Red Thread: Introduction
POEMS OF WAR, FAMILY, IMMIGRATION, AND CULTURE
“Red Thread makes an exceptional contribution to the poetry of war. Consistently soft-spoken in tone and polemic-free, it is a shimmering and delicate book.”
—Jane Summer, author of The Silk Road
This remarkable collection of poems tells the turning points in a life that began in the midst of turmoil and violence. Teresa Mei Chuc was born in Vietnam during the horrendous war that bombed her people and her homeland. Somehow, she and her family survived, although her parents were separated for a long time. Teresa, her brother, and their mother escaped Vietnam in a ship crowded with hungry, sick, and frightened immigrants. They settled in California, where eventually they were reunited with her father, who had spent nine years in a Vietcong “reeducation camp.”
Family is a recurring theme in Red Thread. Especially important is the relationship of mother and daughter. The poet's earliest bomb shelter was her mother's womb, and the mother returns time and again, cooking rice, dispensing wisdom (“Don't smell roses”), telling ghost stories, and passing on her heritage.
Teresa's cultural heritage informs many of these poems: “Vietnamese Ghost Stories,” “Vietnamese Globe,” “How Chopsticks Were Invented,” “Saigon,” and “Cam On” are a few of many examples, as are “Moon Festival” and “Chinese Female Kung-Fu Superheroes.”
Out of her personal history, beyond her cultural heritage, and apart from her family, Teresa finds her own individuality in these poems. She does smell the roses, and their scent changes her. Roses in fact turn her into a poet, for when she crashes her bike into a rose bush, her skin is pierced by thorns and the essence of rose enters her bloodstream. The poet that emerged from that accident has a strong, intelligent voice. Many of her poems draw on science and mathematics, invoking botany (“Photosynthesis,” “Intimacy”), weights and measures (“Not Worth a Bullet”), geometry (“Vietnamese Globe”), and quantum equations.
But the one overriding theme in Red Thread is the horror of war. Over and over, Teresa Mei Chuc returns to the absurd tragedy of death and destruction, whether the atrocity be in My Lai or in Gaza, and whether the massacre is made of bullets, tanks, or Agent Orange.
“Red Thread makes an exceptional contribution to the poetry of war. Consistently soft-spoken in tone and polemic-free, it is a shimmering and delicate book.”
—Jane Summer, author of The Silk Road
This remarkable collection of poems tells the turning points in a life that began in the midst of turmoil and violence. Teresa Mei Chuc was born in Vietnam during the horrendous war that bombed her people and her homeland. Somehow, she and her family survived, although her parents were separated for a long time. Teresa, her brother, and their mother escaped Vietnam in a ship crowded with hungry, sick, and frightened immigrants. They settled in California, where eventually they were reunited with her father, who had spent nine years in a Vietcong “reeducation camp.”
Family is a recurring theme in Red Thread. Especially important is the relationship of mother and daughter. The poet's earliest bomb shelter was her mother's womb, and the mother returns time and again, cooking rice, dispensing wisdom (“Don't smell roses”), telling ghost stories, and passing on her heritage.
Teresa's cultural heritage informs many of these poems: “Vietnamese Ghost Stories,” “Vietnamese Globe,” “How Chopsticks Were Invented,” “Saigon,” and “Cam On” are a few of many examples, as are “Moon Festival” and “Chinese Female Kung-Fu Superheroes.”
Out of her personal history, beyond her cultural heritage, and apart from her family, Teresa finds her own individuality in these poems. She does smell the roses, and their scent changes her. Roses in fact turn her into a poet, for when she crashes her bike into a rose bush, her skin is pierced by thorns and the essence of rose enters her bloodstream. The poet that emerged from that accident has a strong, intelligent voice. Many of her poems draw on science and mathematics, invoking botany (“Photosynthesis,” “Intimacy”), weights and measures (“Not Worth a Bullet”), geometry (“Vietnamese Globe”), and quantum equations.
But the one overriding theme in Red Thread is the horror of war. Over and over, Teresa Mei Chuc returns to the absurd tragedy of death and destruction, whether the atrocity be in My Lai or in Gaza, and whether the massacre is made of bullets, tanks, or Agent Orange.
Red Thread: Author Biography
Teresa Mei Chuc was born in Saigon, Vietnam and immigrated to the U.S. under political asylum with her mother and brother shortly after the Vietnam War. Teresa, a fellow and teacher consultant of the Los Angeles Writing Project (a chapter of the National Writing Project), teaches literature and writing at a public inner-city middle school. Teresa has a bachelors degree in philosophy, professional teaching credentials in primary and secondary education, and a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing (poetry) from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. She served for two years as a poetry editor for Goddard College's Pitkin Review. Teresa's poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012. Teresa is working on her second collection of poetry.
