Vietnamese Portland

Vân Le Oral History

Vân Le was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She attended the University of Washington where she studied architecture. She is the general manager at Jeffrey Allen Gallery, overseeing the direction and future of the business. In this interview, Le begins by sharing how her family came to Portland, adjusted, and established themselves after immigration. As she reflected on her experiences growing up in Portland, she became more aware of the lack of representation within the Asian community, particularly Vietnamese representation. She shares how her family encouraged her to learn about the Vietnamese language, culture, and traditions, which shaped her cultural identity. Later in the interview, Le discusses generational differences between Vietnamese Americans. Le hopes the younger generations can better understand their parents’ experiences, as older generations may carry unresolved trauma that influences their personalities, attitudes, and actions.

The interview’s primary focus is her work at Jeffrey Allen Gallery, owned by her uncle, where she works and maintains the family temple, which deepens her connection to her heritage and allows her to honor her family’s legacy. Through the temple, she also increases awareness of Vietnamese culture by telling stories to patrons and inviting people to attend Đạo Mẫu/Mother Spirit Practice ceremonies. Le also discusses her current project to showcase her father’s paintings, which emphasize post-war themes and abstract expressions of Vietnamese culture. Throughout the interview, Le expresses a desire for more representation and understanding of Vietnamese culture.

View the institutional page for the Mother Spirit Practice/Vietnamese Cultural Arts Alliance here.

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Transcript

Zoë Maughan: This is Zoë Maughan. It’s December 19, 2023 and I am at Symposium Coffee with Van Le. Thank you so much for joining me, and I’m wondering if you could begin by telling me just a little bit about yourself.
Van Le: Oh my gosh! Where do I start? My name is Van, it’s pronounced like “fun” with a “V.” That’s what I always tell people. Born and raised in Portland, I was born on Northeast Killingsworth to my parents. I’m the third sibling of three. I have my older brother and my older sister, and they were born over a decade before me and to my parents. And my parents came over here in 1975 after the end of the Vietnam War.
ZM: I wonder if you could just tell me a little bit more about your family.
VL: Let’s talk about my mom’s side of the family first—it’s easier. My mom came here in 1975. My mom is one of twelve siblings. My grandparents had twelve kids. My mom was their fourth kid. They left Vietnam on the last day, when it was claimed—I believe April 30th—they were like, “We lost. You either got to go or you’re staying.” So my grandparents’ family on my mom’s side took all twelve of their kids—they had a couple of grandkids already—and they fled onto the last boat. The story goes: My grandpa—most of his sons were in the military, so they were already over in the U.S. The rest were just the girls and the young kids, like the grandkids. He pushed them all onto the boat. He’s a super devoted person to his spiritual practice and he wanted to confirm and make sure he got the OK from the people up above. So he put all of his kids on the boat and he ran back home. He has a little temple-altar [that] he wanted to take with him, but you have to ask permission to do that. You can’t just move it. So he asked the deities with coins—that’s how you ask a yes or no question—and he was totally prepared that if they said no he would just stay. He’d be like, “Nope, my family’s going over there and I’m going to just stay.” But one time he asked and they said, “Yep, take it.” So he grabbed the incense bowl, booked it back to the boat. He had just put his two feet onto the boat and they closed the door. And that was it, they left. There were some people still waiting, and they didn’t make it on. But luckily [my family] all made it and they got to the islands down in Indonesia, in the Philippines. They went to Subic Bay. So from that point, [I’ll] introduce my dad. My dad was a naval captain, and he was at sea when they announced, like, “Yo, we lost. You either boat home or you boat somewhere else.” [He was] on a tiny boat and at the time—he told me—that the U.S. giant naval boats were passing through to pick up the small boats and pick up anybody who wanted to go. It’s a choice, they were like, “Hey, it’s the U.S. boat, we’re here to offer you a ride back to the U.S. but if you don’t want to, you’re welcome to go back to Vietnam.” He hopped on the boat and it was headed to Subic Bay as well. And that’s how my parents ended up meeting each other for the first time. I have a couple of uncles who are—my mom’s brothers—who were also naval captains or in the navy so they all kind of knew each other and [tried] to be familiar with each other.

Eventually they did make it to California in Camp Pendleton. I hear it in the way my mom pronounces it, which is not the way it’s actually said. So they made it there and of course they were stationed there with all the campsites… It’s interesting—my aunt and uncle still talk about people they met from that time, but they don’t refer to them by name, they refer to them by the tent number. Like, “Do you remember aunt from tent number thirty-two? Do you remember the uncle from tent number sixteen? Do you remember that older sister who was from tent four?” That’s how they referred to each other, it’s interesting. Of course that’s how my parents finally were like, “Well, we’ve met each other twice. I guess we should get married.” So that’s kind of how that happened. Oh, no, they had one more meeting. My mom’s whole family—twelve kids, grandkids, grandparents—they got sponsored by a church in Portland, so that’s how they ended up over here. That same church also sponsored my dad.
[5:54]
ZM: Do you know what church it is?
VL: I know I’ve passed by the church. It’s in Northeast Portland. I don’t remember the name.
ZM: That’s OK. I’ve heard from folks that there were lots of Catholic and Lutheran churches that supported folks.
VL: And actually, those church community members, there’s a fun story that hopefully I’ll cycle back to. Once my whole family came to Portland, that was it. They decided, “OK, we’re in Portland, we’re staying here and we’re going to try to start a new life here.”
ZM: Could you tell me where in Vietnam your mom’s and dad’s families are from?
VL: Fun fact: My grandparents are actually from the North. This is kind of important amongst Vietnamese people because accent means a lot. My grandparents have a northern accent, they’re from the North. They moved to the South in ‘35 because of war and unrest and such things. And then my mom was born in the South, and all twelve of their kids were born in the South. So all of my aunts and uncles have a southern accent. And that’s from Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, that's where they left [for] Subic Bay. My grandparents’ last house is in Saigon. My dad’s side of the family—he’s from Hue, which is this center region of Vietnam. He was born in ‘41, so he was actually alive during the last imperial dynasty of Vietnam, right before they ended [it]. His backstory is [that] before he was a naval captain, he was an artist. He’s still an artist. He is an artist. And he went to art school in Hue, and got his college degree in Fine Arts. His professors were related to or worked with imperial palace painters, so that style of imperial painting. That’s actually incorporated into my dad’s own work. The way that he paints and his style comes specifically from that.
ZM: Are there organizations, family members, or friends that helped your family establish themselves once in the U.S.? And we talked a little about the church…
VL: Yeah, the church. So the fun story with that is: my family is very friendly and they really enjoyed the community that they had, and they were really well-supported by the church that sponsored them, of course. One of the popular stories that I heard was that, because my dad is an artist, to marry my mom he needed money, right? So he actually painted quite a large oil piece and one of the people from that church bought that painting so that he could marry my mom. That was kind of one of those key moments in his life. I think that gentleman—I can never remember his name—my mom still remembers him, and he remembers my dad. But since then, my dad had passed in 2014.
ZM: I’m sorry. [Are there] any other organizations, family members, friends, that helped establish?
