An interview with Christina Vo, author of My Vietnam, Your Vietnam

by Kat Georges

I first met MY VIETNAM, YOUR VIETNAM author Christina Vo via Pitch-o-Rama, sponsored by WNBA-San Francisco Chapter, a fantastic event where agents and publishers get a chance to meet with dozens of authors in a very short amount of time to learn about their upcoming projects (FYI: Next one is April 20. Sign up here.). And what a project Christina proposed: a dual memoir sharing the stories of her father, who escaped to America from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, and Christina herself, who was raised in the US and opted to move to Vietnam for years in search of connection to her ancestoral past. The first read through the manuscript was so powerfully moving, I became a huge fan and ardent supporter. With the publication of MY VIETNAM, YOUR VIETNAM just a few months away, I sat down with Christina to find out more about the impetus behind creating this project and her unique perspective on how, 50 years after the fall of Saigon, the wounds of war are finally beginning to heal.

Christina Vo with her father, Nghia M. Vo

Kat Georges: MY VIETNAM, YOUR VIETNAM is a dual memoir, sharing two extremely differing viewpoints of the country of your ancestors. What prompted you to take this approach to this book?

Christina Vo: A series of events spanning decades led to the publication of this book. In 1997, a few years after my mother passed, my father wrote a memoir about Vietnam and rebuilding his life in the States. Since it was his first book, it was a mixture of personal storytelling and history. Since this was his first book, his writing voice didn’t quite feel consistent, as a result the book was difficult to read.

Then, five or six years later, when I was living in Vietnam, I was on a trip with friends in Hoi An, and I shared with them how I wanted to write another book about my father’s life. I had no idea how/when I would do it but I knew that I would.

Finally, the last time I ventured to live in Vietnam, I was in my late 20s and writing became part of my life for the first time. My early writing focused on Vietnam and my mother, mainly because I desired to keep memories of her and Vietnam alive in my heart and mind. After a few years, I nearly completed a manuscript about my family and Vietnam, and then shelved it for about a decade. My Vietnam story didn’t feel powerful or compelling enough as a singular story to get published.

During the pandemic, when I moved to Santa Fe and found myself with more time to think and process, it suddenly hit me that the way both of these stories about Vietnam — my father’s and mine — felt complete was by combining them and allowing the contrast to show depth and also to show parts of our relationship through this connection around Vietnam. There was a sort of completion by joining the two stories together in a way the singular stories did not possess.

KG: The sections written by you describe mixed feelings about Vietnam today. What were some of the most extraordinary differences between the US and Vietnam in your experiences there?

Christina Vo in Vietnam

CV: The “mixed feelings” were perhaps more of a reflection of my age and where I was in my life when I was living in Vietnam. It’s been 20 years since I moved to Vietnam the first time, and in retrospect, I view my time there as some of the best years of my life. The varying emotions reflect the uncertainty of my own identity as a woman in her twenties navigating life, identity, and my early career. Vietnam was so alive, so loud, so energetic compared to any place I’d lived in the States at the time. Until then, I had lived in small towns, so moving to another country to a city with millions of people was quite a change for me as a young adult.

One of the biggest differences for me between living there and in the US is the proximity of people. With the active commerce, motorbikes, noise and scents of food lingering in the air, the atmosphere felt more buoyant and energetic than the closed and contained way we sometimes live in the States. Here, we can live in apartment buildings and not know our neighbors, or cookie cutter homes in neighborhoods where we also might not know our neighbors. There’s a distance, a certain privacy that we maintain in the States. A separation from one another. Whereas in Vietnam, I saw friends regularly, had dinners or coffee with people daily. I felt as if I was never alone, and for someone who tends to spend a significant amount of time alone, being around so many people felt healthy to me.

There’s a part of the book where I describe meeting my paternal grandfather in Saigon. After the war, like many of my father’s family members, he settled in California. When I met him in Saigon, he was sitting on a plastic chair watching life go by. He returned to Vietnam to live the last years of his life, and he said to me that in Vietnam everyone waves to him and says hello to him, but in California, he lived in an apartment and nobody even visited him. I think that story sums up one of the main differences between living here and in Vietnam — our connection, our proximity to people, and our feeling that we are actually embedded within a community.

KG: One description that is quite striking is the idea of “visible life” in Vietnam. Describe what this means, and how it differs from life in the US. Did the concept affect the way you approach life now?

CV: When I was leaving for Vietnam the first time, my then stepmother, who was also Vietnamese, mentioned “visible life” by saying something along the lines that life in Vietnam was so visible. That phrase certainly stuck with me while I was settling in and understanding life there.

On the ubiquitous motor scooters in Vietnam

By visible life, you can literally see life being lived all around you. For example, if you wake up early and go to Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi (or any park), you’ll see hoards of people doing aerobics, jogging, playing badminton, and some who even bring their own dumbbells from home. You can see people sipping their cafe sua da (iced coffee) or eating pho. When you walk/drive around, you’ll see motorbikes everywhere and you’ll see them transporting the most random things, whether it’s a large tree, a tall mirror, or a basket full of live chickens. You can visit the fresh markets in the morning, or in Hanoi, there’s also a beautiful flower market you can literally drive through as early as 3am. The street level of homes sometimes pass as storefronts, and many of these storefronts are open so you can also see inside from the streets. You just see life. Everywhere. And there’s something about that “visible life” that for me made me feel much less alone.