Teresa is founder and editor-in-chief of Shabda Press.
An avid reader of Russian literature and poetry, Teresa has studied the Russian language for over 15 years and in her spare time, translates her favorite poems.
Teresa is founder and editor-in-chief of Shabda Press.
An avid reader of Russian literature and poetry, Teresa has studied the Russian language for over 15 years and in her spare time, translates her favorite poems.
Red Thread: Themes
War and family are recurring themes in the book.
Red Thread: Style
The poems in the collection are lyrical in nature infused with intense emotion, vivid imagery and metaphor. Teresa uses alliteration, consonance, assonance, and internal rhyme to create the music and mood in her poems. Many of her poems draw on science and mathematics, invoking botany (“Photosynthesis,” “Intimacy”), weights and measures (“Not Worth a Bullet”), physics ("Newton's First Law of Motion" and "Grandma (A Hologram)"), geometry (“Vietnamese Globe” and "Story of Mother and Daughter"), and quantum equations.
Red Thread: Historical Context
Featured Interview - Literature Radio Show hosted by Joseph Wade with guest host Ed Kearns, Brooklyn, N.Y., Featured interview and reading (online live) from Brooklyn College - Teresa Mei Chuc, Friday, October 19, 2012, 7 p.m. east coast time. Listen to the podcast here http://sexandpolitics.podbean.com/2012/10/21/teresa-mei-chuc/
CounterPunch: Doug Valentine's Political Poetry series, interview with Teresa Mei Chuc, Friday, October 11, 2013. http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/11/poetry-and-transformation/
Poets Cafe - KPFK 90.7 FM, Pacific Radio Los Angeles hosted by Lois P. Jones, recording on December 8, 2013 and airing in 2014. Interview with Teresa Mei Chuc forthcoming in Poets Cafe.
"...Teresa Mei Chuc's book of poems, Red Thread is one of the most important contemporary collections on the subject of war and specifically the Viet Nam war from a deeply personal perspective. This is a two part program which will air in 2014." - Lois P. Jones, KPFK 90.7 FM, Poets Cafe
Author Interview, 2012
Red Thread by Teresa Mei Chuc
Interview by Fithian Press
Your poetry is clearly autobiographical, and much of it concerns your family. Is the importance of family something shared by other people of Vietnamese heritage?
During and after the Vietnam War, many Vietnamese were separated from their family or killed. Children were burying the dead. Family members left to fight in the war for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam or for the Vietcong and some never came back. I think many Vietnamese in Vietnam and refugees or immigrants in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world felt the importance of family either by losing a family member, losing a homeland, or being separated from family members during and after the war.
Also, ancestral worship or reverence to ancestors is important in Vietnamese culture, there is a deep sense of duty. So, even those that have died in the family are continually present and remembered. They continue to bless and protect the family. We pay respect to our ancestors yearly on the day of their death and sometimes in daily prayers with incense. Pictures of ancestors are placed on the altars along with the bodhisattvas. So, family is an extension of our own bodies and souls.
Do you think the bond of family is especially strong for those who have experienced war?
When you and your loved ones are so close to death and in the midst of war, you realize what is most important and that is family and those you love. You get right to the essence. These are the people who you will live and die for and the people who give you strength, the people who are there for you. War can threaten all that is most important to you, so the bond of family can become very strong. In war, many families are torn apart due to being sent to fight or due to death. Afterwards, families are separated due to immigration to different countries. Many didn’t survive the harrowing journey in boats facing illness, starvation, pirate attacks. My family, luckily, survived the war and its aftermath. We are very grateful to still be together in the same city and we are there for one another.
You and your family experienced immigration first-hand. Has this experience affected your feelings and opinions about the plight of refugees from other cultures, who are seeking safety and a better life in the United States?
I think I am empathetic towards other immigrants who seek safety and a better life in the United States. I have been a public school teacher for seven years and most of my students are from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and many of them escaped the violence of gangs and drug wars in their country to seek a better life in the U.S. I feel the importance of keeping our borders open for those in need. I feel strongly that immigrants contribute greatly to our country in terms of language, culture, foods, ideas, perspectives, and all people should be embraced as part of our human family. I’ve met so many immigrants who work so hard to make a better life for themselves and their children, and their contributions and their children’s contributions to our society are invaluable. It can be challenging to adjust to a new life and to build a new life in a new country, but many people persevere under the most difficult of circumstances.
