Going Home, Writing Home
Poet and children's book author Truong Tran talks about writing in the margins.
By Kathryn Olney*

Vietnamese poet and children's book author Truong Tran often feels like he is straddling two worlds. As the son of a South Vietnamese army major who emmigrated to San Jose when Tran was only six, he grew up in a household where a sign on his parents' refrigerator decreed: "only Vietnamese spoken here." Yet when he stepped out his front door, and frolicked in 1980's-era Silicon Valley as a boy, he slipped easily into his adopted culture, falling in love with quintessentially Western authors like J.D. Salinger and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Later, as a college student at UC Santa Cruz, he found himself at another kind of threshold. While Tran always assumed he would major in biology, he found himself drawn to the work of Chicano poet Gary Soto in an English class. It was through Soto, as well as Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath, that he discovered the printed word as an ideal way to grapple with his "hyphenated" heritage.  ("Whitman for his lyricism, Plath because she is such a master of the craft, and Soto because Vietnamese poets were not an option for me then," Tran notes). His love of words had a heritage of their own: "I think [that] given the chance", reflects 35 year-old Tran a little sadly, "my father would have worked with words too.  He loved stories and books." Like so many new immigrants in California, his parents made their living on the computer chip lines of Silicon Valley. And like so many first-generation children, Tran's life would be very different from his parents.

In 1999, four years after completing his MFA in poetry at San Francisco State University, Tran published Book of Perceptions, a book of poetry that explored a momentous experience: his first visit back to Vietnam since he left with his family in 1975. "It took me a long time to begin work on the book.  I felt very intrusive looking at Vietnam as 'the Other'." The solution, he decided, was not to draw a distinction between the two cultures, but rather to show the two cultures bleeding into one another. This would become a theme for the poet, and a way to explore the boundaries of both identity and language. A subsequent book of poetry, Dust and Consciousness, impressed fellow poets with the ease with which it negotiated his dual heritage. "It claims both Vietnamese and American perspectives without one identity overwhelming or obliterating the other," wrote one reviewer, "...It allows the speaker to be in both Vietnam and in America at the same time."

One pitfall for books like Going Home that speak to underserved populations is that they don't always reach a larger audience. Sadly, these marginalized works often end up only being bought by libraries and parents of children within the particular culture they chronicle. The beauty of Going Home is that Ami Chi's story speaks to children of different backgrounds. Whatever their ethnic heritage, children often commune between all sorts of disparate communities: rich and poor, young and old, scholarly and street, old homes and new. While one or two pages in the book could have teased out this idea a little further, an imaginative child can easily see how Ami Chi's story is about more than just dual heritage. "It reminds me of Lindsay's life now," this reporter's eight year-old son Ted commented after we read the book for the first time. As we talked, he ran his fingertips pensively over the vibrant  aquas and teals in Ann Phong's textured Illustrations.   Ted's big sister Lindsay was leaving for her second year of college the next day, and he intuited in Going Home a story that dealt with the two homes she too now straddles.

In his latest work within the margin, just released from Apogee Press, Tran continues to wrestle with marginality and duality.  This time he expresses the idea in both form and content. within the margin is written in a single line of type that runs through the middle of the book. While most would call Tran's work experimental, and thus on the margins of mainstream poetry, in within the margin he uses the physical idea of writing in the margins as a symbol for his psychic struggle. "The more I write, the more space becomes metaphorical, not physical," Tran observes. " I heard the sculptor Richard Serra say in an interview that in order for viable art to exist in our society there has to be some level of marginalization. That idea was both disconcerting and intriguing to me. My reaction to that was: okay, if I was a marginalized writer, what kind of space would I exist in, what kind of stories?" 

Yet the innovative poet isn't above putting those stories on a level that younger audiences might more readily understand.  "A friend of mine was wondering how to explain the book to her students if they don't understand what within the margin is trying to say.  I told her to tell them it's an homage to Lord of the Rings, except instead of Hobbits, you have a six year-old boy who is doing the traveling or making the quest, and instead of traveling to Middle Earth, he's traveling within the margins of a book." 

As one reviewer put it, Tran's work is going where American "hyphenated identity" itself is traveling: to "a place where one's ethnicity is simply a fact, and not required to assert itself against any of the literary paradigms that are beginning to lose their bite."  The story which is the theme of all of his work, the journey between and among homes, is one that can speak to adult and young readers.  As he continues to explore the bounds of language and identity, Tran charts new territory.

*Kathryn Olney is a San Francisco-based writer, editor, and high school and college journalism instructor.  She is a regular contributor to PaperTigers.

Posted: October 2004

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