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In her words By Kobi Ben Simhon Tags: Vaan Nguyen, poetry It's 10 P.M. and the memories return. For as long as she can remember she has been corresponding with empty spaces in her soul. And she seems to have many of them. Maybe that is why she views her place as a poet with such wonderful innocence. She makes no big deal out of her new status. Dipping a herbal tea bag into hot water, she says she started to write out of loneliness, that it was not something she yearned to do. "I never dreamed of writing or publishing. I didn't intend that. I had a hard childhood. Socially, my situation in Avigail Elementary School in the Jaffa Dalet neighborhood was cruel. I was teased because of my Asian origins. They called me 'Chinese' and 'Japanese.' Children hit me because I talked back and did not shut up when I was insulted. They waited for me and threw stones at me and hit me with key chains. I walked home frightened, but they chased me. There was a period when I tried to escape my Vietnamese identity. I sent letters to Knesset members asking to have the word 'Vietnam' erased from the nationality rubric on my ID card." The young poet hangs her legs over the arm of the chair, like a girl. Vaan Nguyen, 26, is wearing a black jacket over a blue T-shirt. She is a diminutive woman, though recently she soared to new heights, after years of anticipation. A pamphlet attached to the fourth issue of the literary journal Maayan ("Fountain" - A Journal of Literature, Poetry, Art and Ideas), contains her first collection of poems, 37 of them, entitled "Ein Hakmehin" ("Eye of the Truffle"). "Ein Hakmehin," the blurb says, is a "confetti burst of turgid passion, dirty gold." Nguyen sheds additional light on this: "I am dirty gold. Dirty gold is glittering and moldy. Like my life." Advertisement As a girl she hid behind the curtains in the library, which was a haven for her. "I gobbled up the children's books very quickly, and the librarian started to give me adult books. I read so much, and at a certain stage I also began to write. I have kept a diary since fourth grade, because I didn't have it easy." She still doesn't have it easy. Sometimes she thinks she will never have it easy. Nguyen lives in Jaffa's squalid tenements with her parents and earns a living from two part-time jobs. In the morning she works as a bookkeeper in an ad agency, and in the evening edits Internet sites related to advertising in offices in Petah Tikva. Her life has been tortuous and rocky. Born in 1982, she is the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who were granted asylum in Israel in 1979, three years after the end of the Vietnam War. In the wake of the victory by the communist north over the American-backed south, followed by the country's unification under communist rule, half a million people, among them collaborators with the Americans and others who feared the communists, fled and became refugees. Vaan Nguyen's parents were among the refugees known as the "boat people," because they left in boats in the hope of being rescued at sea and starting a new life elsewhere. The wave of refugees lasted about 10 years. Nguyen's parents fled in 1977, after her grandfather was murdered by the communists. Their boat washed up on the shore of the Philippines, but they were not allowed to enter that country. They were confined to a refugee camp until a solution could be found for them. It was then prime minister Menachem Begin who brought Nguyen's parents to Israel. Indeed, his first official decision in office, after being elected in May 1977, was to grant Israeli citizenship to 179 Vietnamese refugees "right after they landed in Israel," Nguyen relates. "They were taken to an absorption center in the Negev town of Sderot and forgotten forever. My parents were transparent: No one took any interest in them. They left the ulpan [intensive Hebrew course] after three months without having learned Hebrew, in order to work in factories in the Sderot area. Very quickly they decided to move to the big city in the expectation of finding a better livelihood. They moved around between Holon, Rishon Letzion and Bat Yam, and in the end settled in Jaffa - not the pastoral tourist part, but the section that is far from the sea. My parents worked mostly in kitchens, doing jobs that did not require language." The family's story is told in a 2005 documentary film, "The Journey of Vaan Nguyen," directed by Duki Dror, which tells the story of the efforts of Nguyen's father to reclaim the land taken from his family by the communist regime. Her father may not have picked up the language, but Hebrew flows in her blood. The immigrants' daughter is a veritable juggler of Hebrew; even fierce and impatient critics melt in the face of her poetic finesse. "The moment I read her poems, magic arises," literary critic Menachem Ben enthuses. "I can say immediately what I think about a poem, because there is nothing to understand - her poetry comes across in language. I judge the depth and the