I think, as immigrants, different countries are our homes. The country we left and the country where we live. There can be a feeling of not really belonging anywhere, but there can also be a feeling of belonging everywhere. I think everyone, but perhaps especially the immigrant, struggles with the question of “who am I?” and “what language belongs to me?”, “what culture(s) belong(s) to me?” It can be an alienating situation, but it can also be an opportunity to embrace new, open spaces both physically and within our hearts, both of the past and present. It is a fracture in the heart, but it takes a fracture, sometimes, to open us up, to help us love more widely and deeply. However, in some cases, there is also a sense of deep loss, the loss of the motherland that is incurable.
Can you elaborate on what the “red thread” means to the Buddhists, to Vietnamese people, and especially to you?
I think, as human beings, we are all ultimately connected by a “red thread.” To me, the “red thread” means many things. It means the flow of blood, life and death - the red thread that is in our bodies. It means the fate and serendipity that brought my family and me to a new country to meet new people and start a new life. It means everyone that my life has come into contact with and the experiences that shaped me.
There is so much uncertainty in life and as a symbol of protection from the bodhisattvas, the “red thread” provides a sense of safety – the gods and goddesses and our ancestors are watching over us. At the same time, we embody this protection. The sense of the power of compassion is very important and interesting. This is the core of Buddhism and as practicing Buddhists, we try to emulate this compassion in our thoughts and actions. I’ve heard stories about those in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Those who were generous and gave their piece of bread to others in need were the ones that actually survived and those who were greedy died. There is something about love, compassion, and kindness that strengthens us and feeds the soul and body.
I think the meaning of “red thread” for Buddhists and the “red thread” that connects those who are destined to meet are intertwined. In some sense, we are each other’s protectors and the best gift we can give is the gift of compassion.
Quite a number of your poems deal with mathematics and science. Are you a scientist at heart, as well as a poet?
I am fascinated about how the world works and the patterns and similarities between the microscopic and macro, the logical and the emotional. I try to show the connections between science, math, and humanity. It’s part of embracing the universe as a whole. I think there is a beauty when we can show how things work together, how we are a part of a greater harmony, how we reflect the world. For example, my poem “Gong-gong Por-por” is about the separation of my mom’s adoptive parents from our family after the war. It was an extremely painful experience and I was trying to find a way to write about it. Somehow the algebraic equation allowed me to express my intense emotions in a new way. “X is part of the equation./ X is the unknown.” Somehow this mathematical truth was also my personal truth.
Your father was in a Vietcong “reeducation camp” for nine years, after which he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Did witnessing your father’s suffering help you define the way you feel about war?
Most definitely, witnessing my father’s suffering and being directly affected by his PTSD helped me to see very vividly the consequences of war on so many levels. It has really helped me to see the horrors of war and know that no one should have to endure such cruelty. Having seen the affects of war on my father and the rest of my family, I can see that war does not end when the guns are put down. That’s when another war begins, one that occurs in the mind, heart, and soul. I think my father’s suffering as well as the suffering of so many on both sides of the Vietnam War, really helped to define the way I feel about war.
What are the most important lessons you learned from the strength with which your mother sheltered you and your brother when you were children?
My mother is my heroine and has been my heroine in so many ways. I think what drove her and gave her strength was love, love for her children and family. She worked very hard when she got to the U.S., studied English, and took a job working as a data entry operator at a bank. She supported my brother and me on her own for nine years before my father was released from a North Vietnamese “re-education” camp. My mother took care of us with such compassion. She was also a very dedicated Buddhist. She prayed often to the bodhisattvas and to our ancestors. As I grew older, I realized how difficult it was for my mother – she endured a war, her husband was in prison/labor camp, she was separated from her adoptive parents, she raised my brother and me on her own in a new country. She started from scratch and never gave up. We didn’t have the luxury to take anything for granted. Despite our suffering, we were thankful. We were lucky to be alive and had to make the best of our lives and what we had.
My mother’s example has helped me greatly in my life and has defined much of my character. I think it is from my mother that I learned the strength of love, compassion, kindness, and gratitude. She is such a generous person and she has endured so much pain and suffering.
You are widely published, and your work has appeared in dozens of periodicals, as well as in anthologies and chapbooks. Do you have any advice for aspiring young poets who hope to build a writing career?
I think it is important to be persistent, work on craft, be true to yourself and your writing. I think it’s important not to see failures as walls, but to see them as a way to get better and as a learning experience. I think in every step of the writing process, from the act of writing itself to publication to promotion, the writer has to be deeply involved. It is a very hands-on process. Writing is very similar to birthing a child. You take care of your writing, make sure it’s in good hands, show it the world, make sure it has the best life until it can be on its own.
