Today went to a conference on Vietnamese literature which you can read the abstracts of in my previous post. It was very interesting- and as usual the conversations around it were more interesting still. Pham Thi Hoai is officially banned from publishing in Vietnam but was mentioned in three papers at this conference which was hosted by the Institute of Social Science (a government department). They were quite open about the fact that major writers and artists from Vietnam are in exile and even had conversations about homosexuality which I thought was a taboo topic here! I have made a couple of new friends including Lian who is taking me to the museum of ethnology tomorrow and is doing a masters in festivals. There were two papers about archetypes in Vietnamese folklore which were very interesting and directly feeding into my work. It seems that my work comes from a long line of using folklore as allegory, parody or pastiche- it is considered very postmodern in Vietnam.
I met an american Karen Turner who has done a book and a film on Vietnamese women who fought on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. She had some interesting insights to add on Vietnam. She has a Vietnamese collaborator- and she informed me that the book came out in the US and then the Gioi published it in Vietnam without informing her!?! One of her contacts is initiating a law against domestic violence which she cynically says the National Assembly will pass it because they want to join the WTO. She said that now is probably the best time to be in Hanoi because of APEC, Hanoi will be more open than usual etc etc. She mentioned that most of her work is done unofficially because if you ask for permission to do anything it takes forever!

Today the Gioi has me editing descriptions of folk festivals in central and Southern Vietnam. It has been very informative- I have not heard of any of them and they are not listed in the Lonely Planet! The most interesting details to me is how they suspect that some of the festivals originated with the Cham people whom were here before the Vietnamese- especially with Goddess worship. The text has been forthcoming in describing that the rituals and texts have been made over by the Confucians, Buddhists and lastly the Communists. One particular Goddess statue that has been worshipped is actually suspected to be a statue of a man with Indian influences- but in the mid 20th century an artisan has altered it to be more feminine. One particular motif that keeps reoccurring in Vietnamese folklore and myths is of women self sacrificing. I think this is the Confucian ethics at work- as a Western feminist I am grappling with the fact that the Trung sisters the most famous heroines of Vietnam committed suicide rather than give in to the Chinese. Committing suicide in certain circumstances is seen as sacrificial, honourable, to be celebrated and desirable- witness the Buddhist immolations in the sixties. I think that the self sacrificing ethic is one that clashes with Western individuation and causes lots of problems for women (and not only Vietnamese women!)

Yesterday I met up with Phan Y Ly, the director of samestuff theatre. We had a good wide ranging discussion about our passions in theatre and what issues concern us about the Vietnamese community both here and overseas. Ly said that Overseas Vietnamese are in a time capsule caught up about 40-50 years ago, and the war is still a constant reminder to them unlike in Hanoi. She was born in 1981 and the war is something that she says affected her parents not her. Her reflections on the overseas Viet community is that the older generation feel helpless and so lash out even without provacation. She was stunned to hear about the protests against SBS when they had Viet news and the reaction against the performing troupes that come to Australia. The underground theatre scene here seems very contemporary, but they only perform in places like the Goethe Institute and the british council they do not perform in public. She commented that to get anything with official approval to perform here you need to know the top people otherwise the middle men will sting you for money.
We are hoping to get funding for a collaboration between samestuff theatre and AVYM through Australia Council or Asialink. We would explore the time capsule with different generations of Vietnamese-Australians and hopefully exchange cultures with Ly to get the perspective of the modern Vietnamese generation.

I’ve just been reading the above title and it’s worth reading for anyone interested in writing. It covers the seven basic plots that all stories are said to be derived from- and talks about the need to tell story and what drives it. In a badly paraphrased nutshell the drive to tell story is about the need to unite the ego with the Self (higher self that is) or in Buddhist terms become egoless and at one with the world. Stories are about what happens when you either succeed or fail at uniting these elements. When I’m in Vietnam (Leaving tomorrow for an asialink residency) I’ll be studying this because my weakest point in my writing is structure- in terms of having a climax resolution and ending. I know short story and fable form really well which is how I wrote Vixen, but novels are still a challenge for me. As someone once said you don’t learn how to write a novel, you learn how to write a particular novel and I think that’s true.

My grandmother had a heart attack earlier this week- and it’s made me realised that she is mortal and that I need to hear her story soon before she passes away. This is my way of getting to know my grandmother I don’t speak Vietnamese and only know some of her stories through my father. I regret not having tried to talk to my deceased maternal grandmother more- my mother’s story was fascinating and Ba’s would have been even more interesting. But time ran out- and she was in the USA. Sometimes I think I have conjured up the whole Silence project to speak to Vietnamese older women, catalysed by this regret.

I’ve had a meeting with a publisher about my next novel and she wants to look at the full manuscript which is promising. We had a discussion about what makes the young adult voice more for the YA market and what other YA protaganists are for the adult market. We discussed MJ Hyland’s work and thought it might be the sophistication of the writing, the subtext the fact that there are other points of view not just the YA voice. I like my YA voice because it sounds like a teen. But whether my novel benefits from having a YA voice as well as the voice of Ba (a grandmother) is another thing all together.