In search of a shared language
May 29, 2024
This essay is part of Transpacific Literary Project’s monthly column, with art by Mit Jai Inn.
Every day, ông ngoại (maternal grandfather) turns on the TV: The Price Is Right in the morning, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune after dinner at 7, ESPN and testosterone-pumped blockbusters on FX in between. What he fails to understand in dialogue he can usually piece together through action. If given the option, he can also rely on one of his children to explain what’s happening on-screen into his ear. There’s a spot indented deep into the carpet, the accumulation of hundreds of hours, upon which he rests his feet.
My cousins and I were always amused by his viewing habits. What fun is watching Jeopardy without the ability to play along, the thrill of identification? This was ông ngoại’s attempt at American citizenship: always outside, incomplete, always already failed by language.
Growing up, my mom told me and my siblings that Tết is the most important day of the year—its unfolding sets the stage for the rest of the lunar cycle. This is not a simple passing down of cultural knowledge; it is an instruction. Every year since moving away for college, I’ve always come home for this day, so full of superstition and hurrah surrounding the family and its future.
Last Tết, I found myself among all the men in the family as they watched football. At some point, ông ngoại nudged one of my uncles, asking something about third down. It was an innocent question, but I was taken aback by it being asked at all. After decades of watching, I would have expected ông ngoại to know the ins and outs of the sport. Maybe he didn’t know much about football after all. What had he been watching this whole time, then? What did he make of this game? All this action?
In middle school, a history teacher suggested that the sanctity of football in American culture is a result of its function as a metaphor of war. An elaborate enactment of masculine violence, a stand-in for imperial aggression made for the basest of pleasures.
I’m wary of implicating ông ngoại, a war refugee, with this form of imperial spectatorship, but the Viet diaspora is no stranger to kissing up to the beneficent Western states that welcomed them into their enlightened democratic arms. In undergrad, during a conversation with a professor of refugee studies, I asked her how to make sense of the right-wing character of Vietnamese America (as I’m typing, ông ngoại is watching Tucker Carlson on Fox News). She responded, “When you’re left stranded and someone hands you a ladder, you don’t question it. You’re thankful to whoever was there to offer it.” (I am not completely satisfied with this answer.)
The fields of visual culture and semiotics, taking the instability of language as given, understand the moving image as an abundantly open circuit of signs, meaning, and interpretation, always in relation, always context-bound. How do you consume football or Jeopardy without understanding third down or having someone in your ear? Perhaps ông ngoại’s relationship to American TV and football inhabits that space outside of language, image and sound, signifier and signified—that moment in which the viewer generates an alternative relation, a process of becoming, the building of a home in a new country, the constant climbing of a ladder.
After dinner at family gatherings, the entire family would sit around the TV to watch a movie or Paris by Night, a variety program produced by Vietnamese entertainers for a global diasporic audience. The program featured comedic skits and musical performances ranging from wartime ballads to pop sleaze, showcasing younger singers clearly fashioned in the image of Britney and Christina. I once thought that I could trace the roots of my faggotry to watching Trish perform on screen (I don’t get how my family struggles with the fact that they raised a homo, ’cause I was stanning down!).
It was a random thought that occurred while researching for my undergrad thesis on Vietnamese refugee film and video. My advisor, Nguyễn Tân Hoàng, had shared some of his work with me, including one titled Cover girl: a gift from God, a short video essay that takes as its subject Dalena, a white girl who became a pop sensation in the Viet community in the nineties for her ability to sing in perfect Vietnamese. I’d seen white people on these variety programs before, but Dalena was especially jarring. Hoàng’s video unexpectedly departs from an all-too-easy critique of Dalena’s whiteness, sublimating her fetish object status into a fetish of another kind: diva worship. Despite the video’s intentions, I can’t help but feel like I’m being slapped in the face when I see a white person speak Viet. I spent seven years in Viet school and don’t have much to show for it.
I was never close to bà nội (paternal grandmother). For most of my life she lived with my uncle in Rowland Heights in Southern California. It didn’t help that I could never understand anything she said in her thick (but always endearing) Hué accent. When ông nội’s (paternal grandfather) health began seriously declining, the family moved him and bà nội to Arizona to live in a small apartment, closer to my aunt. I remember hearing that bà nội was unhappy living there, that there wasn’t much for her to do. Rowland Heights had a larger Viet population, and if she wanted, she could go to an elderly center during the daytime or indulge her gambling habit by taking a shuttle to a casino somewhere in the desert.
By the time that Tết came around last year, I was approaching my third year out of undergrad. I had been living in LA, struggling to land a new job in the film industry, and had just gotten in my second car accident in four months (intersectionality means escaping stereotypes can prove especially difficult). I had run out of savings and was left with no option but to move back home at the end of the month.
I had enjoyed the freedom of living without the panoptic gaze of my mom—whose maternal instincts often manifested to the detriment of my self-esteem—and bà ngoại (maternal grandmother), and their constant nagging for me to find more stable and better-paying work. To me, home was a shark pit of doctors and cushy finance-types, embodiments of a certain brand of hetero-aspirational Asianness that gestated in the ferment of Silicon Valley. But it was Tết, and I wanted to be back.