You have been active in the poetry community of Los Angeles and Southern California. Do you enjoy working with other poets, and is it important to make poetry a vital part of a community’s culture?
The first time I met a poetry family here in Los Angeles and Southern California is through the anthology New Poets of the American West. I organized a series of readings for poets who appeared in the anthology. The experience was wonderful, I made some great friends and I loved listening to them read their poems. There is something very wonderful about hearing poetry read by its author. I also enjoyed reading my poems and having them heard. It is wonderful when people that I have never met before come up to me after a reading to tell me that they loved listening to the poems, that they were moved, or that the poems made them cry. Poetry really becomes alive. Poetry has so much to offer in terms of language, beauty, humanity that I think it should be a vital part of a community’s culture. It’s a way to open the heart. In Cantonese, the word for happiness is “hoy sum”. “Hoy” means “open” and “sum” means “heart.” “Hoy sum” means “open heart.” So, happiness = hoy sum = open heart. Happiness is about having an open heart and I think poetry contributes to this.
Red Thread: Critical Review
RED THREAD by Teresa Mei Chuc
Reviewed by Jane Summer, author of The Silk Road
(review first published in Big Bridge, Issue 17, Spring 2013)
RED THREAD makes an exceptional contribution to the poetry of war. Consistently soft-spoken in tone and polemic-free, it is a shimmering and delicate book.
While war undergirds much of the collection, Teresa Mei Chuc takes on other subjects as well: the clash and crash of immigration and class, the power of language, and family in its many dimensions (political, cultural, natural, and social). In fact no matter what her subject, she writes at the intersection of race, class and gender. Throughout, she maintains that same light brushwork, so self-contained and certain.
Chuc’s lithe lines of simple statements of fact revision a world too easily camouflaged in the violent maelstrom of our era. When the poet writes, “A bullet is made of/copper or lead,” “A bamboo tree can weigh sixty pounds,” “The best containers/for fire are made of metal” Chuc is setting the stage to memorialize both the scarring wounds as well as the pleasures of our lives. Such duality is one of the constants, the threads, running through this collection of remarkable delicacy.
Halfway through Red Thread one encounters a telling poem, the fulcrum of the collection. “Saigon” begins, “A pearl in my hand./I was born in this ‘Paris’ of buildings/and monuments, of war remnants.” As the poet continues to limn the metropolis, writing:
City of pho, of Buddhist temples
of children who beg with bowl in hands.
This falling, a heart’s tearing
from branch to soil, the turning leaf
flutters in the breeze in a slight confusion
of where it should be
the author’s emblematic ability to contain dualities within the same moment is evident. In exploration of her subjects, rather than hold them in opposition Chuc describes them in a kind of balance or continuum.
Beyond examining the city/soil polarity, Chuc explores (here and throughout the collection) a variety of cultural frictions and always comes up decidedly independent, insisting on making her own way. Here she underscores the power of words. In one sense, words confer upon her an identity. To wit, “Saigon” is persistently Saigon despite its official renaming almost 40 years ago as Ho Chi Minh City; “pho” remains “pho,” insistently untranslated, though it could be described as a noodle soup.
Chuc further conveys the relationship she has with language in her poem “Fractures”:
There is a village when I read
the words, there are guns held
up towards a target and doors
kicked open, the way a language
enters a body without consent.
Its power can be restorative:
Let language enter without pain,
without shaking with fear.
Tell myself it’s okay, open, open.
Only through the mastery of language can we know our world and ourselves. “Rough Draft” expresses this notion, even in the state of becoming: “I am a constant participial phrase. . . . I will never be a final draft. I will never be done.”
Chuc’s facility with language is reflected in her ability to master the art of compression, even in her longer narrative works or those fevered pieces in which god-awful chemical bombs spill over civilians and casualty lists rise like welts. This is consistent in her war poems, astonishingly devoid of censure. Even the gritty “Song of Massacre,” “A Priori,” and “H’mong” resolve with a view toward life, survival, even flowers, albeit desiccated, in the war zone. It’s not so much a sunny optimism one reads in Chuc’s lines as much as a reflection of her own insistent triumphant life, the human spirit staring down the odds.
But since war played a crucial role in her identity, war permeates the collection. One surprising aspect about her war poems is much of it targets not recent conflicts, though these are addressed, but the war in Vietnam. For a certain generation, the artistic response to that war always seems to come with a soundtrack by the Doors, its central players the bewildered and bartered American soldiers. Chuc offers a new perspective. This is timely. Scanning my teenager’s high school curriculum reveals the offering of a history class dedicated entirely to the conflict and American involvement in Vietnam. Chuc’s unique vantage point in part lends these poems their tensile strength.