VL: I think the other things that supported my family… I know that, of course, after coming here, because my dad was associated with the military, there’s a huge Vietnamese veteran community of the folks that came over here that were in the war. They have a big community and big events held in California and up in Seattle and they would both attend those. My siblings didn’t go to Vietnamese school, but by the time I was eleven [or] twelve, they started doing Vietnamese school in Portland and I went to Văn Lang and Lac Hong, so I went to both. But I went to Văn Lang first and that was back where Fubonn is now. It used to be a college, we used to go to classes there. That was a big Vietnamese community thing that I did as a kid. I did that until I was in eighth grade. I met a lot of my Vietnamese peers that way, because obviously the school would hold events and such like that. That was kind of my big, “Oh OK, so this is our Vietnamese community.”
[11:11]
ZM: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what it was like for your family to adjust to life in the U.S. Some big points I often ask about are language, and then—also with Portland specifically—the climate, the weather. Because I know some folks came in the winter and it was like, “Oh my goodness!” So I’m just curious about what adjusting was like for them.
VL: That’s funny, that’s a great question. It suddenly just brought up memories—there’s a couple of photographs—back then they had albums of just photographs from the 70’s and 80’s. There’s this really great set of photos where all my aunts and uncles are still young, they are in their 20’s, right? And they are on Mount Hood and it’s snowing, and they are so not dressed correctly. They didn’t know how to dress for the snow! They’re like, “Well, jeans. As long as it’s shoes it should be fine?” They had no idea and they were so cold, but they wanted to dress up so bad[ly] because they had never seen such a thing. It was super magnificent to them.
My mom liked the cooler weather. My mom’s name is Thu; it means ‘autumn,’ so she loves the crisp air. She liked the fresh air of Portland. After a while some of my aunts and uncles that did come to Portland first, they did end up moving to San Jose, so I do have a portion of them that did move to California. But my parents decided to stay. I think it was PCC (Portland Community College) that was offering education to teach English to everyone who immigrated here—and my mom, she was more acclimated to this type of weather and she [wanted] to stay. She was learning English pretty well and she found a job here and everything like that. My dad—so, funny story: I didn’t know my dad’s real birthday until he passed away. I learned that when he came over here—and this is true for a lot of immigrants, they faked their age. For him specifically, he was born in 1941, so by ‘75 he was already in his late 30’s. And I believe the program at the time had an age cap. So he was like, “Well, then I was born in 1948 or ‘49.” On his paperwork he was born in 1949 so that he could go to school. That was a big thing. For him, because he’s an artist too, English—he could never really grasp well, and this goes into him as an artist. Communication was really, really difficult. He couldn’t really grip how to enunciate the words very well and didn’t feel very confident about it. So a lot of times he didn’t really like to interact with people. He loves to interact with people but it’s not going to be with language. But he was the most friendly man you’ll ever meet. He’s always wanting to have a beer with someone, that’s his favorite.
ZM: It sounds like he was really connecting in other ways.
[15:00]
VL: Oh absolutely! Everyone loves him! They couldn’t understand him but everyone loves him. Because my whole family on my mom’s side was here and he was by himself they all spoke a southern accent. And he has a really thick central accent. I had cousins growing up who were like, “I love your dad but I can’t understand what he’s saying to me.” It was interesting, having the extra layer of a little bit of difficulty where not only is his language not as prevalent in the Vietnamese community but he also had a hard time gripping onto English. Those were some difficulties. Obviously they managed, but my mom was pretty much pulling the weight of taking care of the family and everything like that. My dad eventually did get a job, but during the big layoffs in the 2000s, did end up getting laid off. And so that was some times and experiences I remember with him.
ZM: Now shifting to you a little bit, I’m wondering if you could tell me just a little bit about your childhood, whatever you would like to share. And if you want to talk a little bit about the neighborhoods you grew up in.
VL: I was born on Northeast Killingsworth, but I moved when I was three so I have really no memory of it. But by that time, my siblings were in their teens. They resonated with Northeast Portland. They grew up there. My whole childhood was in Beaverton, that area near Rock Creek. I moved there in 1998, so I was five. They had just built neighborhoods, it was a brand new suburb. My mom was super excited to buy a house, I think because they had experiences in Northeast Portland that [weren’t] great. So she really wanted to look forward to a brand new suburb and brand new housing and a good school. My siblings grew up moving a lot, [but] I pretty much stayed in that same house. We still have that house. That’s where my mom lives now, still. My whole childhood was really painted by that neighborhood. A lot of the friends I grew up [with] there, I’m still friends with them. I’m actually seeing them for the holidays this year. There’s quite a few Asian communities in that area and so I got into that clique really fast with all the Asian kids. Not only that but with Vietnamese schooling, they had eventually opened up, I believe Lac Hong, which is the one near Rock Creek. I ended up going there for a few years, learning Vietnamese.
ZM: I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you went to school and your experiences that stand out.
VL: I didn’t really think I had much of an unusual experience of elementary, middle school, high school. I stayed in the same school district. I grew up with everybody there. I had a really well-rounded—I was really academically over-achieving, as many of my other friends were as well. It was a lot of [those] competitive extracurriculars, like, “Why? Why are we doing this?” I definitely had that experience and had that kind of family upbringing, too. My parents were super into like, “You gotta go to school!” Not only that but out of my three siblings, I was the most academically motivated [to] which my parents were like, “Yes. Good.” Because my siblings—I love them, and they would laugh about this—but they were notoriously difficult when they were younger and my mom was like, “Oh no, I don’t know if Van will be… ” but I just wanted to be first place in everything. And so she really pushed me to take a lot of classes and go to school a lot and everything like that. So by the time I graduated high school, I really wanted to go out of state. I was like, “Whoa! The world’s big out there!” I was really on this ten-year passion of wanting to be an architect. I wanted to learn architecture in a bigger city. I ended up deciding on Udub (University of Washington), in Seattle. So I went to the University of Washington and my dad was [a] huge advocate for me going to school. Both of them were. They kept pushing, “If you’re going far, that’s fine. Just make sure you keep pushing, and make sure you finish all your classes.”
At that point, the biggest pivot in my life was winter of my senior year. That was the year my dad passed. It was very sudden. It was just kind of out of the blue. I think one of the last phone calls he had to me was like, “I hope you’re doing well in school! Stick to it, don’t give up!” That was a really hard year because I was really motivated to go to school to make him proud, so I was sad that he didn’t get to go to my graduation.
[20:42]
But that being said, by the time I graduated college, my brother and sister had their own house. My brother had his own family. I was like, “Well, I don’t really want to leave my mom by herself in this big old house, so I’ll move back with mom.” I lived with her for a few years after that, up until the pandemic.
ZM: You have spoken to this a little bit, but I’ll ask it, should you want to add more. Growing up in Portland, did you feel connected to the Vietnamese community here, and why or why not?