magic of the language. And I am immediately charmed by Vaan's poetic language." In Ben's view: "She has brought to Hebrew poetry innovativeness, freedom, liberation and sexuality. She does not write standard Hebrew, but it is clearly proper and lovely. With her one gets an infusion of simplicity, but at the same time something sensual and delicate. She concocts terms that come a bit from the outside, which I call 'Vietnamese lightness.'" For example, in the poem "Data processing," she writes: "You read poetry / that's sophisticated / from Herzliya Pituah, close to the sea / You were a pilot with seven sorties into enemy territory, once. / My life: a period of men. Tabula rasa / of cock notes." Writer Uzi Weil has become optimistic thanks to her: "I have been following her work for almost two years, and I see her voice taking shape. Her pamphlet of poems is very humane and personal. Hers is a voice that needs to be read, in my opinion," he says. "It makes one terrifically optimistic to see the process she has undergone - to see an artist being created through continuous, ongoing work. I think she has an important, interesting and original voice in Hebrew literature. I love what she writes." Verging on crudeness Nguyen started her writing career with a personal woman's column in the weekly Zman Tel Aviv after her discharge from the army, where she was a video editor. Her first published poems appeared two years ago in Maayan, which is edited by Joshua Simon and Roy "Chicky" Arad. Writing, she says, is a constant confrontation with her detached life and her disappointed love life. These two worlds are described in her poetry in almost documentary, narrative style, which takes the form of self-exposure verging on crudeness. The occupation with sex in everyday situations is a recurrent motif. In "Tel Aviv," she writes: "He got angry at me and went / to take from the waitress / her phone number. / Entered my cunt so he could solve / the problems of existence. / I wanted to cradle Lior Speier / deep into myself, to pour / hot water on him." "My poems are not only Tel Aviv fucking," Nguyen protests. "It was the editors' decision to emphasize that. For good or for ill, because along with favorable criticism I've also received virulent criticism. There are very blunt critics who are not ashamed and know how to hurt the writer. 'Her poetry lacks intellectual foundations,' they wrote. Maybe. Some people interpret some of the poems as sexual works. I have no problem with that. I live a sexual life and naturally I write about it. But I do not write about crude sex, about violent sexuality. I write about the vulnerability. The sexual poems contain many additional layers. Some poems started from a distant, different point. There is one poem that started basically in a demonstration against the Lebanon War, and after that I talk about some fuck. So you might think it is a sexual poem. What can I do if I have a need to integrate the one with the other?" In the poem "Loop," you write of yourself: "I am a clothes catalog, a bipolar personality." Nguyen: "Exactly, there is no subtext. That is how I feel, that is me. I feel that I am looked at as a clothes catalog - very superficially, with nothing beyond that. It has to do with the way I comport myself in this city. In the past I wrote about fashion and took part in fashion productions. I modeled and was part of that industry. I don't know why, but it happens that girls always talk to me only about accessories and guys. The conversations get stuck on that. They talk to me about clothes. I have the image of a blonde." And the bipolarity? "I have nothing to add about the depression. It's a disease. Chemical problems in the head." Nguyen feels that the city accepts her, that it is home to many rejects who are creating a place for themselves. From her point of view, the Maayan group of writers is a type of home - a place that accords security. The communal feeling and the support she gets there are important to her. "There is a kind of renaissance," she explains. "There was a gap, a kind of quiet after the phalanx of the poets Yona Wallach, Dahlia Ravikovitch and Natan Zach. We went through more than a decade of individual poets: There was no representative mass of a generation. Ravikovitch's death marked the end of a chapter. The feeling now is that there are many young people who are writing, that it is happening anew. There is more expression of young identity in the poetry." She speaks of a cohesive group whose members are interconnected. "The Maayan group has the sociological characteristics of an organization: There are meetings, there is a regular journal. There are no formal ties, but there is neighborliness, a feeling of being a group. We meet in the street and we are invited to the same events. To parties at people's homes. We hang out together all the time. There is support and a sense of home. We e-mail poems to one another. Everyone reads everyone and everyone reacts to everyone. On Fridays we meet at the Little Prince Cafe, and young writers are joined there by figures such as [the poet] Aharon Shabtai, Ran Yagil, who edits the journal Emda, and [literary critic] Prof. Gabriel Moked." Some would say you are a marginal niche. "In the meantime it's a niche, and it could well be marginal, but it's easier to create this way, as a group. Alone, it's hard. At one time I worked for the Internet site Walla as a talkback censor. Occasionally I would go into their library - they get hundreds of books for review from PR people - and I went through the poetry books. It was sad. The press releases were still inside the books, and it was obvious the books hadn't been opened and never would be. That anonymity is saddening. A group like Maayan enables you, as a poet, to breach the anonymity." 