“Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood”
–Ocean Vuong, 98.
Bodies of water, throughout time and place, have served as archives of memory, sites of history, and forms of knowledge. Ancient and modern cultures have worshipped water as burial and religious sites, civilizations have built themselves around various waters, and recent histories have seen throngs of weary masses attempt to find refuge by migration through and on water. Ocean Vuong’s family and millions of other Vietnamese were among these masses. Vuong has written of water in a plethora of ways, including but not limited to migration, landmark, memory, and cleansing. This motif shows up time and time again in both his poetry (Night Sky With Exit Wounds)and prose (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous), both as sea (the Pacific Ocean) and river (the Connecticut River). In this page, we elaborate on these references using relevant historical and local archives. Theorizations on water, it seems, too ebb and flow across cultures, places, and time.
“Tobacco Valley”
“I got up at six in the morning five days a week and rode my bike the full hour it took to get to the farm, crossing the Connecticut River, past the suburbs with their suicidally pristine lawns, then into the sticks. As I approached the property, the fields unfolded all around me on both sides, the telephone wires slacked with the weight of crows dotted along the lines, the sporadic white almond trees in full bloom, irrigation ditches where more than a dozen rabbits would drown by summer’s end, their corpses stinking the hot air. Verdant swaths of tobacco, some high as my shoulders, stretched so far that the trees standing at the farm’s edge looked more like shrubs ”
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Group: 2019. 108-109.
There is a long history connecting the Connecticut River and the tobacco industry. Since 1600s, tobacco farming has been an integral part of the Connecticut River Valley’s economy, a resource already being grown by indigenous communities well before colonists settled along the CT River Valley. While today, tobacco production in Connecticut has significantly decreased since peak production in the 1930s, around 2,000 acres still remain used by the tobacco industry in Connecticut today.
Citation: “Windsor Tobacco: Made in the Shade.” Connecticut History. 22 August 2019.
“Because eventually the river rises here. It overflows to claim it all and to show us what we lost, like it always had”
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Group: 2019. 181.
The Vietnamese creation myth: born of mountains and sea
Folklore is one of the most important and long-standing sites of archive in Vietnamese culture. Folklore not only reflects the culture’s perception of themselves, but also their attitude towards nature, morality, and the supernatural. One of the oldest and most widely known stories that circulate the Vietnamese archive is that of the origin of the very nation of Vietnam. The story goes that Au Co, a mountain fairy who at times takes the form of a white crane, went around to different villages to heal the sick and dying. One day, while on one of her excursions, she’s attacked by a monster, causing her to take her crane form as self protection. Lac Long Quan (meaning Dragon Lord of Quan), a lord of the oceans and rivers who was known for his bravery in fighting off monsters and beloved by villagers, happens upon this encounter and saves Au Co’s life, not knowing she was a fairy. Au Co, then, reverted back to her womanly form, and immediately fell deeply in love with her benefactor, and her affections were returned. They made love and conceived a sac of eggs which contained a hundred children. Though madly in love, the fairy still longed for her northern mountains, and the dragon lord for his southern waters. They painfully parted, each taking fifty children with them, who then went on to found powerful Northern and Southern Vietnamese dynasties that would rule for centuries. The Vietnamese people pride themselves in being born of dragon and fairy, of mountain and sea. Unlike many other nation creation myths (The Rape of the Sabine Women, the Aeneid, Manifest Destiny, etc.), the Vietnamese creation myth is borne of love and benevolence, not destruction, rape, or conquest. It is a gentle story about a gentle people.
The Pacific Ocean as a passageway for Vietnamese refugees
“Boat People S.O.S.’s videos captured images of rescue by resettled Vietnamese refugees, framing the Vietnamese boat exodus and the urgency of rescue at sea, by highlighting the violence of starvation, drowning, and piracy in the voice-over while juxtaposing images of refugees laying stacked on top of one another on fishing boats and malnourished bodies jumping from boat to boat as rescuers with orange life vests helped carry and transfer refugees onto larger ships. Boat People S.O.S. stepped in to respond to the overwhelming number of refugees left to drift by countries both refusing entry and evading rescue at sea”
Nguye͂n, Patricia, “salt I water: Vietnamese Refugee Passages, Memory, and Statelessness at Sea”, Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2017, 45 (1/2). 94-111
“We rode along the Connecticut River as night broke into itself, the moon freshly high above the oaks, its edges hazed by an unseasonably warm autumn. The current churned with white froth to our right. Once in a while, after two or three weeks without rain, a body would float up from its depths, a bleached flash of a shoulder tapping the surface, and the families cooking out along the banks would stop, and a hush would come down along the children, and then someone would shout, ‘Oh god, oh god,’ and someone else would call 911. And sometimes it’s a false alarm: a refrigerator rusted and lichen-stained to the shade of a brown face. And sometimes it’s the fish, gone belly-up in the thousands for no reason, the river-face iridescent overnight.”
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Group: 2019. 177.
“The river’s current, although gentle, frothed white around his thighs. The crickets grew louder, lush. The trees rustled unseen in the massed shadows across the river. Then Trevor let go, dipped under, before quickly surfacing. Droplets ran down his jaw, tinkled around him.”
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Group: 2019. 241.
“’Clean yourself,’ he said, his tone oddly tender, almost frail. I pinched my nose and dunked under, gasping from the cold. In an hour, I’ll be standing in our dim kitchen, the river still damp in my hair, and Lan will shuffle into the glow of the night-light above the stove. I won’t tell anyone you been at sea, Little Dog. She will put her finger over her lips and nod. This way, the pirate spirits won’t follow you. She will take a dishrag and dry my hair, my neck, pausing over the hickey that, by then, will be the shade of dried blood under my jaw. You been far away. Now you home. Now you dry, she will say as the floorboards creak under our shifting weight. The river up to my chest now, I waved my arms to keep steady. Trevor put his hand on my neck and we stood, quiet for a moment, our heads bent over the river’s black mirror.”
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Group: 2019. 177. 241-242.
Learn more about water as a form of the archive through: Into the Deluge
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~A spring 2021 exhibition and lecture series at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts exploring bodies of water as sites of history, knowledge, and memory: “What would it mean to organize notions of self and society not around land, territory, and nation, but around the oceanic, the fluvial, the aquatic? Through lectures, artist talks, discussions, and an exhibition, we turn to water as an urgent mode of critical inquiry and artistic practice. The program draws on scholar Paul Gilroy’s notion of ‘offshore humanism’ as we look to oceans, rivers, and seas in an effort to rethink political subjectivity during our time of racial reckoning and climate emergency.”
Photo Citations:
- Way to Tam Coc on Ngo Dong River, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/400116748127905173/
- Ngo Dong River, https://www.bestpricetravel.com/travel-guide/rivers-in-vietnam-you-gotta-know-these-329.html
- Tobacco Valley, https://www.cardcow.com/291550/springfield-massachusetts-aerial-view-connecticut-river-tobacco-fields-pioneer-valley/