VL: A lot of my friends that I grew up with, most of them were Chinese, some of them were Vietnamese, some of them were half Vietnamese. I felt like, out of that group of friends—me by a long shot—I spoke the language a lot more, I comprehended it a lot more. That was actually just the nature of growing up with my parents. My dad didn’t speak any English so if I wanted to communicate with him, I had to speak in Vietnamese. Not only that, but he was a big advocate of teaching me how to read, write, and be able to speak it. So he encouraged that in me at a young age. I didn’t see a whole lot of that same passion out of a lot of my Asian friends that I grew up with, for any of their languages, whether it be Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese. But I think it didn’t hit me until high school and then to college, that I realized [that] even though I went to Vietnamese school and everything like that, the big two are always Chinese and Japanese. That goes even into how you get discriminated against, they’re just like, “Oh, are you Japanese or Chinese?” I’m like, “Surprise! There’s other Asian countries too! But joke’s on you, I'm American!” I started to feel like I grew up with that Vietnamese community, but I didn’t ever really feel like we were strongly motivated to stick with each other. There wasn’t the, “Oh yeah, we represent the Vietnamese community.” They were like, “Oh yeah, I learned Vietnamese, you learned Vietnamese. Cool story. Live your life. We have other things we’re really passionate about.” So I don’t really feel like that really resonated with me very much until later on in my life. That was probably the last four years, and that has to do with the temple.
ZM: This is another one you have spoken to, but just in case there is more. As a child, who encouraged you to learn about Vietnamese language, culture, and tradition and how was that encouraged?
VL: Oh yeah. My dad. Big time. Because a lot of his paintings had to do with Vietnamese culture, his biggest thing and narrative through all of his paintings was [that] he wanted to represent that Vietnamese people are their own people. Because a lot of times the misconception is—cause it’s a very tiny country compared to other Asian countries right next door—he felt like people were like, “You’re basically Chinese but you speak a different language. But you’re basically Chinese.” Like, oh, no! No, no, no. That’s like if you said you’re basically Italian even though you're French. That’s not right. But it’s hard to give people that context when there’s just not that much representation. His whole body of work—these oil paintings take him years per painting, and the longest ones were like, ten years of painting. They all talk about the origins of Vietnamese culture. We have so much that is just Vietnamese. You can’t find it in any other country, we are Vietnamese people, and what that really means. He wanted so badly to convey to people that: No, we are our own people. We have something to be proud of. We do not come from anywhere else but our homeland. And he wanted to share that with the community, with the world. Because that was his strong passion, he always encouraged that for me. It was never directly, but he always talked about [how] there are these beautiful Vietnamese dresses. Someday you should get one when you grow up. We’ll wear them and then we’ll display the paintings and you can wear that dress. These traditional dresses that he loved, you don’t really see them anymore. Things like that that I remember the most about him, and [I was] definitely influenced by him.
[25:57]
My mom, the only thing about her that I remember really encouraging me for the culture and community was food. She used to run a restaurant way, way back when, before I was born, in Portland. [ZM: Do you know what it was called?] I know what it is now, but I don’t know what she called it before. It’s called Utopia and it’s on 82nd. That used to be her old restaurant. She’s a huge stickler about food. People ask me, friends are like, “You’re in Portland, what was your best Vietnamese food recommendation?” I’m like, “My mom’s?” And I’d always take her to a different restaurant that was really popular, and be like, “What do you think of the Vietnamese food?” And she’s like, “It’s OK, but it’s not...” She’s a really tough critic. But I remember thinking, “I love the way she cooks. I’m so glad I got to eat that kind of food.” It definitely allowed me to appreciate… Me and my siblings, this is a tangent, but we always want to talk about how would we be able to capture all the different kinds of Vietnamese foods that there really are? Because when people think of Vietnamese food they’re like “Oh, pho.” And that’s it. But I mean, granted, Japanese food: sushi. Chinese food: dim sum. It’s like the pretty standard one. But I feel like with the Portland Vietnamese community that we grew up with, I’m like “We could do so much more, though. And I think people would be interested.” So there’s fun things from both of them that I grew up with.
ZM: I hear that sentiment a lot: “Where’s the best Vietnamese restaurant?” “My mom’s kitchen.” I remember talking to someone who was like, “It’s this lady at this phone number. Go to her house.”
VL: Me and my siblings always joke: The shadier, the better the food. If it looks sketch, it’s probably delicious.
ZM: The other day I was getting Mexican food and it was like the back of the grocery store. That’s how you know it’s going to be good!
So we’re shifting to college and career now. You talked about going to [University of Washington] and how you decided to go there. And you talked about studying architecture. Can you talk a little bit about your experiences there? Maybe what it was like to leave Portland and live in another city, how the community compares in Seattle?
[28:44]
VL: So the biggest difference I noticed when I went to Seattle was, “Wow, there’s a lot of Asian people here.” And it’s funny, it didn’t really dawn on me until I visited Portland after being in Seattle for a while. I came back and was like, “Hm. That is different. Wow. I didn’t think it would feel that way but it really does.” Because Seattle has such a huge Asian population, and California has such a huge population too, I think Portland is the least diverse out of the spread on the West Coast. In my head I want to have some change there. My trajectory originally was just to stay up in Seattle after college but obviously that’s not what ended up happening. I also realized in Seattle, the biggest community there is the Japanese community. I ended up picking up Japanese martial arts while I was up in Seattle so I still do that. In the international district in Seattle they have this block: Chinese food. This block: Japanese. This block: Korean. This block: Vietnamese. I was like, “Well, that’s kind of interesting.” Whereas for us, back then it was just Chinatown. So I appreciated that they had enough to be able to differentiate all of them and that it was meaningful. I also, for the first time, going to college, encountered international students. Totally different ball game. I remember meeting international Vietnamese students for the first time. And it makes sense, the reason why they’re there: Totally different. The time period that they’re there: Totally different. Just their motivations, everything, it was really a different ball game. Actually the closest friends I made when I was in college were a few Chinese international students, and they talked to me about the weirdness about coming to America, and their perspective. She was talking about how sometimes, not all of them, some of them go over there just to study in America just because they can put that on their paperwork like, “Yes I went to a university in the U.S. Big deal. I can get a better job back home.” Meeting other Vietnamese international students, they didn't really want anything to do with me or anybody who’s from here. To them, you’re an American. You are an American. There’s really nothing to connect with on that level, which is interesting because you kind of feel like, “Oh wow.” Because it’s kind of funny. You try to adopt this, “OK, I’m a Vietnamese person. My parents are Vietnamese, I’m really proud of that.” But in the face of that, of somebody who was born and raised in Vietnam post-75, you’re an American. You’re just as interesting to them as any other white person. I was like, “Wow, this is weird. That is weird. OK.” Me and my family had talked about this: Everybody who came here in ‘75 is a time capsule, and the Vietnamese that we learned growing up here is very different than the Vietnamese over there. And so modern words that we don’t think about: computer, Wifi, mobile, messenger, text. All the things that came with technology, we don’t say those words. My mom has her iPhone in English, because if it were in Vietnamese she doesn’t understand what it’s trying to ask for, where it’s like login, password, passcode. She doesn’t know. She knows what they are in English. She’s like “It’s a password, I know what that is.” But if I told her what the actual translation for that is in Vietnamese, she has no idea. I think in college it really hit: the difference between [being] born and raised in Vietnam post-75 versus being a Vietnamese immigrant, which is a very, very different thing. So I asked myself what really resonates with me more. When you say you’re a Vietnamese person, are you talking about the country of Vietnam, or are you talking about the folks that left? I feel like, the more that I sit with it, the folks that came here because they had to. Which affects a lot of my perspective on that. They were fine and nice people but it was just an interesting meeting, experience especially.
ZM: Yeah, the idea of the time capsule is very interesting.
