By Arden Grey

In celebration of AAPI Month and the Book Birthday of her newest book, we sat down with Christina Vo, the co-author of MY VIETNAM, YOUR VIETNAM. Vo wrote the book with her father to intertwine their journeys of Vietnam as father flees his war-torn country and daughter returns to learn about the culture she never grew up with. In this interview, Vo discusses her creative process, connection with her father and the friends she made, and funny moments that didn’t make it into the book.

Arden Grey: This is a little bit of a basic one, but what inspired you to join your story with your father’s? You said the parts were taken from works that he wrote previously, but what jumped out as an idea to combine both your story and interweave it in the way that you did?

Christina Vo: So my father’s portion of the book, he wrote that in, I think, nineteen—I don’t know—ninety-six or seven. A long time ago, he wrote this book, The Pink Lotus, and also with my sections I started to write while I was in Vietnam and I was probably in my late twenties. I wrote a lot but I didn’t ever do anything with it and it was actually during the pandemic that I realized the stories together would be much richer and interesting ‘cause I always felt with his book—it was his first book—it wasn’t really well crafted in terms of the narrative and with my own writing, I just didn’t think it was strong enough to stand alone. Then I realized combining the two of them gave a certain depth and a different intergenerational perspective about Vietnam.

AG: That’s really interesting. I loved seeing the ways in which you combined the parts and how they related to each other. What connections with Vietnamese culture did you have or not have during your childhood? In the book itself, you discussed this lack of connection between family culture and especially that this tends to happen between children of immigrants. Did you feel there was a resistance to learning that culture either internally or externally?

CV: I don’t know for myself, there was a little bit of a resistance but there was also just—I mean, my parents spoke Vietnamese to each other, they didn’t teach us Vietnamese. We had Vietnamese food, my mom would cook things but we also would cook a different mixture of foods. Never from either of my parents, was this enforcing of Vietnamese culture or even sharing any of it. My dad—well, you know from the book—he didn’t really communicate very much, so they didn’t share anything. When I was in Junior High, it was only visiting my dad’s family in New Orleans where his brother and extended family lived along with a large Vietnamese population that I started to have a little bit more of an idea of what it meant to be Vietnamese. But around me, we didn’t have very many Vietnamese families at all. During my graduating class in High School, which was four hundred and thirty people, there was not one other Vietnamese person, not even another Asian person actually. This was in southern Indiana, a town of 13,000 people so it was really absent from a lot of my upbringing. Even in college, a classmate who was a part of the Vietnamese Student’s Association, she called me Freshman year and asked me if I wanted to be apart of it and I said “No”, that I didn’t really connect with being Vietnamese and then my senior year, when I told her I was going to Vietnam, she was so surprised and she brought that up. She said “I remember when I called you and you said you didn’t really do the Vietnamese thing.” Then after college when I finally went it just—Vietnam really opened up so much for me and it opened up my whole life, my whole world, my everything—Everything changed after I went to Vietnam.

AG: That’s amazing, going off of that, what’s one experience you had in Vietnam that you didn’t write about in the book? It can be a little bit more of a light-hearted moment or just something that stood out to you that you didn’t bring up.

CV: So I have a funny story, that I accidentally—I didn’t even realize this—I had been renting a motorbike from my landlord and there was something wrong with it so he took the motorbike I was renting and gave me a loaner. Then I went shopping and I didn’t realize that the motorbike keys sometimes work in other motorbikes. I wasn’t that familiar with the loaner so I actually stole—[Laughing] I drove off with somebody else’s motorbike!

AG: Oh no! [Laughing]

CV: I know! And then my landlord came back and he was like “Where’s the motorbike?” and I said “It’s right there” and he said “That’s not the motorbike” and we went back and tried to figure it out. Thankfully he was there with me, he said that the people I stole the motorbike from thought I was gonna come back and get my motorbike and I wasn’t stealing motorbikes. [Laughing] But it was so funny how it worked—I didn’t—I just rode off with—[More Laughing]

AG: [Laughing] Why would you notice?

CV: [Laughing] It was really funny!

Arden: Now that you’re back to living in the states, have you implemented what you learned in Vietnam into your everyday life? Are there any new aspects that you learned while there, that you brought back into the states?

