Blood and Soap
Robert Benziker - The Santa Fe New Mexican
Feb 22, 2008
"Each word offers a different taste," Linh Dinh writes in "Food Conjuring," a short story from his collection Blood and Soap, in which he reflects on the words we use to describe food. "Some have volume but no density. Some emit crude, rustic sensations. The most intriguing leave paradoxical, even tragic, consequences on the tongue."
Dinh is obsessed with language, well beyond even the strict requirements necessary to become a successful poet and author. Dinh doesn't just obsess over the words in his poems -- he is also fascinated by the very idea of language.
"By calling an old dish a new name," he continues, "my friend believes (or allows herself to believe), you're already changing its taste. One does not eat bread but baguettes. One does not eat instant noodles but pasta. A beautiful girl with a hideous name becomes a hideous girl. An ugly girl with a pretty name becomes a pretty girl in print and in memory." In other words, a rose by any other name might not smell as sweet.
The idea that different words can change the meaning of what they represent comes into sharp focus when traveling abroad. Does prosit imply something different than cheers? Does a bonbon taste the same as a piece of candy? Language barriers can seem gargantuan when a person moves to a new country at a young age, as the preteen Dinh did when he moved from Vietnam to America in 1975. Not only did Dinh need to grow familiar with the new words for everything around him but also the words used to describe himself. He had to adapt from being thought of as Vietnamese to being considered American.
"As a child, you didn't think about it," Dinh told Pasatiempo by telephone. "You just did what other kids were doing. Ultimately, there was a point that I realized that there was kind of a barrier, in the sense that I would never be quite inside. So this realization and the finality of it would really irritate me and almost enraged me for a while -- the fact that I was always going to be on the outside."
He found that he was not quite considered American in America, and when he returned to Vietnam in 1998, he discovered he wasn't considered Vietnamese there. But the more he traveled (he has also lived in England and Italy), the less he minded this lack of a firm national identity. "At this point, I'm no longer upset that I'm not quite 100 percent American. It doesn't really matter to me. Because wherever I go -- even back in Vietnam -- I was an outsider. So it's a trade-off. My outsider status is more than compensated for by the fact that I've had the opportunity to experience many different cultures. Different places. And as a poet, you're on the outside anyway, and that was another realization that came slowly."
Dinh came to poetry slowly, first trying his hand at painting. After high school, he attended The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. It was there, and during the years of odd jobs that inevitably follow an art-school degree, that he gained the confidence to write in English and developed his voice as a writer. But the roots of this interest can be traced back further than that. "My last year of high school I spent in northern Virginia, in the suburbs. So there weren't really good bookstores around. The first book of poetry I bought was Langston Hughes. I bought it almost randomly. But I think, looking back, I was intrigued by the fact that there was a nonwhite person writing poetry who was famous." He also cites Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde album and the poetry of the French Surrealists as early sources of inspiration and influence.
Just as Dinh has never lived in one place for long, he's also never settled into one form for very long. He won a fellowship from the Pew Charitable Trust in 1993 and published Drunkard Boxing, the first of his four books of poetry, in 1998. He is well known for championing modern Vietnamese writers, having editing and co-translated Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction From Vietnam and translated Three Vietnamese Poets. His first short-story collection, Fake House -- an intriguing set of occasionally semibiographical stories set in both America and Vietnam -- came out in 2000. He has taken to blogging lately (see http://wwwwsonneteighteen.blogspot.com/), and promises to show some videos of his performance work at the Lannan event.
Over the years, Dinh has grown more political. Despite having grown up in Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s, he was only aware of the Vietnam War as it affected his family -- until he got older and studied the subject. He feels Jam Alerts, his most recent collection of poetry, is his most political work. This, too, was informed by Vietnamese writers as well as by current events in America.
"In Vietnam, the writers feel more important because they're being watched. They're being harassed by the police. So they feel like they have a real enemy. And they have real issues to struggle for. It's a bit of an illusion, because the general public doesn't really pay much attention to them anyway. This real enemy and the real issues they are battling with give them a sense of relevance. I came back to the United States in 2001, just before 9/11. And it's interesting that the differences between Vietnam and the United States seemed more extreme before 9/11. But since then, some of the issues that afflict Vietnam seem to be afflicting the United States also. So each country has its own set of problems.
"Perhaps being in Vietnam taught me that a writer can be deeply engaged and that he should be careful not to trivialize himself and allow the dominant society to make him trivial."
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