VL: The Vietnamese has changed and, as my uncle put it, everything that they learned, they took it with them. So the people back home don’t all learn the same thing. There’s also, even more interestingly enough that I notice, as they’ve been here for almost fifty years now, there’s a lot of Western ideology that they’ve translated and can understand in Vietnamese. That when I talk to someone from Vietnam it’s a little bit more foreign, they’re like, “I don’t understand that etiquette, why would you do it that way?” Well, you know in English when you sneeze you say ‘excuse me.’ My mom had to learn about that. She’s like, “I just sneezed, what’s the problem?” Everybody looks at her, shocked. Tiny examples of that. When my parents go back to Vietnam, it’s a whole other ball game, they’re like, “I don’t understand what they’re talking about. Do you understand? I don’t know what they’re saying.” And I’m looking at them like, “If you don’t know, I most definitely don’t know.” So it’s kind of an alienation from that.
[35:20]
ZM: I was going to ask you a bit about if your family has gone back and visited and what that experience has been like.
VL: We’ve been back multiple times. I’ve been back maybe about three, or four times now. And the first time I was really small. I was a baby. I was just three, maybe two, so not that much memory about that. It was because my grandma on my dad’s side was passing away, so I got to see her. His family is really interesting. I guess we’ll go back to that. My dad came here by himself, so when we went back to Vietnam we always made it a point to visit Hue because that’s where my dad’s family all is. My mom is the fourth kid [of] twelve kids. She was born in 1951, so she’s considered the older sister to most of those kids. My dad was born in 1941, ten years older, [and] is the youngest kid of five kids, so my cousins over there are as old as my aunts and uncles over here. In Vietnamese you never address somebody as “you,” you always address them by their relationship relative to you. They’re either your older sister, your older brother, your uncle, your great-older uncle, or grandma. They’re all in perspective. So I’ve mistakenly called my cousins in Vietnam “aunt” or “uncle” and they look at me and they’re like, “Yo, I’m not that old.” Like, “Well you are, but OK I understand what you mean. I get it, your parent is my dad’s sibling.” There’s kind of a hard jump. But yeah, we have visited Vietnam before. Visiting Saigon, I can understand the most when I go back there but it feels very alienating because all of the food and culture that we made for ourselves in Portland has been transforming in Vietnam. Like street food: totally different thing.
I have a best friend over in Vietnam and she loves talking to me because she’s like, “You’re like an eight year old. You talk really simply. I know what you’re saying, but it’s really…” I can’t say “phone”, I’ll have to be like, “You know, the calculator that you use to call people.” That’s how I talk to her. She’s like, “Oh you mean this?” I’m like, “Don’t make fun of me. You know what I’m trying to say.” Because Vietnamese is such a tonal language there’s a lot of things that sound like other things. And I know enough Vietnamese but barely just enough. They’re talking really quick, and there’s so [much] slang that you don’t learn here. Of course not. We have Vietnamese slang over here, but it's totally different over there. And they have jokes that I’m like, “I don’t get what that joke means at all.” And my friend’s like, “It’s hard to explain. Don’t worry about it.” It’s so weird to hear this language that I grew up with being used in a way I didn’t even know you could use it. That’s one thing.
Second thing: the food. Things that are like snacks or like traditional foods that I grew up with over there—because they’re young, too—they come up with all sorts of interesting stuff. Like the rice paper they use for spring rolls over here—if you don’t put it in water, you can break it up, turn it into chips, mix it up with salt and pepper and chili and lime—and that’s their flavored chips. She’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s my favorite snack!” I'm like, “I never would have even thought to do that.” Those are some little things that are interesting.
I definitely can feel how limited my Vietnamese is every time I go over there. My family can feel it when they go over there. Technology is one thing, but even just how we refer to things is different in 2020 than it would be in 1980, right? Your stove top is now different. The mechanisms, the types of pots, the types of tools that you use. The vocabulary for my parents stopped, but their vocabulary is still changing. And things that you would never even think to refer to before, like [a] credit card holder. And they're like, “A what?” And they’re like, “Yeah, you know, this thing.” And they’re like, “Oh. I didn’t know that’s what you would call that. That’s very strange.” So I think for them it’s also really difficult, too.
[40:02]
ZM: I’ve heard a lot about the language and vocabulary shifting post-1975. The government, too. Just some—I don’t know if this is the right word—but enforced language changes or influence.
VL: Oh yes, yes. I can only imagine what words are more—I mean I’m talking about just layman’s terms and stuff—but documents, governmental papers, the way news is talked about. Whenever I hear a news anchor talk I’m like, “I have no idea what they just said.” And my mom would translate for me. She would translate Vietnamese for me. That was the most interesting thing, because it’s a totally different thing when you have official language versus just me and you talking. I can get away with casually talking to someone, but I am totally lost when it comes to formal [conversations].
ZM: Back to college, just for a second. I know it’s especially prevalent in Seattle, but did you participate in any Vietnamese student associations? I know UNAVSA (Union of North American Vietnamese Student Associations) is really big too, so I’m curious if you experienced any of that.
VL: I did not.
ZM: Let’s shift to talk a little bit about your professional life and trajectory. If you want to talk about your path that led you to working at the gallery. I’m excited to dive in!
VL: After I graduated from architecture school [ZM: What year was that?] I graduated in 2015. Then I came back to Portland. And I was like, “It’s fine. I’ll just look for an architecture firm in Portland.” While I was applying that summer, my uncle was like, “Why don’t you work for me for a while? Because it’ll be easier to find a job if you have a job already. It’s hard for people to hire you when you have no work experience.” I had pretty much just straight schooling. I did not do any other side jobs when I was in college. So I was like, “OK, yeah sure.” So I worked at my uncle’s shop. I grew up with his shop. He opened his business in 1998 so around the time when I was born—my whole life. I remember walking through the store and I just remember that he has a lot of beautiful pots and furniture and plants. At the time, I just liked to wander around and move things. That was all I liked to do when I was a kid.
As I grew older I always ended up visiting the shop because my grandparents—we’re talking about school but I’ll come back to that… while Van is in school, meanwhile my grandparents—remember that incense story I told you with my grandpa? When he brought that incense to the U.S., he put it up in his first Portland home. He had an attic, so he made the attic into an altar. He put the incense bowl there. It was really cute. They didn’t have statues so they would turn toys into statues. They would turn little dolls and dress them up like deities to make it work. It’s so endearing. Then he moved to San Jose. My grandparents both moved to San Jose and they turned their living room into this temple. Then my grandparents got old and they wanted to be closer to the kids. Most of the kids are in Portland still, so they moved back to Portland. My grandparents ended up moving into my parents’ house. That temple of theirs got moved into my uncle’s second shop. The second shop was on Dartmouth, right off here next to Winco. They were there for, like, fifteen years. He had shifted one of the rooms to accommodate a temple. That was the first iteration of that temple.
