An exchange with a reader

at Information Clearing House, 2/12/14:



manfred noa · 5 hours ago

As some one that has enjoyed his articles it's a little disconcerting that Linh Dinh should use Viet Nam in the argument.This nation more than any other on earth has suffered under the brutal boot of US Imperialism and has to be rightly suspicious of a returning 'white' poet whose parents I assume left the country classified as counter revolutionaries. Visiting the homeland, attempting to bribe poorly paid officials ( not hard to do lets face it) and then sitting around in cafes paying the bill for 'poets'and disaffected writers with his bagful of books and expensive camera equipment what the hell does he expect? It has to be said that this sort of behaviour is unacceptable in any country much less Viet Nam.




Linh Dinh · 20 minutes ago

Hi Manfred,

I didn't attempt to bribe, I actually did, because that's how things get done there. Everyone bribes every official as needed, and it's not just this government, but the former South Vietnam too, and the Colonial government. You get the picture. The dissident poets and fiction writers I've translated are working within the Vietnamese context and dealing with Vietnamese issues. They do not care about American concerns or what Americans think about them, but merely pointing out the many gross abuses of power from the RULING CLASS of Vietnam. They are speaking from the point of view of regular people, that is, from the Vietnamese working class, and I didn't live there like some American fat cat. I had no expensive camera, and like most people, I flushed my toilet with a bucket.

If you're interested in the results of my time there, then check out The Deluge: New Vietnamese Poetry, which has just been published by Chax Press of Tucson, or my novel of Vietnam, Love Like Hate. The Deluge took years to compile, and I made not a dime from it. Why? Because I admire and love the poets I translate. I have also translated plenty of American poetry into Vietnamese, including T.S. Eliot's Waste Land, for also no money. I'm telling you this to clarify that I love writing, including other people's writing, and that's why I've translated so many authors' works.

As for the elites of Vietnam, news just came out that McDonald's will open its first eatery there, and the man behind it is the Vietnamese-American son-in-law of the Prime Minister. The cops who harassed me and my friends are serving this elite, and not the people. The richest, most corrupt people in Vietnam are in the upper echelon of the Communist Party, and they are grossly materialistic, just like the elites anywhere. Though they flaunt their wealth constantly and indulge in the worst decadence, they will brand me and my friends as "decadent and reactionary."

Lastly, I do not write from ideology, but from common sense, and abuses from any source are still clearly abuses, unless you let ideology or partisanship cloud your judgement.




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Additional thoughts on this: It's also odd that this reader faults me for bringing books to my writer friends. In Vietnam, you're expected to bring back gifts after a trip, and during my 2 1/2 years there, from 1999 to 2001, this was my only visit to the US. Before I left, some of my friends asked me specifically to bring back books for them. A poet requested the Norton Anthology of American Poetry, so that's what I got. I also brought him a volume of Allen Ginsberg. For another poet, I brought the Selected Poems of Michael Palmer. The Balthus, I gave to an artist. I brought several copies of a Vietnamese poetry journal published in California. So why are these contrabands, you may be wondering, but in a totalitarian system, the government can declare just about anything illegal, and it doesn't even have to be consistent with its own rules.

Also, how is it "unacceptable" to give books away while sitting in a "cafe"? Speaking of which, Vietnamese of all types sit in cafes for hours, drinking very slowly their cheap beer or coffee, but "sitting around in cafes" as used here implies the lifestyle of idle bon vivants... And what's up with 'poets' in quotation marks, which further reveals this reader's assumption that these so-called poets were merely decadent trouble makers "sitting aroung in cafes," but even if that's all they were, how is it "unacceptable"? As for my "expensive camera equipment," which I didn't even have then, how would that add to the unacceptableness of my presence in Saigon?

A note too about my use of "Saigon": Everyone in Saigon uses the old name, with Ho Chi Minh City relegated to official documents, official pronouncements and the evening newscast. In conversations and on shop signs, it's Saigon, because that's what the people who live there prefer. "Saigon" is also seen on long distance buses. The word Saigon itself evokes an entire culture, so that even in Hanoi, you might see a shop sign advertising "Saigon fashion." A people's culture and heritage cannot be changed with a government decree.




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