'Sweetmelancholy' In addition to the circle of poets, Nguyen is also part of other social groups. "The city is saturated with different cliques. At every party you can see the different groups. My feeling is that everyone is suddenly aware of the power of social networking. I hang out in clubs that are frequented also by people who maybe have more money than the student poets of the Little Prince. My encounters with people are not only at poetry-reading events, but also at night on Lilienblum Street, where there are more people from the advertising and film industries. I know them because I worked with them. I was in a commercial for YES [satellite television] and in an episode of a TV show. That is where the industries meet. "Everyone hangs out with the people they work with. The film people bring actresses, the advertising men bring models. But because you can't really talk at parties, there is a lot of talking via text messages, Facebook and e-mails. You read the blogs of people you know so you keep up with what's happening. A lot of my life takes place via the computer. I have no close friends, so I make a point of cultivating relations with other people. I split the psychological support I need with different people through the computer." Nguyen's patron, Roy "Chicky" Arad, editor of Maayan, says he likes "natural writing" and "natural rhythm." Nguyen has those qualities, he feels. He doesn't think she is an especially "weighty" poet, because she is too sad and not political or socially engaged. "But she is one of a kind," Arad notes. "The poems simply write themselves from within her in a flowing stream. She is like a dinghy moving quickly on a river; there is something eel-like, elusive, shimmering about her poetry. Vaan's poems just glow off of the page ... What sweet melancholy. She has some kind of elusive historical depth, which I haven't yet been able to grasp. In any event, Vaan Nguyen stood out in Maayan. We publish 70 writers in each issue and wait to see what will happen, and the responses to Vaan made me very happy." Arad says he "is not Menachem Ben's man" and that the critic in fact threw out the last issue of the journal without even opening it. "But I'm pleased that he noticed her of all the Maayan poets. He has an ear for beauty, which other critics do not. Vaan is a poet who deals with this unpleasant subject of beauty. Of course, there is also something Jewish in her refugee condition, which you do not find in Jewish-Israeli writers." Her uncompromising effort to create a distinctive voice is paying off in the form of public recognition, but Nguyen remains a bit lost amid all the rejoicing. She looks fragile, vulnerable. Her speech ranges from rapid giggles to oppressive silences. It is the past that weighs her down without letup, she explains; it is related to the way she grew up. "I feel confused. I am profiled according to my family, my parents, Jaffa, Vietnam. My alienation is family alienation. Maybe because of my father, maybe because I am basically an immigrant. My father wandered, and maybe because of that I feel that I am floating. In the final analysis, I am a non-belonger. I always feel that I want some other place, want a new cultural identity. Here I am committed to my parents, to my family." Meaning? "I cannot really lead the life I would like to lead. The expectation of the Vietnamese community is that we, the second generation, will speak in their place, will help provide for the family, as in Vietnam. And it is terribly hard to see one's parents helpless in the face of simple things - such as a line of people in the health clinic. That frustrates me." What are you thinking about just now? "That maybe I could have been a lawyer or a physician and helped my community. I am under tremendous pressure. I think about [my family] all the time and don't feel good about my choices. My problem is that they cannot be proud of me. In the end, I am a girl who writes sex poems. I am not going to university and I am not helping them economically. And they need me. For them I am not a success story."W Bookmark to del.icio.us   Devil's weed New campaign equates smoking pot with terrorism. Bad company A BBC poll says Israel world's most hated country after Iran.

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