[43:58]
Because the temple was in his store, every time I came back from school I would always be there because my mom would be like, “You’ve got to help your uncle out. We’ve got to take care of the temple.” I’m like, “OK, sure.” At the time, I didn’t have any super strong spiritual beliefs. I was like, “Yeah, I’m Buddhist. I’ll answer that question. Checkmark. Buddhist.” But that’s about as far as I went when I was in high school. In high school I saw the temple at the old shop. I went to college, I would visit it all the time, help out. It wasn’t until my last couple of years of high school that I started taking time to really understand what that temple was about. I knew it, I grew up with it, but it was always my grandparents’ thing. My mom was like, “It’s really important.” OK, well I’ll do it because it’s important to her, but does it really have a strong relationship to me? Not quite. I was starting to want to build that relationship. I went to college, all that. I came back and then I worked at the shop, which is right down the street now. There’s a temple in there too. My grandparents, when she passed away, that temple was given to my Uncle Allen. My youngest uncle. So out of the twelve kids, this is the youngest relative. My mom’s youngest brother. When he bought this building here on Main Street he had the opportunity to renovate it, to be the size that he wanted. He had the chance to make a temple the size that… is like a temple! [ZM: An intentional space.] Yeah, not trying to jerry-rig a living room into a temple. He actually had the time to make it the right size. So he decided to take that opportunity and now the temple in the shop is as big as an average temple in Vietnam. So it’s about that big.
Since then, from the time I was a junior in high school until now—I’m thirty now—I have a much stronger understanding about what that temple really is and what it really was about. Because of that, when I went to start to work for him, I was working right next to the temple, too. So I said, “OK, I might as well take care of the temple while I’m working.” I started applying for architecture jobs in Portland hoping that they would reject me so I wouldn’t have to work there and I would just work here. And I’m like, “This is probably not smart. If you’re applying for a job and hoping that they won’t accept you, you probably shouldn’t apply for the job.” I was like, “You know what? I’m just going to dedicate my time to the shop.”
It was not just a temple, but it was the kind of retail environment. I love to talk to people—I don’t know if you’ve noticed—I love to tell stories. I love to connect. Basically the shop was like, “Let me tell you a story,” and share some happiness with you, then you can take that happiness home. And hopefully I get paid. I was like, “This is more what I really, really want.” If I had to describe a dream job of mine as a younger person, it was kind of in that line. That told me definitively, “I think you want to stay.” And I talked to my uncle about it, the more years passed, he was like, “What are you going to do with your dad’s paintings?” And I said, “I guess we haven’t really thought about it since he passed.” “Well, he wants to put them in a gallery. This is a gallery.” So we have a couple of my dad’s pieces in the store, too. By that point I was like, “Oh, now this is it.” If my dreams can be accomplished, this shop will be a point for me to accomplish my dreams. Then it started to become more like, “This is my shop.” At this point now, in the last couple of years it’s been trying to think about, “What is my uncle’s exit strategy, and how am I going to transform what he’s left with me—the shop—into Van’s dream?” That’s now the trajectory with that. In there is included this whole temple and this whole thing about my dad’s paintings. Now we’re like, “Everything is coming to a point.”
ZM: I wonder if you could share just a bit more about your father’s paintings and the meanings. I’m also curious [about] where they were prior. Were they at home?
[49:09]
VL: My dad started his paintings the moment he landed in Portland. He’s like, “I’m going to paint.” Because he’s an artist, so he’s going to paint. It’s cool, you can see his earliest paintings dated 1979, 1975. If you had chronologically lined up all of his paintings, there’s only twenty-two of them. There aren’t very many. He painted at home. My brother and my sister would say his first place where he painted, he painted in the basement. And when my parents moved into the suburb house out in Beaverton, his canvases were so large that they wouldn’t fit in the living room, so he put them in the master bathroom because it had the tallest ceilings in the house. At one point, after he finished one of those paintings, his studio was basically in the garage. The garage had been turned into his studio space. So I grew up with these gigantic [paintings]. He didn’t paint tiny. Everything was at least three feet wide and at least four feet tall. That was his smallest canvas, so everything was massive, and every inch of wall had my dad’s painting on it. So there [were] no photographs of family, we had no room for that. My mom was like, “In this house? Where would it go?” So everything was covered in my dad’s paintings. After he passed, they had stayed in my mom’s house. They had never been featured anywhere. He does have newspaper clippings where people have actually featured his paintings before in public. I wish I could look back on those again, but in my living memory I don’t recall them ever leaving the house, they’ve always just been in there.
And now, this gallery has been here for seven years. He passed in 2014, so probably by around 2016, my uncle was like, “Hey, you want to move your dad’s paintings into the shop?” The theme of his work, especially the earlier ones, is very much post-war. They’re really, really sad. They’re just, like, people escaping the country. It’s war paintings. [ZM: Right, how do you process that?] You could tell if you lined up his paintings what he’s processing. Earlier works: a lot of post-war. But then later on, as he hit the late ‘90s, he started painting more abstracts, and then his own stories, and then Vietnam culture. That was the peak of it, and the last phase of his work was more abstracts. So from the ‘90s to now, those are the works that we typically have in the shop. There’s only seven of them right now in the store. This is a project I talked to you about earlier, but me and my siblings are trying to come up with a way to showcase all of them in one spot like he dreamed of and have that be ready for people to see, because that’s his dream.
ZM: So, going right on that track, the next question is: Could you talk a little more about the family temple, and your and your family’s desire to share it?
VL: This takes a little bit of spiritual philosophy. Whenever people ask me, “What’s your spiritual practice?” I’m like, “Buddhist” and I move on, but to say I’m actually Buddhist is incorrect, it’s not quite accurate. Everybody in this practice is Buddhist, but not every Buddhist practices. Hopefully that makes sense. The temple is in the shop and people have seen it and they will ask me about it. And usually the nutshell response is: Buddha talks about your lifetime and that you’ll reincarnate many times until you become Buddha. Everyone can become Buddha. Buddha is like a title, it’s like getting a PhD in life, I guess. These folks, they talk about here and now. They talk about “Are you well? Are you good? Are you good financially? Are you good health-wise? Are your kids healthy? Are they going to school? Are you taking care of your parents? How’s your job? Taxes?” Things that are more like, “Today, I have to deal with it today.” Buddha doesn’t worry about those types of things. So the philosophy is: If you think about every day, every step, every action that you make as an opportunity for you to be one step closer to the bigger picture of enlightenment. That’s the relationship between the two. The practice is called Đạo Mẫu. D-A-O M-AU. Đạo means “religious practice.” Mẫu means “mother” and “god” at the same time. So this Đạo Mẫu has recently been officiated by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 2017 as a cultural religious heritage practice of Vietnam. UNESCO, while they were researching across the world religious practices that had women as the main deity in the paradigm, and this one checked in. Basically that’s the historical background of this.
[55:09]
My grandma and grandparents had this way back when in Vietnam, when they were in Northern Vietnam. They carried [it] with them when they moved to Southern Vietnam and now over to the U.S. Most of these types of temples are connected to families. They’re not really public places. If you ever visit Vietnam, which I hope you do, there are definitely public versions of this temple that are massive. Huge. But, a lot more common[ly] than not, it’s small. They’re small in people’s homes or they buy a separate property just to have for a temple. It’s a really private type of thing. One of the main signs in front of our temple says “The Mother of All Beings”—that says all beings. Not just Vietnamese people. Literally the mother of all beings.