She was one of two thousand immigrants who escaped communist Vietnam by cramming into one boat. In “Immigration” she recreates the experience: “barely human and starving. We sleep on the floor and/wash ourselves with seawater. People are sick.” Again mastering the conundrums of life, she recognizes how she herself nearly became the annihilator of her salvation and writes: “my constant crying made/[my mother] want to jump overboard.”
Chuc is the master of such duality, which she handles with the utmost subtlety. Few speak with her clarity and, at times harrowing, equanimity. Vietnam in Chuc’s poems is, rather than the heat of battle, instead the starting point for the tale, which is one of the dislocated immigrant, transformed into a story of the American enterprise, and in the end is a story of becoming.
Another of the collection’s notable strengths is its locating and subsequent exuberant celebration of domesticity—the life of the home, intergenerational cooking, the sensuous pleasure of the rice bowl, a fanciful ode to the cashew, as well as a reveling in family relationships, particularly motherhood. She writes with a genuine heart of the tenderness of parenting and of her grandmother’s embrace, in which she finds, “the assurance/of fruits.” Indeed, a certain domesticity touches many of these poems, often with surprising effect as in the horrifying “Eternity in Gaza,” where the image of the quaint domesticity washes the scene with a ghastly result.
A child when she left Vietnam, the poet says she doesn’t remember much but gathers family stories, scars and their ghosts: “Mother tells/of the ghost with a long tongue/that licks dishes at night.” She celebrates her brother for his willingness to eat cockroaches rather than have their mother sell his baby sister, Chuc, for food; she is familiar with her immigration history, made so real it is written in the present tense: “It is October, when the winds of autumn blow strong in/ the Pacific.”
Chuc's genesis as a poet began in wonder, she recollects in “Bike Accident.” She may have been slashed and bleeding by her tumble but her sense of wonder at having careened into a thorny rosebush (“eyelids scattered over me”) with all its contradictions proves her transformative moment. As I turned the pages of RED THREAD, I realized this was the pearl in my hand.
Reviewed by Jane Summer, author of The Silk Road
(review first published in Big Bridge, Issue 17, Spring 2013)
RED THREAD makes an exceptional contribution to the poetry of war. Consistently soft-spoken in tone and polemic-free, it is a shimmering and delicate book.
While war undergirds much of the collection, Teresa Mei Chuc takes on other subjects as well: the clash and crash of immigration and class, the power of language, and family in its many dimensions (political, cultural, natural, and social). In fact no matter what her subject, she writes at the intersection of race, class and gender. Throughout, she maintains that same light brushwork, so self-contained and certain.
Chuc’s lithe lines of simple statements of fact revision a world too easily camouflaged in the violent maelstrom of our era. When the poet writes, “A bullet is made of/copper or lead,” “A bamboo tree can weigh sixty pounds,” “The best containers/for fire are made of metal” Chuc is setting the stage to memorialize both the scarring wounds as well as the pleasures of our lives. Such duality is one of the constants, the threads, running through this collection of remarkable delicacy.
Halfway through Red Thread one encounters a telling poem, the fulcrum of the collection. “Saigon” begins, “A pearl in my hand./I was born in this ‘Paris’ of buildings/and monuments, of war remnants.” As the poet continues to limn the metropolis, writing:
City of pho, of Buddhist temples
of children who beg with bowl in hands.
This falling, a heart’s tearing
from branch to soil, the turning leaf
flutters in the breeze in a slight confusion
of where it should be
the author’s emblematic ability to contain dualities within the same moment is evident. In exploration of her subjects, rather than hold them in opposition Chuc describes them in a kind of balance or continuum.
Beyond examining the city/soil polarity, Chuc explores (here and throughout the collection) a variety of cultural frictions and always comes up decidedly independent, insisting on making her own way. Here she underscores the power of words. In one sense, words confer upon her an identity. To wit, “Saigon” is persistently Saigon despite its official renaming almost 40 years ago as Ho Chi Minh City; “pho” remains “pho,” insistently untranslated, though it could be described as a noodle soup.
Chuc further conveys the relationship she has with language in her poem “Fractures”:
There is a village when I read
the words, there are guns held
up towards a target and doors
kicked open, the way a language
enters a body without consent.
Its power can be restorative:
Let language enter without pain,
without shaking with fear.
Tell myself it’s okay, open, open.
Only through the mastery of language can we know our world and ourselves. “Rough Draft” expresses this notion, even in the state of becoming: “I am a constant participial phrase. . . . I will never be a final draft. I will never be done.”
