My Viet: Vietnamese American Literature in English, 1962-Present

from Breaking the Map, Kim-An Lieberman

Kim-An Lieberman Kim-An Lieberman was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1974. Her mother is a Vietnamese-language professor, originally from Hanoi, who came to the United States in the 1960s to study at the University of Hawai‘i’s East-West Center. Her father is a music professor who grew up in a Jewish American family in New York City. In April of 1975 Kim-An’s grandmother left Vietnam on one of the last planes out, and the family moved to Washington State. Kim-An grew up in suburban Seattle before attending the University of Washington, where she studied comparative humanities. She went on to earn an MA in creative writing (poetry) and a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley , with a dissertation on Vietnamese American literature. She has visited Vietnam twice, as a language student in 1997 and as a tourist in 2002. She has taught a wide range of students, spanning in age from fifth grade to college, and in location from New York to Ohio to Washington. Currently she teaches writing and literature at the Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington. from Breaking the Map (2008) Eyes to the Earth Half-breed, they call me. Only a snip of a dragon, a pinch of an angel, soft-bellied hound circling before it squats on scraggly haunches. Only half my face, half my flesh may call Vietnam home. The rest, American-imported: pink flushed hands, hazel eyes. Half-breed, like oil and vinegar sliding back to cool separation. My cousins, scattered by beer-marinated soldiers in green shoots across the rice paddies, Kim-An Lieberman | 231 search. They spread roots to grip the dust-sown ground. They spread, path by path, past Hanoi, past Saigon, hands dark imprinting the dragon earth. Cursed before the family altar where incense spits spires of perfume and smoke. Thrown into the streets by iron matriarchs, by sapling girls, with nothing but dust to whet their stomachs, dust to water their tongues, dust to wear on shivering, scaled backs. Their scars split skin as pink as mine, but their silhouettes dig sharp edges in the ground. Slithering beneath steaming clouds of dirt, my siblings know their place: low, eyes to the earth. I wait, feasting full on my freedom. Free I burn between slats of stares, slurs curling, oblique like sliding steam. I play their game, writing exotic scripts and elaborate lies, writing for tomorrow, for one dust-child1 to scratch and slither down the pavement on bloody, ragged claws, snag my sleeve and bid me: Come and embrace all the breathing, breathing dust. Appleseed Born of rib or womb, gender is the oldest art— maybe the vainest too, cloaking our simpler selves in amber clouds of powder and perfume, emerging on stage all mustachioed and muscled. 232 | from Breaking the Map Call it a nation’s adolescent vanity, then, to refashion her a strange sort of wiry lad— girl born one crisp autumn, winesap in her cheeks, gloss of cider-pomace heavy in her hair, her mother’s young grave greening so lush the neighbors stared whispering witchcraft— or maybe she planted the rumor herself, forecasting too rough a life for any daughter of Eve weaned on jonah gold juice, fond of lazy afternoons barefoot among the crickets and garden snakes, tempted downstream by flickering river-tongues. And all along the tributaries, a raw trail of truth— ebony boy John, barely eleven, tutored in steel by Chinaman Henry, gone in a blast of Sierra rock; Bunyan’s blue-eyed babe, illegitimate niece with whip-burled back and log-burdened arms; slender Clem shamed into suicide, miner ’49er caught playing dress-up in his sister’s herring-boxes— everywhere the brown, the queer, the second sex tightening the ropes on the wagon canvas herding the livestock, naming the children, scrubbing cholera from the threadbare blankets, digging cemeteries in the dank underbrush, lips and feet and fingernails caked sepia with clay. She witnessed, and knew, and bound her sackcloth tight around the chest and loose on the hips— learned to walk with a westering swagger, speak with a bulge of frontier gravel in her throat. Silenced by the sediment of history, maybe, helpless to stop the leaf-bud, the pollen, the fruit, Kim-An Lieberman | 233 bees abuzz in the blossoms, branches of pigeons warbling the falsetto of manifest destiny— but still a thousand buffalo eyes...