Archived entry from our February 2007 trip
Hi All, Ilene posting here:
If you are unsure of what I am doing in Vietnam, fear not, dear reader—you’re not alone. People ask me all the time how I got interested in Vietnam, what I do in Vietnam, and what I write about. Here are some pithy soundbites to digest and/or share.
What do you do in Vietnam?
I travel in Vietnam looking for experiences, people, artifacts, language, images, and sounds that help me question my most familiar ways of thinking and knowing. I also investigate the effects globalization has had on Vietnamese people’s lives—especially the effects of communications technologies, foreign language literacies, and the shift to a market economy. I use that material as the basis for my writing.
On this trip I’ll be taking Vietnamese language classes, re-interviewing women whose literacy narratives I began collecting on my 2002 and 2005 trips, conducting interviews with additional people I recruit, collecting pre- and post- Vietnam War-era photographs and postcards and maps, photographing Ho Chi Minh City and places in the Mekong Delta, finding books and journals I can’t get in the US, and visiting museums and historical sites.
The interviews always lead to other opportunities—on previous trips I have ended up teaching an English class, meeting University faculty and visiting campuses, visiting a convent, and speaking with the nuns about the nursery school they run and the conflicts they have with the government. Since my last trip, one of my interviewees translated portions of Hillary Clinton’s autobiography into Vietnamese and I plan to meet other members of the group she worked with. I also plan to talk more with artists I have connections to about the production and circulation of their work.
What have you written?
I have presented conference papers and published journal articles and book chapters geared toward academic audiences. (Do not feel obligated to request a bibliography. Seriously.)
Here’s a sampling:
In one piece I use my experience crossing the street in Vietnam as a metaphor for doing university teaching and academic writing that is both timely and effective.
In another, I show the ways young Vietnamese women are compelled to acquire English literacies and discuss why learning English can be a mixed blessing for them.
In another, I argue that the imperfect roles we to play to be able to travel at all—exchange student, tourist, ESL teacher—all come with their own baggage, but that we can learn to play them in new ways and question the Us-Them dynamic they often create between us and locals.
Why Vietnam?
I was born in 1970, so I have no memory of the events of the Vietnam War, but I’ve always been interested in how iconic mass media images have implanted memories of Vietnam in me and given me a point of view about Vietnam nonetheless. I’ve also always been interested in the kind of shift in perspective that physical movement and traveling can create. How do you know what you know? How can you be persuaded to perceive and to know differently?.
When I became friends with my colleague Thuan Vu, who is a professor of Art at Southern Connecticut State University where I am a professor of English and Women’s Studies, we decided to apply for a research grant that would allow us to travel to Vietnam together and jointly explore the questions that our work takes up. He studies traditional art techniques in Vietnam and gathers images and experiences for his drawings and paintings, which explore identity, perspective, and memory.
What are you writing now?
I’m working on one academic piece I’ve proposed for an edited collection called Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies. I’ll describe why I needed to devise methods of working suited to Vietnam’s complex material conditions while gathering women’s literacy narratives.
I’m also working on a collection of essays geared toward a broader audience that I’d like to publish with a trade press, rather than an academic one. I’ve long wanted to write for a less academic and a more popular audience. Tenure has its privileges.
I have about a dozen ideas for different pieces I want to actively research and develop while I am in Vietnam. Together, they’ll create a narrative about Vietnam in the midst of the changes globalization is bringing and they’ll make an argument about learning to see Vietnam on its own terms.