Chuc’s facility with language is reflected in her ability to master the art of compression, even in her longer narrative works or those fevered pieces in which god-awful chemical bombs spill over civilians and casualty lists rise like welts. This is consistent in her war poems, astonishingly devoid of censure. Even the gritty “Song of Massacre,” “A Priori,” and “H’mong” resolve with a view toward life, survival, even flowers, albeit desiccated, in the war zone. It’s not so much a sunny optimism one reads in Chuc’s lines as much as a reflection of her own insistent triumphant life, the human spirit staring down the odds.
But since war played a crucial role in her identity, war permeates the collection. One surprising aspect about her war poems is much of it targets not recent conflicts, though these are addressed, but the war in Vietnam. For a certain generation, the artistic response to that war always seems to come with a soundtrack by the Doors, its central players the bewildered and bartered American soldiers. Chuc offers a new perspective. This is timely. Scanning my teenager’s high school curriculum reveals the offering of a history class dedicated entirely to the conflict and American involvement in Vietnam. Chuc’s unique vantage point in part lends these poems their tensile strength.
She was one of two thousand immigrants who escaped communist Vietnam by cramming into one boat. In “Immigration” she recreates the experience: “barely human and starving. We sleep on the floor and/wash ourselves with seawater. People are sick.” Again mastering the conundrums of life, she recognizes how she herself nearly became the annihilator of her salvation and writes: “my constant crying made/[my mother] want to jump overboard.”
Chuc is the master of such duality, which she handles with the utmost subtlety. Few speak with her clarity and, at times harrowing, equanimity. Vietnam in Chuc’s poems is, rather than the heat of battle, instead the starting point for the tale, which is one of the dislocated immigrant, transformed into a story of the American enterprise, and in the end is a story of becoming.
Another of the collection’s notable strengths is its locating and subsequent exuberant celebration of domesticity—the life of the home, intergenerational cooking, the sensuous pleasure of the rice bowl, a fanciful ode to the cashew, as well as a reveling in family relationships, particularly motherhood. She writes with a genuine heart of the tenderness of parenting and of her grandmother’s embrace, in which she finds, “the assurance/of fruits.” Indeed, a certain domesticity touches many of these poems, often with surprising effect as in the horrifying “Eternity in Gaza,” where the image of the quaint domesticity washes the scene with a ghastly result.
A child when she left Vietnam, the poet says she doesn’t remember much but gathers family stories, scars and their ghosts: “Mother tells/of the ghost with a long tongue/that licks dishes at night.” She celebrates her brother for his willingness to eat cockroaches rather than have their mother sell his baby sister, Chuc, for food; she is familiar with her immigration history, made so real it is written in the present tense: “It is October, when the winds of autumn blow strong in/ the Pacific.”
Chuc's genesis as a poet began in wonder, she recollects in “Bike Accident.” She may have been slashed and bleeding by her tumble but her sense of wonder at having careened into a thorny rosebush (“eyelids scattered over me”) with all its contradictions proves her transformative moment. As I turned the pages of RED THREAD, I realized this was the pearl in my hand.
Red Thread: Topics for Further Study
unexploded ordnance and landmines, Agent Orange, napalm, tiger cages, B-52s, Con Son, "re-education" camps
contemporary Vietnamese art - The Art of Ann Phong http://annphongart.com/about.html
contemporary Vietnamese art - The Art of Ann Phong http://annphongart.com/about.html
Red Thread: Further Reading
Year of the Hare by Teresa Mei Chuc, a story in a series of vignettes, was first published by Memoir (and), Issue 4, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2009. The full story is published online in Big Bridge, Issue 17, Spring 2013. The collection focuses on the post-traumatic stress disorder that Teresa's father experienced after the war in Vietnam and after spending nine years in a "re-education" prison camp and how it affected her and the family. Also available in print on Amazon.com.