When my grandparents died, my uncle inherited the temple. So it is with his philosophy, his background, and his knowledge of the practice, and watching my grandparents, trying to recreate everything that he can from memory, because that practice, back in Vietnam, after ‘75, it was closed. Nobody practices this. It’s banned. The Communist Party thinks this is “pooh-pooh.” Don’t do it. So everybody who [are] my parents’ generation didn’t say anything about it. People after them are now just starting to see it re-open up and they’re trying to make sense of it. They’re like, “Wait, what is this part? Do you remember? I don’t remember that song. What did this part mean?” Nothing is written that we have record of. Everything that was written about it, actually, funnily enough, is in France. Because remember when the French were in Vietnam? So they took it with them! They have a lot of the original text and there’s actually some footage of Vietnamese practitioners in France who practice too.
Really simply, Đạo Mẫu is also a Vietnamese shamanistic practice, so there’s channeling involved, and it falls under the umbrella of Buddhism. Anyway, so my family, as it’s been super meaningful to us, and because it is in a public space in the shop, we do end up having people come in and just enjoying or participating. One of my closest [friends]—I call him my adopted brother—I have a friend I made practicing kendo in Portland, who then I hired to water plants at the shop. I didn’t really care for him much, and I thought he would probably just run away after the summer job was over, he got introduced to the temple, and now he is on a plane to Vietnam as we speak. He’s my adopted brother in the temple. Basically, the temple has now become really special, not just to us, but has been recognized by communities in Vietnam as like, “Oh, there’s Americans participating in this practice. So what does that mean?” It’s a cultural heritage practice; all of the songs and words, they’re all in Vietnamese, only in Vietnamese. So it's interesting to see it grow and be shared. Speaking of sharing, my family, at the core I think—at least from my experience with my uncle, he wants to share [the] same thing [as] my dad: This is Vietnamese. Straight up. It’s not derived from any Chinese philosophy. This is 100%—it’s older to Vietnam than Buddhism. It is very important to our heritage and our culture. He wants to share that with Vietnamese people who are here because, actually, a lot of the philosophy in that practice is in the U.S. It’s not back in Vietnam, because, like I said, for a long time no one talked about it. And a lot of the types of practices and philosophies of the practice are very democratic. There’s a lot of that as well. More than anything, I don’t think we’d like to… “expand our community” is not the correct word. We would just like to share it with people, to show them, “Hey, if you want to see something that’s Vietnamese, really just Vietnamese, check it out.” [ZM: Just increasing awareness.] Oh yeah, because the practice itself amongst the Vietnamese community is very small, so if you talk to any average Vietnamese person in Portland who came in ‘75, they’ll be like “Đạo Mẫu? I kind of… maybe… recall as a kid, maybe hearing about it? But I don’t know much about it.” Most Vietnamese people are in two places: they’re either Catholic or Buddhist. Đạo Mẫu is an even smaller sliver in that, so it’s very small. It can be very niche.
[1:00:17]
ZM: Do you want to talk about that in the context of the 50th anniversary approaching?
VL: Oh my gosh. OK. So as the 50th year anniversary is approaching… this is not the first time we’ve tried to debut my dad’s work in a gallery. We had thought about it the moment he passed. We had thought about it before he passed. We were like, “How do we get his work out there?” The biggest rut we would run into is every gallery wants to know who you are: “Why should we care about you? What’s your backstory? Why do we need to feature your work?” His work is… amazing. They’re grandiose. It is not short of masterpieces, but to the art community, [he’s] a nobody. So, “Why would I show these giant pieces from someone no one cares about?” is basically what we’re getting. And we’re like, “This is really hard and frustrating.” We were trying to figure out what would be a relevant way to showcase him.
So, as the 50th year anniversary approached—well, before we even realized that we were like, “How could we get the Portland Art Museum to care about this Vietnamese guy that no one knows about?” You have to make it relevant to the public in some way so that they would feel a desire or a demand to even have him. We were like, “Wait, does the Portland community care about the Vietnamese immigrants that moved here? Because we’ve been here for almost 50 years.” So earlier this year, one of the things we were tasked with is trying to get a feel for the pulse of “Do the Vietnamese people, like us, even care about 50 years coming up? Do Portland public places even care?” You talk about the Asian Art Council, you talk about Asian communities, but most of them are like, “We have something lined up for Chinese Lunar New Year, we have something for Japan’s events,” but there’s crickets when it comes to Vietnamese. [They say] “You guys also celebrate new year, so you’ll just fit into this!” [ZM: “We’ll just throw you in!”] Yeah, “It’s you guys, too!” and it’s like, “This is not what we wanted.”
So we were like, “OK, what defines Vietnamese people here?” 1975. That’s the big defining factor. That was the huge push to how most of us got here. But when you talk to people my mom’s age and everyone who came here, they’re like, “We don’t talk about that year.” Because to them, that was the saddest day. You leave everything behind, you go to some place you’ve never been before, you can’t speak the language. It’s terrifying. So [when] they look back on that day they’re like, “Let’s just not talk about it. Let’s not think about it. Just be grateful we made it this far. We don’t [have] to do that.” But me and my siblings were like, “Well, if we connected my dad’s paintings to that, we’re like ‘Hey Portland, if you feel like the Vietnamese community is important, then you can also recognize that 50 years ago, that’s where most of us came from and have been a part of your community, [then] advocate for this incredible painter who is Portland native, he’s been here his whole life, and he painted all of his paintings right here in Portland, and he came from Vietnam, and he came here in ‘75.’ Now we have a relevant point, like, ‘Oh. It’s been 50 years.’ Now there’s a reason to say, ‘Hey, Portland Art Museum, if you think that this community is important, this would be a great stepping stone for you to showcase this.’”
Unfortunately they have their galleries booked out through 2025, so we’re like, “Whatever.” But that doesn’t mean that we give up on that. OK fine, if you don’t want to showcase this work, that’s fine, but at least we have this meaningful way to showcase his work in any other gallery. Because it is really hard to say, “Hey this guy’s awesome! You should check it out!” Instead of being like, “Hey, Vietnamese people, they’ve been here in Portland. You haven’t heard about it, I haven’t heard about it. Let’s change it. Let's showcase somebody who’s from there.” To look at that time as not the saddest day in history for Vietnamese people, but the day [they] started a new chapter, because, from that era, me, all of the people that were born from the folks that came here in ‘75, we're doing well! Going to school, getting jobs, careers, incredible businesses started from those people that came here. And, funnily enough, the people that are in Vietnam are trying to get over here now, to be associated with a country that at the time they were like, “We’re enemies.” It’s such an interesting shift in perspective. More importantly than that, more selfishly than that, we just want our dad’s work to be shown out there. If it takes having something relevant to the public to do it, then alright let’s do it. But the big thing is trying to feel if people care about it. That’s why this project was so interesting to me.
[1:06:09]
ZM: It’s interesting—I hear this pattern a lot of second and third gen(eration) folks being like, “You know what? Our parents weren’t ready to talk about this and now we are. We’re ready to reckon with that.” So it’s really interesting to see how that shift has happened.