Sociolinguistic theories have determined that in immigrant families, the native language is almost always guaranteed to become lost within three generations. Sometimes I think that to be the child of refugees is to be in a constant state of mourning.
Both of my grandparents on my dad’s side are dead. In December 2020, on the day bà nội died, my entire family gathered over FaceTime to watch as she was taken off life support. My sister and I called in from San Diego, while at the other end of the state, my parents, younger brother, and bà ngoại joined, each in separate rooms, confined to their own virtual boxes. It seems trite now to belabor these estrangements of those early waves of the pandemic, yet even today, I’m unsettled by the cruelty of that year. In the hospital room, a camera was placed at one corner, directed at bà nội lying still on her hospital bed, not quite in focus. We took turns sharing our final words. When it was my turn, I became mute. Asphyxiated by finality, her presence mediated by a screen. What words could I say in a language that we shared. How can I claim this as a language that we shared.
Before the pandemic began, after ông nội passed, bà nội had become rootless, drifting back and forth from Vietnam and the homes of each of her children from Houston to Seattle. In that time, she came to stay with my family in San Jose for a few days. I’m not exactly sure what kind of relationship my two grandmothers had, but after bà nội’s stay, bà ngoại joked about the pains she’d go through to make sure bà nội was comfortable as her guest.
When it was bà ngoại’s turn to speak, she began to cry. She reminded bà nội of a conversation they shared during her stay, that when bà nội died, she would like to be in Vietnam. It was a dying wish that, given the pandemic’s state of international affairs, would have been impossible to fulfill. A reminder of the enduring violence that this country wrought against her, displaced by its insatiable imperial ambitions, and killed 40 years later by the failure of that state. After her death, bà nội did not have a home or country to return to. Thinking of her in this way, I saw myself in her, which is to say, I saw her as queer.
One day a few months after I moved home, ông bà ngoại, thinking I had left for the gym, began talking to each other about me. Cái thằng đó … nó hơi lạ. That word: lạ. Strange. Peculiar. I continued to listen as they went on: he spends all his time exercising but no time looking for a job (if I’m going to be jobless, the least I can do is be hot); he’s never even had a girlfriend either (so close!). To my family, witnessing the changes that my body underwent masked the scent of homosexuality (they are not acquainted with the deranged body politics afflicting gay men), and to some extent buying into masculinity afforded me a degree of respectability that I never had growing up.
Let the record show the hundreds of jobs I applied to but never got. And of course, this gender posturing would never save me. And what excuse did I have for the impression ông bà ngoại had of me if the few times I made my presence known (the few times that I felt capable of communicating with them) was to let them know I’d be at the gym.
Shortly after their conversation ended, bá ngoại found out I had heard everything. Sensing that I was upset (I started to cry as soon as she acknowledged me), she tried to explain that she didn’t mean any harm. (Whatever constitutes harm.)
After living in her apartment in Arizona for a while, one of my uncles installed an app on bà nội’s TV so she could easily watch Paris by Night and other Vietnamese-language variety shows. I don’t know how much that helped, but I’m glad she had at least something from back home, and despite being unable to die in Vietnam she still got to see all of her family before she did. A ladder has more than one destination.
Through her framework of queer dis/inheritance, Ly Thuy Nguyen theorizes queer Vietnamese diasporic identity as contested political ground, situated between queer theory’s refusal of heteropatriarchal family structures and the urgency for the survival of a refugee future. How can this be a home when to be here is to let die parts of me that my family will never know? I wish I was a better queer with firmer politics to reject all that this family has imposed upon me, but when they call me con I’m disarmed by the piercing fondness of that word.
I’ve been thinking about this feeling that I need to be home for Tết, to be around people with whom I felt so estranged. I think about opacity and the idea that you can never really know someone. There is comfort in such an idea.
Bà nội never really knew who I was. She never knew what kinds of things I was interested in, never mind that I felt this queer identification with her. What would we have to say to each other if a shared language afforded us some kind of closeness? Ông bà ngoại will never know me. I will never come out to them. I can never complain to them about my job prospects and how I’m trying really hard, or explain to them why Tucker Carlson is bad. Language, too, fails us.
This year was the first year in which I, now living in New York, did not come home for Tết. When I called bà ngoại to wish her well in the new year, her voice trembled as it did when she addressed bà nội the day she died.
Critical refugee studies has embraced silence as a site of potential, though it is more often in reference to all that is unsaid due to the pain and trauma of war. Silence is also augmented by the absence of language. In Venus in Two Acts, Saidiya Hartman writes: “Loss gives rise to longing, […] a space of productive attention to the scene of loss.” Mourning requires attention, attention yields discovery. What would we have to say if a shared language afforded us some kind of closeness? I don’t know if my family will ever change (my mom has watched Everything Everywhere All at Once and I don’t quite think she got the point), but never mind.
On Tết, I’ll be good. I’ll be on good terms with the family, this tenuous thing that sustains itself without language. Perhaps coming home is in that space of productive attention: an attempt at alchemizing family dynamics, a play that refurbishes dysfunction into something new, if only for a moment.