CV: I’ve been back for a long time. I would say like thirteen [years], it’s been a long time I have been back in the states, I would say I’ve lived in San Francisco for a decade and I have been in Santa Fe for three [years] but I think it’s not like incorporating things day-to-day, it’s more like this deep connection and one that I maintain with the Vietnamese community here. The Vietnamese American community and particularly the creative community, I think that’s sort of how I still connect with Vietnamese culture. Obviously, there’s so many things to celebrate like Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, the HBO series, was a huge one for the Vietnamese community because it’s a novel that went mainstream. There’s just a lot of celebration for our community and that’s how I still connect to Vietnam. I haven’t been back in I think eight or nine years and it changes so fast. Yeah, rapid development so I’m sure it’s so different than when I was there last; Definitely different from when I lived there.

AG: And that leads perfectly into my next question, do you have any plans to go back?

CV: I still have friends in both Hanoi and Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, and with this book a lot of people have asked for me to come back. I don’t have any plans, I want to but I know sometimes—my dad has never been back and he sometimes has this fear of going back because he’s written so much. I know it seems strange to fear that, but it is still like, even though nothing I wrote is by any means anti-communist or anti-Vietnam, my dad does have very strong opinions about that and so…yeah, I’m not sure, I want to but I don’t have any plans yet.

AG: And speaking of your father, has this book made you feel closer to him and have you been able to connect more with him now that you’ve experienced all this? But also in the writing of this book itself, as you both are navigating going and publishing this book, have you been able to be with him more?

CV: It has connected us more in the sense that number one: he didn’t have a word document of The Pink Lotus so I actually had to take the physical copy and retype all of the sections I wanted to use. It’s a very intimate experience when you’re retyping someone’s work, you get to know them on a much different level. With his story, I just feel like it comes into you more because you’re literally typing and thinking [like him], there was a deeper understanding of him that happened through this process and I think definitely it’s provided us a reason to communicate more. Anything positive comes—news, a review—just anything, I share with him and it’s like we didn’t really have anything like that before, something that forces communication between us, I would say. He does not share much about his thoughts, I talk to my friends about this and they all say “Of course, he’s probably so proud” ‘cause I feel like it’s a way for people really to hear his story more, because he loves Vietnam so much; He cares so much about the history and has spent so much time writing about Vietnam, but I think that the audience of people who are picking up a lot of Vietnamese history books are not big. And through this book, his story might reach a broader audience. It’s pretty remarkable he’s written so much in English, a man of his generation, so I’m really proud of him and I do think it’s brought us closer together. I can’t speak for him, it’s come up for me in the sense that people have asked “Do you feel that this book brought a sense of reconciliation?” and for me, it definitely has in terms of my relationship with my dad. I feel this is a significant contribution that I’m really proud of.

AG: I’m really happy that this has been a great experience for you. You have the book tour coming up, as you’re going to all these different places to promote: Are you excited and since this book is about connections, and you were talking earlier about your involvement with the Vietnamese Creative Community, have you gotten to meet any new or interesting people through the experience of publishing this book?

CV: Yeah, I mean there have been so many wonderful people—a lot of people I knew [already] then this book provided an opportunity to connect more [with them]. For example: With the Vietnamese Boat People podcast; The Vietnamese Podcast with host Kenneth Nguyen, we’re gonna do a book talk together; A friend of mine who’s a Vietnamese-American singer-songwriter, she’s actually performing with me at a few of these events; With the board Vietnamese artists network; The Viet Book Festival. So yes, it totally helped me reconnect with so many people I already knew and gave us a reason to actually do something together. I’ve been so impressed—It’s just really wonderful going to [The] Unbound [Book Festival] in a couple weeks, another vietnamese writer is interviewing me and yes—I feel like for [my] writing, I’ve always written from a place where there’s a little bit of an emptiness—my mom died when I was a teenager—a lack of family connection, a lack of the cultural connection with Vietnam that I gained when I went to Vietnam, but then this book is solidifying that even more since it makes me feel so connected to the community and it makes a sense of wholeness for me. So I feel very celebratory.

AG: Thanks for speaking with us!

MY VIETNAM, YOUR VIETNAM is available directly from Three Rooms Press, or from your local indie bookstore (by request, if not in stock), as well as online via Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target and Walmart.