Interview with the author of "Daughters of the River Huong" by RavensYard Ltd., original publisher of this novel

An interview with Uyen Nicole Duong, author of Daughters of the River Huong – a Vietnamese royal concubine and her descendants (RavensYard Publishing, Ltd., Fairfax Va. ISBN 1-928928-16-1; trade paperback, 271 pages, SRP $17.95)

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The following interview with Uyen Nicole Duong was conducted by the publisher in advance of the publication of Daughters of the River Huong in July 2005.

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RY: How did you come to write “Daughters of the River Huong”?

Duong: I’m not sure anyone – even the writer – can fully understand all the sources for a writer’s creative energy, but in the case of this book I know that several themes at work for me were the city of Hue, the River Huong, and the native people from Champa.

My mother is from Hue, and of course she has played an important part in my creative life since childhood. All Vietnam veterans who served in Vietnam, I imagine, would remember Hue and the battle there during the TET offensive in 1968. Hue was an imperial city, and represented the past glory of the independent Vietnam before French colonialism. Control of Hue was very important and one of the reasons why the battle in 1968 was so intense. I know many American veterans of the Vietnam War remember Hue. One time at a social gathering at a filmmaker's home in California, I was introduced to a Vietnam vet and when he found out my mother came from Hue, all he wanted to talk about was the battle for the imperial city. In a way, this made me sad that my mother's hometown was associated only with the bloodshed of war in the minds of the American public. For that reason, I want to bring Hue and its motif into my novel.

The River Huong, commonly known among tourists as the Perfume River, is the landmark of Hue. It is associated with the beautiful and romantic women of Vietnam. It also has historic significance independent from the famous battle. One of the last Vietnamese monarchs, together with two mandarin strategists, plotted a revolt against the French protectorate government during his boat trips on the Perfume River. Of course, it was unsuccessful and the young king was exiled. Hue and its River Huong are also associated with the past kingdom of Champa, which annexed into Vietnam as of the 15th century. I have always been interested in the indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, including the Champa heritage. In 1991, a Vietnamese friend of mine, a psychologist who had studied Carl Jung, told me I looked more like a Cham woman than a Vietnamese. This gave me the idea to pursue a creative urge. I conceived the novel during the same year.

Initially, I began work on an epic novel called "The Queens of Champa." Later, I wrote a short story called "The Young Woman Who Practiced Singing," and a non-fiction piece called "Coffins of Cinnamon." These three works evolved as I worked on them into one body of work, "The Daughters of the River Huong." I think of this novel as the first in a series of books I have in mind about the fall of South Vietnam. I have finished the other two volumes in that series and they are ready to be marketed.

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RY: How much of the story is autobiographical?

Duong: My story is a work of literary fiction; so no, it is not autobiographical. However, the voice of each protagonist in this family saga is authentic. The things I wrote about were based on what some acting teachers call my own sense-memory recollection, a stage acting method pioneered by the actress Uta Hagen. I learned about this sense-memory recollection when I attended acting school. I learned how to tap into my private feelings in order to render true sentiments to my creative work. It came very naturally to me and I brought the sense-memory recollection acting method into my fiction writing. Many critics and writing teachers would say an author's early work is quite often thinly disguised autobiography. But remember writers also learn the number one principle: write what you know. River Huong is what I know.

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RY: What was your vision in writing River Huong?

Duong: I wanted to capture the beauty of my home culture, and the sorrow of its women in the form of literary fiction. I followed the heart of Madame Cinnamon, who was a principal character but never spoke directly in the novel.

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RY: What would you like to say to other Vietnamese-American readers?

Duong: I will take solace in knowing that the new generation who was born in the US will hopefully know of the River Huong's romanticism and place in Vietnamese history via my work. For first generation Vietnamese in the US, I hope the novel will bring them back to a time and place, perhaps lost and passed, but not forgotten.

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RY: Is your work political?

Duong: I have no political statement to make except to note the events and settings in some parts of this novel were dark chapters of Vietnamese colonial history. The history of Vietnam is being reevaluated all the time by the writers of Vietnam, and by Vietnamese-American writers like me. I believe literary fiction has a great deal to add to the voices describing Vietnamese history. I hope my writing is of the humanity of this history. I don't wish to write about politics per se, and I don't want to use the literary art to crusade for any particular cause. I think that would kill the literary art.

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RY: How and when did you come to the U.S.?

Duong: Via the U.S. airlift, five days before the fall of Saigon. I was 16.

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RY: Tell us about your family and their influences.

