Happiness

Howdy reader, it's not been so long now. But that is ony as a function of the readily availible nature of this blog as it is immediately placed on my homepage, as it is. It's dark as it is right now, been raining for a good long while.

Yesterday I played the Sims 2 all day long. I'm not particularly proud of myself, but there you have it. You know people always say i'm going to be okay reader, how do they know? Recently I turned in a story i wrote in a single night, how could you have known that its failing would affect me so greatly? The truth is, the reason i've been playing so much in days of late is because frankly, that fear I mentioned last post is academic.

Yeah it's true, I've not been keeping up with my work. a function of perhaps my own laziness, perhaps but also ... well my friend went through a particularly abusive breakup with her first boyfriend and I had to be there for her reader, you understand.

But it still doesn't change the facts.

I'm several assignments behind in French, i've done close to none of the homeworks, I don't know what's going on in class. All of the late critiques i've turned in for creative writing recently just got sent back to me with 6s for scores because in spite of the amount of work i put into them, they are still late and I don't think Frank has the patience anymore to actually read through them. I don't know what I'm going to write about for my African Lit paper, and looking at the facts streaming through the WGA strike right now, I'm particularly scared about my future job prospects.

Reader, over half of the WGA is unemployed, writers work job to job, paycheck to paycheck and most supplement their writing jobs with alternative employment that they keep well into their later years. Annual incomes can dip as low as 5,000 a year and even when you do write your opus there's no guarantee that some executive won't send you a smarmy little note asking you to add in more 'tits and ass'. Really though it's the money that scares me.

Reader, I do love what I do, honestly. I can't imagine doing anything else at this moment in my life and I love my writing. But this scares me, a lot. Right now another one of my friends - whose parents are unfortunately a lot more traditional than mine - is at the receiving end of the tradition stick for pursuing an english degree instead of her parent's mandate that she be a doctor. In their words exactly, she is a 'waste of money' with an attitude problem and she never thinks about how much she hurts them.

Tradition, what did we learn from you anyways.

I find that interesting about the state of asian-americans in this country, that dedicated adherence to the exact same principles of sacrifice and ... whatever that exists in black and white terms, refusing to adapt or change. It might not be applicable to other ethnicities but let me speak for a moment about the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese community as it exists in the United States is a dying one, doomed to eke out its meaningless and slowly suffering existence until the sheltered dreams of the 70s Saigon boat-people generation vietnamese die slow and miserable deaths. Why so? Because they have refused to adapt.

Two years ago I went back to Vietnam, what did I find? The language and culture had continued to evolve, even as our community leaders had adamantly insisted that 'everything under communism is bad'. They had a word for computer, which up until - well frankly now - my siblings and I had always called 'computer' in a vietnamese phonetic model (i.e. stereotypically vietnamese). The word was 'may vi tinh' translating literally into 'thinking machine' and it represents the problem of the Vietnamese in America right now. What culturally have we invented that is new in America? The Latinos have invented their own pertinent definition of Latino-American that is distinct from the culture of their South American counterparts, what then of the Vietnamese? We have maybe Paris by night, and then what else? Trumped up beauty pageants where over-make-upped beauty queens spout trivialities out of their clown-like faces? A dedicated adherence to a stagnant cultural moment that did not even exist?

So much of what is Vietnamese-American is harkening back to this 'loss of country' as the defining and rallying moment for all Vietnamese-Americans. As if it is our defining moment that we must take back and reclaim our homeland like the returning sons in an epic poem. Perhaps, maybe someday, but what until then? If you ask me how I define myself as a Vietnamese-American I will tell you in food, in religion, and in a trivial conglomeration of disparate details but culturally there has been no evolution within the Vietnamese community. This die-hard adherence to this cultural moment, this myopic paralysis within the community has strangled any and all chances for its new evolution outside of the boundaries of Vietnam.

It is why - I imagine - there is that reported split within the second generation Vietnamese, the characterization as 'valedictorian delinquents'. You create a model wherein those who toe the line with this archaeic social structure reap the rewards of societal support, but what then for those who fail? What the elder members (not all, but most) of the Vietnamese community fail to acknowledge is that even within the earlier society that valued success, those who failed to achieve the defined parameters of success had their place too. But not here in America so that when these teenagers do fail, they turn to the culture that is most immediate to them: latino gang culture.

Where is that vitality of language that would expand and reinvigorate how the Vietnamese-American youth understand themselves? Where are our words for 'computer', 'cell phone', 'video game', and all the other terms that we could define ourselves in? This is the failure to expand beyond this 70s moment that is strangling my capacity to legitimately define myself as through and through, Vietnamese American.

Ultimately I do not think my children will speak Vietnamese. Perhaps they will learn a few words to appease me and perhaps they will take a few classes to learn basic phrases but as it is, unlike the Chinese, Korean, and Latino communities Vietnamese-American teenagers do not speak to each other in Vietnamese. We cannot. We are communicating in a language that has stopped developing (here at least) beyond a certain cultural moment at the end of the Vietnam War and that paralysis is killing any chance that a legitimately seperate, Vietnamese-American identity will emerge.

A Demain mes amis.

-Viet