VL: And it’s such a wild thing to think that the generation after would want to talk about the generation before. Because the generation before is like, “We don’t say—We don’t look at it. I don’t want to think about it.” But I think, especially because we’re born into a diverse country, America is pretty diverse and Portland is a diverse community amongst other Asians. You’re like, “I wish I had a celebration that was Vietnamese every year,” but we just kind of ride on the coattails of other celebrations for other Asian communities. But there’s other cool stuff. I feel like because of the temple I have the opportunity to talk to other Vietnamese people of that generation who are like, “You don’t know. Back in my day, this is what it was about. This is what we were about. This is what we were like.”And I’m like, “Why don’t you tell that to other people?” But for me anyway that’s how I would like to share the temple. Just to have something to celebrate that’s just straight up Vietnamese. Everyone’s invited, but the folks that are Vietnamese—this is from your people.
ZM: The next question I think we talked about. It was just kind of goals for the future for you but I feel like we kind of covered that. I don’t know if you have any more to speak to that. Then the next one is if you could talk a little bit about what a day in the life is like for you.
VL: Oh my goodness. A day in the life of me? I think we talked about it before but I did end up buying a house out in Northeast Portland which is so funny because I never grew up there and I have no idea… But my brother bought a house out there and he’s right down the street from me. It’s special to me to be able to talk to him and have him tell me about, “Oh yeah, when I was a kid we walked around here, and then there was this dentist place that had this train on a train track that would go up above on the ceiling. It was really cool.” Just to have him recount his childhood. I remember going with my mom and she would drive me all the way over to Northeast Portland to go grocery shopping because all the Vietnamese grocery stores are there. And I remember her talking to the lady at the front being like, “Hey, how are your kids?” and “Oh, I’m good! How are your kids? And it’s good to see you Van! Do you want a piece of candy? You can just take some off the shelf!” I remember that experience and I remember thinking it’s so nice how everyone out here has this sense of community. But when I go back home to the suburbs, it’s pretty quiet. There’s not really that same sense.
So when I bought my house I was kind of excited. I wanted to invite my mom over to experience this neighborhood that she remembers growing up in. It’s funny, she knows all the roads better than I do. She’s like, “You just turn onto Halsey, and then you go onto Glisan.” I’m like “Wait, where’s Glisan? Let me just Google Map it.” So that’s been really meaningful.
[1:09:25]
So I have my house, and the shop is basically—I’m the apprentice to it. So it’s my responsibility. As much as I love my house, I’m rarely at home. I’m always over here in Tigard. I work about five to six days a week. And not only that but that temple, we have ceremonial celebrations there, and they happen like two times a month, sometimes three times a month. If we’re really fortunate, four times a month. I call myself the chairman of ceremonies. I’m the director of: “This needs to happen. These need to go there. We need to ask this person to help set up.”And it’s all voluntary. My family are the main folks that help there so I see my family all the time. I see my aunts and uncles more times than my cousins see their parents. They’re like, “Were you out at the shop with my mom?” And I’m like, “Yeah I was. We were talking about you.” So I spend a lot of time with them in my work and my day-to-day. My day job is just selling dreams. People are like, “I do want something beautiful but I don’t know.” And I’m like, “Let me tell you a story. This is why this thing is for you.” And then finally at the end of the day, as you know, it took a long time from our initial conversation to get to this point: It’s between the temple and the shop and the house and trying to be social. I just started a serious relationship a year and a half ago, so I’m trying to maintain that and get them on board with the whole [thing]. And balancing all that with my extracurriculars. Kendo: I still practice that.
I can recap yesterday: I woke up. I went to work. Finished work at 6:30. Drove down to Northeast Portland to go to Kendo practice from seven to nine o’clock. Get home, and just do it all the next day. For maybe four or five days out of the week I’m home at like eight, nine [at night]. It takes a lot: The projects for my dad’s work. We started meeting with people once a week for that, and now it’s every Wednesday. Right after work I’ve got to go to a meeting and talk to them, like, “What’s your dream? What’s your vision? What are we doing?” There's that now. Every day is a big thing. Ceremonies we usually have on the one day the shop is closed. We’re open Monday through Saturday. Sunday we reserve for ceremonies. Sometimes ceremonies creep into the weekdays, so there’s a lot of preparing for that. It takes days to set up for that and take it down. It’s very elaborate.
Sometimes I realize when I sit down in the living room, I’m like, “I think I do a lot. I think I do a lot.” So that’s kind of my daily juggle.
ZM: Can you tell me, just briefly, about the ceremonies?
VL: So I did mention very briefly that Đạo Mẫu is a shamanistic practice so we do channeling in that practice. My uncle, Allen, is the owner of Jeffrey Allen Gallery, that I work at, and that I’m apprentice to, and is also the guardian of the temple. [In] this practice, there are three positions: There’s the guardian—there’s only one: that’s him. Everyone who gets—I guess the proper equivalent would be baptized—basically you’re saying, “Hey, I like this practice. I would like to uphold the philosophies of this practice. I would like to be initiated at this temple.” So those people are called pillars. Why? Because we hold up the temple. Simple English, right? It’s kind of interesting because these are words we have come up with in English because they’re all Vietnamese words. Then there are chairs. We call them chairs because we sit in regular chairs, deities sit in us. In order for them to do work we become their chair. That’s literally what we say in Vietnamese too: ghế của ngài. “Ghế” is chair, “của ngài”: of a deity. “Chair of a deity.” There are only a certain number of people who chair in our temple, and then there’s a larger body of people who are pillars. If you’re a pillar, out of that set of people some people have to chair whether it be karmically, because their family did, because they want to. The reasons may vary but that’s how that happens. During the ceremonies, one chair will be having the ceremony, and they will channel deities the whole day. We start the day at eight AM, getting ready, getting set up. We don’t start chairing until about twelve, and that usually goes all the way until like seven, eight, one time it went til ten. It’s a long day and the person who’s channeling is just one person. There’s no breaks. They just channel the whole time. The people around, that’s the part I have to direct. Because people need shifts. They’re like, “OK I’m here. I can sit for four hours, then I’ve got to get lunch, and then I’ve got to come back.”
[1:15:32]
There’s many, many, many deities. A person can channel up to fifteen, sixteen deities a time. Some people just channel a little bit. In my family, my grandparents both channeled, or chaired. Out of their kids: my mom chairs, an uncle in San Jose chairs, and two more of my uncles in Portland chair, and of course, Allen chairs. Out of those people’s kids: my sister chairs, I chair, one of my cousins chairs, and his daughter has been initiated to chair in a couple of years. Now we’ve got four generations. My grandparents’ great-granddaughter is going to eventually, so that’s the legacy. And outside of the family, one of our oldest temple people that we had—not oldest in age but oldest as in he was there the whole time—my uncle Allen’s very close friend of, like thirty-five years, passed away recently: last year. His name is Chris and he is this lovely Portland gay man, just so fun. He grew up Catholic. He befriended Allen thirty-five years ago. He was very curious as to why my uncle was always busy on Sundays, like, “What are you guys doing? You going to church or something?” And he’s like, “No, I’m just doing flowers for my grandma.” And he’s like, “Those are some expensive flowers! You’re going, like, all day!” And so eventually he found out about the temple, and he never left.