Click here to read Year of the Hare in .pdf
"Joyful to heart-wrenching. Short non-fiction stories about moving to Los Angeles from Vietnam, and a dream-like childhood that's turned into a nightmare when the author's father returns to the family after spending years in a "re-education" camp. It's a well-written rollercoaster of beauty and terror." - Review of Year of the Hare by Jason Koivu, 2003
two poems, "Con Son" and "Depleted Uranium" http://hypotheticalreview.com/2013/05/05/teresa-mei-chuc/
a poem, "Violin," http://hypotheticalreview.com/2013/08/15/monthly-feature-august-2013-teresa-mei-chuc/
a poem, "accents" http://www.thevoicesproject.org/1/post/2013/05/accents-by-teresa-mei-chuc1.html
Click here to read Year of the Hare in .pdf
"Joyful to heart-wrenching. Short non-fiction stories about moving to Los Angeles from Vietnam, and a dream-like childhood that's turned into a nightmare when the author's father returns to the family after spending years in a "re-education" camp. It's a well-written rollercoaster of beauty and terror." - Review of Year of the Hare by Jason Koivu, 2003
two poems, "Con Son" and "Depleted Uranium" http://hypotheticalreview.com/2013/05/05/teresa-mei-chuc/
a poem, "Violin," http://hypotheticalreview.com/2013/08/15/monthly-feature-august-2013-teresa-mei-chuc/
a poem, "accents" http://www.thevoicesproject.org/1/post/2013/05/accents-by-teresa-mei-chuc1.html
a poem, "Names," was first published online in Babel Fruit and republished in print in New Poets of the American West anthology (Many Voices Press, 2010), edited by Lowell Jaeger:
Names
I am tired of having five different names;
Having to change them when I enter
A new country or take on a new life. My
First name is my truest, I suppose, but I
Never use it and nobody calls me by this Vietnamese
Name though it is on my birth certificate –
Tue My Chuc. It makes the sound of a twang of a
String pulled. My parents tell me my name in Cantonese
is Chuc Mei Wai. Three soft bird chirps and they call
me Ah Wai. Shortly after I moved to the U.S., I became
Teresa My Chuc, then Teresa Mei Chuc. “Teresa” is the sound
Water makes when one is washing one’s hands. After my first
Marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Prokopiev. After my second
Marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Dowell. Now I am back
To Teresa Mei Chuc, but I want to go way back . Reclaim that name once
given and lost so quickly in its attempt to become someone that would
fit in. Who is Tue My Chuc? I don’t really know. I was never really her
and her birthday on March 16, I never celebrate because it’s not
my real birthday though it is on my birth certificate. My birthday is on
January 26, really, but I have to pretend that it’s on March 16 because my
Mother was late registering me after the war. Or it’s in December, the date
Changing every year according to the lunar calendar – this is the one my
Parents celebrate because it’s my Chinese birthday.
All these names and birthdays make me dizzy. Sometimes I just don’t feel like a
Teresa anymore; Tue (pronounced Twe) isn’t so embarrassing. A fruit learns to
Love its juice. Anyways, I’d like to be string…resonating. Pulled back tensely like a bow
Then reverberate in the arrow’s release straight for the heart.
By Teresa Mei Chuc
Những cái tên
By Teresa Mei Chuc
Thật mệt mỏi vì có năm cái tên;
Phải đổi tên mỗi khi nhập cảnh
Một nước mới hay bắt đầu một cuộc sống mới. Cái tên
Đầu Tiên, với tôi, là thực nhất, nhưng
Tôi không dùng, cũng không ai gọi tôi bằng cái Tên
Việt ấy, cho dù nó được ghi trong giấy khai sinh -
Tue My Chuc. Cái tên bập bùng giọng mũi
Tiếng sợi dây căng. Ba mẹ nói tên tôi trong tiếng Quảng Đông
là Chuc Mei Wai. Ba tiếng chim hót mềm, và Ah Wai
Là cái tên cha mẹ tôi thường gọi. Vừa đến Mỹ, tôi hóa thành
Teresa My Chuc, rồi Teresa Mei Chuc. "Teresa"
Là tiếng nước khi ai đó rửa tay. Sau đám cưới đầu
Tên tôi là Teresa Chuc Prokopiev. Sau đám cưới thứ hai
Tôi là Teresa Chuc Dowell. Bây giờ tôi trở lại
Là Teresa Mei Chuc, nhưng tôi muốn trở về. Đòi lại cái tên ngày nào
Tôi từng nhận rồi nhanh chóng mất vì cố trở thành một ai
phù hợp. Tue My Chuc là ai? Tôi không biết. Tôi chưa bao giờ thực sự là cô,
Sinh nhật cô, ngày 16 tháng Ba, tôi chưa từng kỷ niệm
Đó không phải là ngày sinh thật của tôi dù giấy khai sinh ghi vậy. Thật ra tôi sinh
Ngày 26 tháng Giêng, nhưng tôi phải giả vờ rằng sinh ngày ấy, bởi vì
Sau chiến tranh mẹ tôi làm giấy chậm. Hoặc vào tháng Mười hai, còn ngày
Thay đổi hàng năm vì theo âm lịch - ngày hôm ấy
Cha mẹ tôi kỷ niệm vì đó mới là ngày sinh Trung Quốc của tôi.
