Creative Writing Specialization: Featured Student Work

From a manuscript-in-progress:

American Girls / Cô Gái Mỹ

By Lan Nguyen

Born and raised among the southern coastal suburbs of Long Beach, California, Lan Nguyen is a child of Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in America in the years preceding the fall of Saigon. She will be graduating this year with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English under the Creative Writing Specialization and a Minor in Anthropology.

Xoài

Mẹ takes the knife, slicing the flesh gentle

a parquet succulent as sunrise,

note the lines she cuts

gridlike, longitudes and latitudes of

Our love passed down by

many mothers before. A tender lesson,

Ancient as the blood between us.

Now, I will tell you what I remember. That first time,

Golden marrow slipping through my lips

old age wrinkling the fingers that fed me,

Maybe this is how it was for her

a child standing beneath the Phượng vỹ and Sacred Figs

Nestled among street vendors and foot traffic

Gripping the fruit sliced gentle by hands

of a woman whose name I will never learn, What

memories would have been mine if

America did not send gunned men and

Napalm to erase names like a burning flood,

(that child's golden skin melted into scar tissue.)

Glinting in the dirt of that motherland lies remnants of their bodies

Our histories ordained by gunfire and pale faces remain forgotten.

Mouth sticky with ripe juices, I

attack the honeyed tissue. Bà ngoại’s laugh rings out above me,

“Ngon?” she asks, the nod I

Give: ardent, eager with a child’s love. This memory written in my flesh endures

Over lifetimes rippling as

the girl takes a bite again of what is hers to give.

---

Cô Gái Mỹ

Trinh 1973

Sing it to me like you did

before the blood ran shining down

shame scratched shins and thighs. Before you

gave me a lily

Shoved it down my throat

Writhing in pain all the way down. Before you left

for America left

me

here where you met me

with our children. Now I’m coming to America

and the blood of our third child runs down my thighs as I step

off the metal hold of a ship that has carried my family

(not yours) away from war.

Amy 1988

Sip on the jasmine this morning,

white girls down the street dressed to the Ts.

Showing us immigrant ones how to wear Americana, and

we can’t help wanting.

Wanting the money

Bodies decked in second hand dresses,

In the Goodwill we pretend

Our hands run along designer jeans.

Little girl lunch trays extended out

Starving for inclusion.

The American girl wears

white skin, Reeboks and a perm

She owns a doll lookin just like her,

and how we with the black box hair and round faces and moon molded eyes

how we asked to be American too.

Tam 2013

I think about how

my father tells me he is more American

than he is Vietnamese,

And I try to reckon with the meaning of that

Until I remember Vietnam in my father’s eyes

looks like the steel barrel of a gun

held by my ông nội.

Theresa 2032

Smells of incense and I stare

From the concrete yard of my bà ngoại’s house

Congested with potted plants in black plastic bins,

my tongue knows in taste not name.

I stare at life-sized portraits of the begotten son and

my ancestors whose names and stories I have never heard,

What have I heard?

Tabloid narratives,

A pale stranger’s latest lovers,

Americana–

Lyrics and cinema and

Distillations fashioned by

Powdered bodies wrapped in

Gossamer and taffeta.

I think about how I know more about

America’s celebrity

than I do my own family.