We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People (East EP) - EXCERPT

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we were meant to be a gentle people (east ep)

dao strom | the sea and the mother




(EAST EP)


WE WERE MEANT TO BE A GENTLE PEOPLE




I don’t know if I can fake it anymore


I: CATACLYSM

This is the wound we came out of.


i’ve lied long enough for you

& if you think you know me just

because you read the words i wrote well, here’s another song for you




ยง

My brother is the boy in the middle of this photograph. It is from 1975, just after the Fall of Saigon, and the photo was taken at Camp Pendleton where we had landed. The photograph appeared in TIME magazine, and my mother snipped it and kept it. My brother is the one caught in mid-expression, with his eyes partially closed and his mouth open, as if he were about to speak or yawn just at the moment the picture was snapped. Behind him, there are two boys looking away, looking backwards; we see only the backs of their heads, the oversized bulk of their borrowed green field jackets. The girl in front of my brother looks forward and seems fairly unperturbed, comfortable enough in the jacket that


is every word a cataclysm ? & does it hurt to say what fills

your heart with lonely rhythm in the aftermath of Re-birth? ...

I wanted to be your vessel I wanted to fill your need But the past is an unwieldy burden & I fell out of line again

‘cuz every word was a cataclysm & how it hurt to say what fills your heart with lonely rhythm in the aftermath of Decay


keeps her warm, and we might assume she is the kind who will do fine, she is saavy and adaptable enough, and also she is pretty; we are reassured she will be taken care of. But it is the one in front of her who is the one ((for me)) who begins to give the picture away. This child could be boy or girl with that androgynous long-ish short haircut. And he or she is the only one who appears to notice the camera and is actually looking, with brows slightly furrowed, in the direction of the picture’s shooter. Meanwhile a background of green coat fabric creates an appearance of the children standing in a forest, the foliage of which is made up of more of those same green jackets, but worn by the taller figures of men whose height exceeds the cameraperson’s framing of the shot. These men are very likely the GIs at Camp Pendleton whom my brother says we used to cling to the legs and dangle from the arms of, swinging and playing, like monkeys, in our first weeks and months of life in America. And how apt it is, the face of my brother in this photograph. The middle boy in line, caught in mid-expression, almost comical, the most hapless-looking of them all. A goof-ball, maybe, we guess. He was a generally cheerful child, sensitive, kind, a boy accustomed to the dynamics of cousins and the care of aunts and grandmother; a boy, who at nine years old, had never known a father. The grandmother is the one he will truly miss, though he doesn’t realize it yet, what with the bustle and chaos of flying and landing and being shuttled here and there and given army-issue jackets to wear and this brand-new ritual of standing in lines, for


everything, from food to toilet paper to books he cannot read and clothing that does not fit. For my brother, the exodus struck him at the time as something like an adventure—big airplanes, hundreds of families in tents, American soldiers, treats and toys, games for the children, no school, nothing to do but run around and look for things to do, explore, fight and play with other kids. At Pendleton the boys were in awe of GIs, comic books, chewing gum, English cuss words. They played pretend-war and cowboys-and-indians. They rolled down sand dunes in the California sunshine. I think the photograph captures my brother’s inhabitance of the moment. He is not questioning or worrying (as the one two heads in front of him seems to be); no, my brother is just caught in it, the line, the circumstances of that mid-decade event, the sheer experience. His eyes are not even open. But his mouth is, almost as if he is gulping it in, life, this, or about to exclaim something about it. This makes you almost want to smile, looking at him, caught half-agape like that. He looks sweet, endearing, innocent. That’s it, I see now as I write it, that is what my brother exemplifies. Innocence. His openness, his haplessness, disarms the viewer. Such hope we have for those children in the photograph in TIME magazine in the late spring of 1975. A line of children and each one wearing a different expression or looking off in a different direction. There are so many possibilities, so many ways it can go for each one of them, so much to hope they will receive, discover, accomplish, enjoy. And there my brother is in the middle of the line—in the just-off-center of the composi-


tion (the photographer’s inadvertent subtle anchor)—in the middle of expression too, facing forward, mouth ajar, eyes closed. To both directions, eyes closed.