Well, I couldn’t really replicate here what I had in Vietnam and what I gained by feeling so close to people and so much more entrenched in the community. I certainly miss the hustle and bustle of Vietnam and that ‘visible life’. To some extent when I moved to Santa Fe from San Francisco during the pandemic, there was something about the quaintness that reminded me of Hanoi, almost as if I am living in a place where time doesn’t move as quickly, and for whatever reason, that sense of time brings me back to Hanoi. Of course, Santa Fe doesn’t have the ‘visible life’ but it does have some level of simple charm that Hanoi had twenty years ago.

I do feel that the ‘visible life’ impacted the way I lived when I returned to the states. There’s a part of me that wants to open my home and life to people. In San Francisco, I regularly hosted parties, small gatherings, and salons — and I believe that was a way for me to bring more life to my home. Maybe this way I could compensate for not having that external visible life. But the “visible life” doesn’t really translate directly from Vietnam to the US. I don’t think the closeness of life, the visibility of life could be replicated here.

KG: Your father escaped Vietnam when Saigon fell, your mother fled a few years later. Both experienced the trauma of war and refugee life first hand. The 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon is approaching, and organizations are focusing on the theme of healing. How does MY VIETNAM, YOUR VIETNAM contribute to this idea of healing?

Christina’s father, Nghia M. Vo and her mother with her brother in Saigon

CV: To me, writing is inevitably about healing. I have always viewed my writing as more of a healing pursuit than a literary one, and I certainly believe MY VIETNAM, YOUR VIETNAM has its own place in terms of contributing to a greater sense of understanding and healing, particularly between generations who were each uniquely impacted by the war and its aftermath.

On a fundamental level, this book is about the relationship to a country, to oneself, and between a father and a daughter. On all levels, there is healing there. Healing through understanding our past, and by extension, building a future. Healing because my father and I actually don’t communicate verbally a lot. We don’t sit down and have long conversations, which at certain points in my life really pained me. However, through this book I came to understand my father on a deeper level and love and respect him even more. I think individuals of my father’s generation could read the book and perhaps see their children’s desires for adventure/exploration, and I think people of my generation could read the book and consider their parents’ stories, reflect on their lives in Vietnam, and what they endured to create the lives they are living. So at its core, I hope the book promotes understanding of one another, which in my opinion, will inevitably lead to healing.

Even though the book is not yet published, I have observed the impact its had on a few individuals’ lives—simply by knowing that I wrote this book, a few friends/acquaintances have really opened up to me about their relationships with their parents and their experiences with parental loss. I believe this is a book that can help people crack open, perhaps the first step in healing.

KG: Describe the process you used in assembling your father’s part of the book. How did your work on this book alter your relationship with your father?

CV: For my father’s parts of the book, I used sections from his original memoir. I edited them and pulled out parts that I felt would ‘speak’ to my experiences. There’s a cadence to the book, a way in which the chapters pick up on parts of each other’s lives, and I hope readers will immediately feel how different my father and I are through how we reflect and write. My father leans much more toward history in his understanding of Vietnam, whereas for me, at that time, life was so experimental and emotional even. I think it’s important to reflect on our different writing styles to grasp the complex beauty of this narrative.

The author’s extended pre-war Vietnamese family

My father did not have an electronic version of his original book, so I had to literally re-type all of his words by looking at the physical copy of the book. There were parts when I had to ask him to elaborate and write more. That was laborious to say the least, but by doing that, I became even closer to my father’s story and developed, I believe, an even deeper understanding of who he is as a person. I don’t know if this book altered my relationship with my father per se; nothing feels as if it has fundamentally changed, except for the fact that we have something to CELEBRATE, something that we created together as an offering to the world. On some level, this is life and relationship altering because I don’t think many father-daughter duos have achieved such an endeavor. If anything, at the very least it gives us more to talk about!

KG: Several memoirs by descendants of Vietnamese refugees have been published. What distinguishes MY VIETNAM, YOUR VIETNAM from other memoirs?

CV: I think what distinguishes this book from other memoirs that are part of Vietnamese diasporic literature is the fact that it is co-written by my father and I, and shares two distinct perspectives of Vietnam. There are memoirs written by Vietnamese Americans who have returned to Vietnam – Catfish and Mandela by Andrew Pham, likely being one of the most popular ones. There are also plenty of memoirs telling the stories of Vietnamese refugees who rebuild their lives in another country, as well as a handful of memoirs written about being Vietnamese American and growing up here. However, there’s not one that exists that interweaves stories and spans time similar to MY VIETNAM, YOUR VIETNAM.

KG: What other writers have influenced your style and approach to writing? Any favorite books to recommend?

CV: Two of my favorite writers are Yiyun Li and Kim Thuy. I can spend hours and hours absorbed in their works. Right now, though, I’m reading more non-fiction than fiction.

KG: And, just for fun, what is your favorite Vietnamese food?

CV: My favorite Vietnamese dish is banh cuon – which are thin rice rolls filled with minced pork and mushrooms. It’s a northern Vietnamese dish but when I was a kid, I remember banh cuon being a treat for my father that my mother rarely let me eat. She feared that I wouldn’t like it, but in fact, I loved it and perhaps not being able to have it as a kid, makes me love it more. Banh cuon and a cafe sua da is a perfect meal to me, and sometimes I have to drive an hour from Santa Fe to Albuquerque for it!

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