Dan Duffy

just gave me a nice mention on FaceBook:

Linh Dinh left Saigon this date in 1975. He later started adult life in Philadelphia as a painter and as a house painter, then became a poet with an audience in English and in his own Vietnamese. He is the poet Linh Dinh, and like the poet Langston Hughes has distinguished himself as well in essay and prose fiction and reportage.

He has devoted this century to reporting, from people you might meet painting houses, whom he meets now by taking the bus to drink with the disenfranchised around the United States, then passing along his conversations.

Today he posted this coronavirus report from the Republic of Korea, appending a letter from a correspondent there, and another each from Malaysia, Spain and Taiwan. His communication appears in The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection--A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media. Wikipedia tells me that Unz is an anti-Semitic publication. May I point out that anti-Semitic is what friends of Israel in the United States call any discourse here about Israel that is anywhere near so free as that within Israel. May I also tell you, as a Jew, and an expert on this particular Vietnamese poet, that Linh Dinh loves you all. Really. He walks the earth visiting the poor and the sick and those in prison, that is, everyone, exactly as a Christian is enjoined to do. Please consider supporting his work.

I'd be the first to say I'm not nearly as nice as Dan is describing me, but I certainly appreciate his endorsement, and the fact that he even remembers I left Saigon on April 28th, 1975 (on a C-130 transport plane). Here's my very brief account of it in the New York Times.

Dan Duffy is a dear friend. I first met Dan in Hanoi in 1995, then have hung out with him in New Haven, New York, Raleigh and Philadelphia. In Raleigh, Dan was working as a horse groom while finishing graduate school, so he lived over the horses. It was an experience to visit him there. On that occasion, Dan introduced me to fried okra. I love the Carolinas and, frankly, all of the South.



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