A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, Hoa Nguyen
Wave Books, 2021
The all-women
stunt motorcycle troupe that my mother belonged to was named Hùng Việt.
Established in 1955, the Vinh Long-based group traveled to regional celebrity
in southern Vietnam before disbanding in 1961 when traveling became too
dangerous. One of the managers of the motorcycle troupe also owned and operated
LIGHT, a photography and portrait studio in Saigon. He took some of these
promotional photographs for the troupe. I do not have a record of the
photographer’s name.
There were five members; the names of
three of the women are lost to me. In the photo where the troupe is assembled
alone together, my mother is second from the left, looking directly at you. The
woman on the far right is Back Yen; she left the group after a serious
motorbike fall and went on to pursue a successful international singing career.
As part of the performances, Diệp
would ride to the highest mark on the barrel, the red line. She was only one of
two riders who would ride hands free or in a formation on the wall. As the motorbikes
circles, audience members could offer money to the riders in appreciation of
their bravery, and riders would take the bills skillfully from their hands.
Her Vietnamese name was Nguyễn
Anh Diệp. When she left Vietnam for North America
in 1968, she became Linda Diep Lijewski. On the back of one of those photos,
for the apparent purpose of giving it to someone unnamed, my mother writes as
follows:
“This is a glorious time, in 1956.
In those days I was a flying
motorcycle artist—
this is the sole memory of my life.
For my friend, to keep as a memory…
The flying motorist artist”
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure includes an array of archival photographs of her mother’s motorcycle stunts (which caused my five year old daughter to remark: That doesn’t look safe!) and the occasional family letter, as Nguyen explores the distances of who and where her mother was or might once have been, citing language, loss and memory through the divisions of language, culture and time. There has long been an element of Nguyen’s work that has featured memory and loss, but there is something here that feels heightened, perhaps due to such intimate focus on her mother’s past, which can’t help but include, as well, her own origins. As well, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, some of which appeared in the chapbook ASK ABOUT LANGUAGE AS IF IT FORGETS (Toronto ON: knife│fork│books, 2019), shift from the predominantly shorter, meditative lyrics of As Long As Trees Last (Wave Books, 2012), Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008 (Wave Books, 2014) or Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books, 2016) to poems a bit more expansive and storytelling, with a deeper intimacy and care from an author who has always been known for both, citing more specific and sprawling details of family lore. She composes lines pulled and even stretched apart and across silences, such as the middle third of the poem “Why This Haunted Middle And Door Hung With Haunted Girl Bones,” that writes:
Go into your
tree roll on a rabbit fur blanket
refuse to eat for
thirty days plus ten days
Unremembered does it matter
misremembering the
baby she lost a different baby
(unborn never born the unnamed)
This rain reminds me of rain
“Sways laughing / to glint past / river river / and / river-parted lovers / of myth,” she writes, to open the poem “MOTHER’S RIVER MOON (TRAVELING WITH / THE TRAVELING CIRCUS, LOWER MEKONG, 1959).” Nguyen’s lyrics are composed as accumulations of phrases, nearly written as point-form movements and images, such as the poem “ASK ABOUT LANGUAGE AS IF IT FORGETS,” that includes: “She read the taboo novels / named daughters // for tragic rewritten heroines // trodden oceanic sorrow // She will ride ruffian // She will be the baby taken back / from her half-Khmer mother [.]” There is a lightness to these poems, a delicate touch, but one that also threatens to drift away, given some of her mother’s uncertain recollections, allowing the past a tenuous tangibility. As with any family story, even at the best of times, there can be incomplete answers and half-formed questions, not always aware of how or even what to ask, and to whom. Throughout, Nguyen performes her own high-wire act, stepping point to point, even while writing across the shadow of the Vietnam War, motorcycle adventuring, stories of her biological father appearing in her mother’s life, and references to “the first Hoa,” much of which is set across the landscape of the Mekong Delta: “what electric ribbon of water / re- / becomes delta / fish and moving mouths / as the nine dragons move more” (“MUD MATRIX”). And of course, Nguyen writing the girl who would become her mother: “A motorcycle act that came to her province,” she writes, as part of “THE FLYING MOTORIST ARTIST,” “in the lower Mekong Delta / joining a country fair / for the New Year 1954 // everywhere we came to see / displays of snakes / contortionists / fortune-tellers / to exchange caged birds // she the disobey // Diệp done with farm chores [.]” These poems exist as an incredibly powerful elegy to connections lost and a life well-lived, and as both tribute to and portrait of her mother, capturing an array of moments that might otherwise have entirely slipped away.
Where is the
buried the first Hoa
gone to ground
(buried
in Mekong mud)
dead unknown years
drowned in lung matter
The first Hoa had
not medicine
I got it
(the medicine)
and got the golden visa
and the ash hair
and breathings
lashings to a raft
life
lashed to
life the blonde
joke
of
pull eyes (“SING DING (GHOSTLY)”)