§ I am not in this photograph. But probably I am somewhere nearby, also wearing something green and too large, maybe in the arms of my mother, but also maybe not. (Probably not.) Families looked out for each other, so it’s just as likely some other parent or big sister was carrying me around. § I’ve been told, in fact, there were older girls in the camp who chased after me, wanting to hug or hold me. They ran after me calling out my name: Tiêu-Dao, Tiêu-Dao! to which (I am told) I would respond, running away: No Tiêu! No Dao! § Alive in me already even then, the wish ((I am all too familiar with by now)) for self-eradication. § I was two that year. It was my mother, me, my brother— the unit we traveled as, then. §

With me: nothing from this period is remembered.

§ I have no memory of the passage we made or the first home I was born to, no shadows or impressions, nothing whatsoever. Any inklings I may claim to have of this period are made up of witness and iconography and documentary and imagination and bias and hearsay and silence and inference.


§

All those memories I may belong to, do not belong to me.

―

if i dress it up in ribbons, if i groom & make it glisten

will that make it easier for you will you finally stop and listen?

to every Word that’s a cataclysm and how it hurts to say what fills your heart with lonely rhythm in the aftermath of the Shame ...



April, 1975 : There was a term for making your decision via this action—it was called “voting by feet.”

[ A PHOTOGRAPHIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY INVOLVING SEVEN GEOGRAPHIES / TRIANGULATIONS ]


Place of conception — “The Street of Horror,” 1972, on Highway 1 between Hue and Quang Tri


Future stepfather, circa 1957, as young Danish traveler in British Columbia


What he found there.

<You should know>, (they warned before we set out), <there is both profound loss and tremendous opportunity in being one of those sent across divides.>


[ The world-war of his own childhood now a sea at his back ]



(( & on the journey in unprecedented ways our forms began to change:

reminders of why we also now need Eyes to see—

we amassed shells

do you remember? ))

& on the new shore from there-on we would wear our hearts inside of our skins, contained now in one small organ only, enveloped by everything else, unlike how it used to be which was almost the exact opposite.

<You helped me cut the slits I needed; I helped you with yours>

our hearts like small beating


Self, childhood, Sierra Nevadas CA. First pony, circa 1981.


Birth father (right), circa 1986, shortly following his “graduation” from “reeducation camp” [his term: 1975-1986]. The photograph’s owner is the man to the left; the photo is a part of his archives and is captioned: “Planning An Escape” “Discussing the upcoming escape by boat with Uyen-Thao at a small pagoda near Truong Minh Giang Market, Saigon.”

[ The darkness of that decade a rectangle of night at my father’s elbow, the blackness that just grazes his temple ]


Future husband, circa 1996, desert arches near Moab, Utah


Self, Chihuahua Desert, West Texas, 2006


Self and son, West Texas, 2006


Alaska, 2008



Oregon, 2011—a facing coastline


§ Memory dawns, for me, in the dimness of an unlit room, close walls, a rectangle. Another room where the others are not and I have been sent alone to search for something and I have a sense of apprehension about this search for I was told sternly (by my stepfather) to go there; I fear I’m in trouble. But in the unlit room I find instead a gift. In a large box. A Fisher Price toy house, an object I’d been coveting, with its bright hard-plastic colors, all its satisfyingly rounded corners, the friendly, solid heft of those palm-sized limbless citizens. Round plastic heads, wooden barrel bodies. Simple faces smiling. The bodies hollow-bottomed to fit perfectly onto the pedestal nooks contoured into the seats of each piece of furniture, each resting perch in the perfect plastic house—which can be opened up right down the middle like a book, then closed up again and latched when not in play. It is the child’s desire to possess the ordinary world in miniature, her craving to own the power to reenact the daily motions of life—in her hands—via little plastic-and-wood figurines; the first experience of this wish fulfilled that becomes, for me, also the moment at which remove is first handed to me. The complexity of life inside of a house reduced to a microcosm cast in plastic, a rendition of family made manageable, miniature, harmless, pleasing; manipulable. It is then, for me, that remembering becomes safe, possible. So memory begins for me there. With a gift that is a simulacrum of residence. §



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