Duong: My father was a professor of linguistics at the University of Saigon, Faculty of Letters. He continued his teaching career in the U.S. but in a different discipline. My mother was a teacher of Vietnamese literature, who left her family in order to teach at Faifo, a port town adjacent to a war zone. She saw her students pulled into the war and various sides of the ideological battle. The port town of Faifo was a meeting place between east and west, where international traders and the missionaries first set foot in that part of the world, on their voyage from India to China. I consider my mother's action quite feministic for her time: leaving home to teach and rejecting a pre-arranged marriage in the name of love. She married my father in Faifo for love. But despite this independent spirit, she has remained a very traditional woman faithful to Confucian values all her life. I was born in Faifo. I also should point out that both of my grandmothers were influential in every endeavor I have undertaken in my life, including my creative writing, even though neither could read or write even their native tongue, Vietnamese. This was not unusual for their generation -- the generation of Vietnamese women coming from the villages of Vietnam, born at the turn of the century. Yet, this was the generation that survived and bore the bloodshed of continuous warfare. My paternal grandmother died in California. My maternal grandmother died in Saigon, only a few years after the communist takeover.

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RY: How has your profession as a lawyer affected your work as a writer?

Duong: Currently, I am a law professor. I have been making a living and maintaining my professional standing in the law for 20 years, at all times maintaining my commitment to excellence in the law. It has been a hard struggle to combine law and art, and the combination at times has been exhausting. I have had to compromise of my career ambitions to pursue my literary art. But I never compromised excellent performance in the law. This is very important to me because, although I did not choose this role, it happened that I was the first Vietnamese American female in various places within the law. This distinguishes me from other lawyer-cum-writers.

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RY: You mentioned compromising your ambition. What do you mean?

Duong: Oh, you have to make choices in life. It happened that for me to continue my writing I've had to pass up some professional opportunities. For example, I did not pursue a judicial career to the maximum possible, and resigned from the judgeship. I also withdrew from the White House Fellowship competition. A judicial, political or public service career would have restricted the freedom of my pen because such a career would have put my writing under constant public scrutiny, and of necessity limited my ability to create my literary art.

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RY: But you didn't leave the law. Why?

Duong:
To me, law is a beautiful end in itself – containing notions of freedom, liberty, and justice for all. I will never give up working with the law. It is not just a day job. If I had wanted just a regular job to earn a living, I could have done something far less demanding and concentrated on my writing at night. I do not want to do that. Other writers may think of law as a day job, in which they plug themselves to wait for that commercial break with their novel. That's not how I want to live my life. When I say I can do both law and art, I will do both.

I have found it is possible to combine both. It all depends on the writer's level of determination and sacrifice. It turned out that all my professional life I have dealt with the conflicting demands of both the law and art, internally and externally. In my various law jobs, for example, I have had to fight a bias that as an artist I did not take my law job seriously. Wrong. This bias was enhanced because I was a Southeast Asian woman living with those cultural stereotypes. Further, the law is restrictive, and art is free, and the creative processes are different. I wrote about this conflict between law and art in my scholarly research work on law and literature. Yet, in many ways I have found that for me the worlds of law and art compliment each other.

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RY: Your novel has poetry and music in it. How does this come about?

Duong: Again, I draw from my life experience to write fiction. Music, poetry, the performing and visual arts are just as important to me as literature. The only art form that I have not experienced is sculpture.

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RY: What artist do you most admire?

Duong: What a loaded question! There are many artists I admire. But one? Perhaps Maria Callas. A reader of River Huong won't be surprised by this, I expect. The novel is textured by classical music and the poetry of Baudelaire. And it is, after all, derived from a love story I wrote about a "young maiden who practiced singing.”

Ms. Callas had a very sad life, even scandalous. Yet it was the glamorous life of a diva and the disciplined life of an artist dedicated to the search for perfection. She was also a dramatist, in life and on stage. Drama was in every feature of her face and her expressive eyes, as well as in her delivery of all the great female roles of the operatic world. Her unique voice was technically imperfect. It was beautiful yet full of raw edges.

In my view, Ms. Callas really lived. And struggled along in that life. She was an icon of style and fashion, yet she struggled to stay thin and to combat skin problems. She was alienated and exploited by many, including her loved ones. She courageously learned to live with so much pain in all that glamour; so much hurt by love; and so much driven by her art. Her's was a life full of eccentricity, anguish, anxieties, conflicts and despair, gains and losses, as well as the limelight of her stage.

Her life was imperfect, but she was an immortal artist who has really loved and has really lived with all the negative as well as positive emotions. Ms. Callas did not build the world’s greatest wonder, nor find a cure for cancer, nor put a stop to a war, but she left us something so fragile yet so strong and enduring, so mortal yet so eternally beautiful it is with us forever. It is the human voice delivered by an artist, all wrapped in the dramatic yet vulnerable nature of a passionate woman. All legacies of the great men and women of our world can be politicized, but not when it is pure art, like the voice of Maria Callas and the music her wonderful voice has delivered to us. As you can see, I feel deeply about how art can give meaning to life.