile yet so strong
and enduring, so mortal yet so eternally beautiful it is with us
forever. It is the human voice
delivered by an artist, all wrapped in the dramatic yet vulnerable nature of
a passionate woman. All legacies of
the great men and women of our world can be politicized, but not when it is
pure art, like the voice of Maria Callas and the music her wonderful voice
has delivered to us, during her lifetime and continuously after her death. ‚ The Writers Post &
literature-in-translation, founded 1999, based
in the US. Editorial
note: Works
published in this issue are simultaneously published in the printed
Wordbridge magazine (ISSN: 1540-1723). Copyright © RavensYard Publishing LTD & Uyen
Nicole Duong 2005. Nothing in this magazine may be downloaded, distributed,
or reproduced without the permission of the author/ translator/ artist/ The Writers Post/ and Wordbridge magazine.
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