Những cái tên và những ngày sinh ấy làm cho tôi chóng mặt. Đôi khi tôi không thấy mình
Là Teresa nữa; Tue (phát âm TWE) thì không đến nỗi quá rầy rà. Một trái cây học cách
Yêu dòng nhựa chính mình. Dù sao, tôi muốn là sợi dây...cộng hưởng. Như chiếc cung co mạnh
Rồi dội lại bằng mũi tên bắn thẳng vào tim.
Translated into Vietnamese by Ngo Tu Lap
Names
I am tired of having five different names;
Having to change them when I enter
A new country or take on a new life. My
First name is my truest, I suppose, but I
Never use it and nobody calls me by this Vietnamese
Name though it is on my birth certificate –
Tue My Chuc. It makes the sound of a twang of a
String pulled. My parents tell me my name in Cantonese
is Chuc Mei Wai. Three soft bird chirps and they call
me Ah Wai. Shortly after I moved to the U.S., I became
Teresa My Chuc, then Teresa Mei Chuc. “Teresa” is the sound
Water makes when one is washing one’s hands. After my first
Marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Prokopiev. After my second
Marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Dowell. Now I am back
To Teresa Mei Chuc, but I want to go way back . Reclaim that name once
given and lost so quickly in its attempt to become someone that would
fit in. Who is Tue My Chuc? I don’t really know. I was never really her
and her birthday on March 16, I never celebrate because it’s not
my real birthday though it is on my birth certificate. My birthday is on
January 26, really, but I have to pretend that it’s on March 16 because my
Mother was late registering me after the war. Or it’s in December, the date
Changing every year according to the lunar calendar – this is the one my
Parents celebrate because it’s my Chinese birthday.
All these names and birthdays make me dizzy. Sometimes I just don’t feel like a
Teresa anymore; Tue (pronounced Twe) isn’t so embarrassing. A fruit learns to
Love its juice. Anyways, I’d like to be string…resonating. Pulled back tensely like a bow
Then reverberate in the arrow’s release straight for the heart.
By Teresa Mei Chuc
Những cái tên
By Teresa Mei Chuc
Thật mệt mỏi vì có năm cái tên;
Phải đổi tên mỗi khi nhập cảnh
Một nước mới hay bắt đầu một cuộc sống mới. Cái tên
Đầu Tiên, với tôi, là thực nhất, nhưng
Tôi không dùng, cũng không ai gọi tôi bằng cái Tên
Việt ấy, cho dù nó được ghi trong giấy khai sinh -
Tue My Chuc. Cái tên bập bùng giọng mũi
Tiếng sợi dây căng. Ba mẹ nói tên tôi trong tiếng Quảng Đông
là Chuc Mei Wai. Ba tiếng chim hót mềm, và Ah Wai
Là cái tên cha mẹ tôi thường gọi. Vừa đến Mỹ, tôi hóa thành
Teresa My Chuc, rồi Teresa Mei Chuc. "Teresa"
Là tiếng nước khi ai đó rửa tay. Sau đám cưới đầu
Tên tôi là Teresa Chuc Prokopiev. Sau đám cưới thứ hai
Tôi là Teresa Chuc Dowell. Bây giờ tôi trở lại
Là Teresa Mei Chuc, nhưng tôi muốn trở về. Đòi lại cái tên ngày nào
Tôi từng nhận rồi nhanh chóng mất vì cố trở thành một ai
phù hợp. Tue My Chuc là ai? Tôi không biết. Tôi chưa bao giờ thực sự là cô,
Sinh nhật cô, ngày 16 tháng Ba, tôi chưa từng kỷ niệm
Đó không phải là ngày sinh thật của tôi dù giấy khai sinh ghi vậy. Thật ra tôi sinh
Ngày 26 tháng Giêng, nhưng tôi phải giả vờ rằng sinh ngày ấy, bởi vì
Sau chiến tranh mẹ tôi làm giấy chậm. Hoặc vào tháng Mười hai, còn ngày
Thay đổi hàng năm vì theo âm lịch - ngày hôm ấy
Cha mẹ tôi kỷ niệm vì đó mới là ngày sinh Trung Quốc của tôi.
Những cái tên và những ngày sinh ấy làm cho tôi chóng mặt. Đôi khi tôi không thấy mình
Là Teresa nữa; Tue (phát âm TWE) thì không đến nỗi quá rầy rà. Một trái cây học cách
Yêu dòng nhựa chính mình. Dù sao, tôi muốn là sợi dây...cộng hưởng. Như chiếc cung co mạnh
Rồi dội lại bằng mũi tên bắn thẳng vào tim.
Translated into Vietnamese by Ngo Tu Lap
Writing Prompts
Please click here for writing prompts based on poems from the book.