inside Hanoi

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.

in Hanoi- samestuff theatre

In Hanoi and so far it has been fantastic! I'm here as part of an asialink residency and have been teed up with the gioi publishing house. I met the director today and they were very nice and accomodating with some interesting questions. They were interested in overseas Vietnamese communities and said that they were part of Vietnamese heritage as well. Some curious things though- they wanted to know if I was going into other provinces for security reasons. Apart from that they have even said they are interested in publishing my work- if I give them the copyright. Interesting.
We also went to the University of Social Sciences and the Humanities and saw a theatre show by samestuff theatre. We also got to see a bit of a university revue with three karaoke singers, hip hop dancers and a long skit in historical costume- which we were told by the people next to us was about pollution. This last one was interesting because they were using traditional theatre styles in terms of the music backing up the skit and certainly it received lots of laughs (didn't understand a word!) Alister who has taken the role of my husband when in Vietnam stuck out like a sore thumb being the only white face in the audience and taller than everybody else. The same stuff theatre show was multimedia about chat rooms with a sting in the tail. I'm hoping to meet Phan Y Ly the director this weekend to talk about collaborations with AVYM- her husband is Australian and she is coming to Australia this Christmas.
My first impressions of Hanoi are a jumble. There is a lot less visible poverty and no beggars in the centre of the city- which may be due to the APEC conference being held here in November. President Bush is coming with 1000 people so they say. There are lots of signs and banners welcoming APEC already and visible police presence. We saw them patrolling and causing people sitting on the street to suddenly pack up and disappear. I'm not sure about my thoughts about this- it has made our stay more pleasant not being hassled for things all the time- but I wonder what has happened to the people.

seven basic plots

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.

the look

Been reading Kaja Silverman's The Threshold of the Visible World which is about the look, the gaze and the development of self image- in particular when your mirror reflection does not reflect the ideal of white masculinity. This is for my thesis but it has intrigued me on a personal level as well. It was not until I was 21 that I really accepted that Asians could be beautiful, after experiments with blonde hair dye and being dumped for a pretty blonde girl by one drop kick. I had internalised for a long time that only blonde was beautiful- I remember when I was six drawing pictures of myself with blonde hair. I am also intrigued by the Woman Warrior in which a Chinese girl torments another Chinese girl and finds her ugly and repulsive. One day I will read the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison which is about a black girl who wants to be like Shirley Temple and in the end is driven mad by her surroundings. I wonder whether Asian girls growing up now experience the same things- or whether with the increase of the number of Asian girls, the idolising of Lucy Liu and the popularity of Asian things means that this is less of an issue.

heart

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.