He was my uncle Allen’s first pillar. In our temple the order in which you get pillar-ized, that’s your sibling order. So I got pillar-ized before one of my uncles, so in the temple, he’s my younger brother. Outside of the temple he’s my uncle, of course. Chris was very special because it was the first time we had a white American chair in a Vietnamese practice. I remember at the time, it was really big news to a lot of our family members in Saigon who also practice and have a temple. They were like, “Wait, really? Is there footage of him?” Back then it was just little recordings, photographs and stuff like that. Now we have many people kind of like Chris. We have friends that have just started to come in and were like, “I really feel like this is relevant to me. I feel like this is what I want to practice.” And we’re like, “Of course, if you feel like it’s for you then it’s for you.” And then we have in the last couple of years, I noticed, Vietnamese people who are like, “I heard about this when I was a little girl but I never knew what it was. I heard the songs and I heard my grandparents tell me about it but—” because they remember when no one was allowed to talk about it. They're like, “I never got to go,” or they remember, “I got to go to the temple one time and I saw a ceremony, but I never got to see it again and I was so curious.” So now they’re starting to show up. That’s their journey. Our, I don’t know, congregation—that’s a weird word—our little temple community has been diverse and growing slowly and quietly. All of those folks, everyone who’s a pillar and people who are interested, that’s who runs the temple ceremony.
[1:19:50]
ZM: If you want to talk more about the current connection you feel to the community, but I do feel like we’ve talked about that a lot. The sub-questions for that are talking about how you’ve seen the community change over time, and then zooming out more—how you’ve seen Portland and the greater Portland area change over time, if there’s big themes you want to talk about…
VL: I feel like when it comes to Vietnamese people in Portland the main resonating point is the food, which is fine. I love the food, too. I notice that out of a Vietnamese community we’re not super unified in each other. Like I said, just because we’re both Vietnamese doesn’t mean that we both care that we’re Vietnamese. That’s kind of how I feel with other Vietnamese people in Portland, and so we don’t really have much to say on it. We love the food, and that’s kind of where the interest ends. What I’m hoping for is that spark from the younger generation to be like, “Maybe we should have some more representation,” because we’re starting to see so much representation for other Asian communities. We’re like, “Well, we’re here too. We have things to say.” But, granted, do we know much of our own history? Because our parents weren’t very talkative. I could safely say not a lot of us really know our own history, so I feel like that’s something worth sharing.
I feel like to have those examples and key points of “Here’s something,” if you feel like you want to have something to connect with we can say, “Here, this is something you can relate to, and share, and be proud of!” I mean, I practice kendo, which is a Japanese sport, so I run into a lot of members of the Japanese community. They have such a strong sense of “I like it.” “Why?” “Because it’s Japanese!” “OK well, is there anything else?” “No, I just got interested because I’m Japanese and it’s Japanese.” I can see their train of thought, whereas a lot of Vietnamese people, I don’t feel like there are many points in which they could say, “What else is there in Vietnamese culture that I could even ask you the question of why you were interested in it, outside of food? What else do you know?” And the answer is pretty slim. And that’s why I feel like [giving] them another example would be so important. “What do you think about these paintings? What do you think about this temple?” I'm hopeful but I haven’t seen too much of the interest yet, especially out of my siblings’ age, they were born in the ‘70s to the ‘80s. They’re kind of like, “Eh, what’s done is done.” They resonated with other groups growing up, so I don't think that [my siblings] have a super strong desire for it.
I think for me, because I have my work environment and what I’ve grown up with, I’m starting to be like, “I feel like we should say something.” But I am pretty pessimistic on the outlook I have on who else would be interested who’s my age. The only thing they can really say is, “Oh, you mean everyone who came over in ‘75?” I’m like, “Do you know anything else?” They’re like, “No.” “OK, well we should talk about it,” because there’s a lot of stuff that they brought with them that we really don’t talk about.
ZM: This one’s about religious or community orgs, but we already talked about that, so I’m going to jump right ahead. This is an opportunity if you want to share about any experiences of racism or discrimination in Portland. I know that’s a big one, too.
VL: That’s a whole other conversation in itself. So at this retail shop that I work at we sell a lot of Asian antiques—Asian meaning ninety percent of it is Chinese. And the reason why it’s Chinese is because Chinese antiques were available therefore we can sell them. Vietnamese antiques are not available. Filipino antiques are not available. Thai antiques are not as much available. Hence we sell Chinese antiques.
[1:24:52]
However, I’m Vietnamese. Well, my uncle’s Vietnamese, I’m Vietnamese. The folks coming in, I think the most common thing is they’ll be like, “Oh these are Asian. Are these Japanese antiques? Are they Chinese?” “They’re Chinese, ninety percent of them are Chinese.” “Oh, are you Chinese?” “No, I’m not Chinese.” They’re like, “Oh. So then…what are you?” And you’re like, “Ah! There it is!” I was blissfully ignorant in my upbringing because I grew up in such a prominent Asian community. I actually didn’t get asked that question a lot, straight up. I’ve definitely seen videos, and memes, and the posts, and the Facebook, I get it, “Oh, what are you?” But I never really witnessed it until I worked. And I’m like, “Wow, OK. This is it.” And I had the opportunity to think to myself, “How would I want to respond?” Nowadays I don’t want to make people feel weird about it. I get what they’re trying to say, but at the end of the day I also want them to understand that I’m American. I’m from Portland. I was like, “Oh me? I was born up the street!” And they’re, “Well, I mean…” I’m like, “I get what you mean. I know exactly what you mean.”
ZM: You’re answering very intentionally.
VL: Exactly. “I know exactly what you mean.” But I also want people to have that moment to think about, “Americans look [more] different now than they ever have.” I mean that’s a whole conversation of understanding that each Asian community—they’re not just “Asians.” Half of the time we don’t even like each other. There’s a lot of war in history and that whole mix too.
It’s silly, I wouldn’t like to be asked this, but in a way I wish the Vietnamese community had such a strong presence here so that somebody might ask me instead, “Are you Chinese or Vietnamese? Are you Korean or Vietnamese? Are you Japanese or Vietnamese? Are you Malaysian? Are you Thai?”
But then again, I say that, but I’ve had some people come up to me straight up and just ask. I had one person, he didn’t say “hi” or anything he just walked up to me. He snapped and he said, “Cambodian.” I’m like, “Woah. Nice to meet you too, sir, but American. Close but not quite.” Especially with the type of retail that I do, a lot of the audience is older. They say, “I have a lot of Oriental pieces at my house.” And I’m like, “Ooh. Asian pieces? You mean Chinese pieces? I wouldn’t say ‘oriental’ but OK.” But it speaks to that generation, and I forgive them for that. If it’s how you grew up talking about it, I understand. That’s what you think of when you think of “the orient.” My main thing with people who are younger, or closer in age to me is trying to get them to, “Oh no, these are Chinese. This is a Vietnamese temple. This is a Japanese furniture piece. These are different, distinguishing places and things and we respect all of that.” Antiques is a funny thing to be working with because it’s very much like, “That’s old people stuff.”
I think the hard conversation too is sometimes realizing how racism gets started in people who feel like, “We’re more progressive than that. We’re going to think a little bit more open-mindedly.” And then I hear them say something… And it’s sometimes kind of innocent, I would say. I had a gal—she was roughly my age—and we were talking about getting older. And I’m like, “Yeah, thirty. I’m pretty much like the crypt at this point.” And we were joking about that and she was like, “You’re lucky. You’re Asian though so you won’t age as bad[ly].” And I was like, “I know what you mean, but…” And it’s such a social thing. You kind of “ha ha” it but then you think back and you’re like, “Was that…? I think that was kind of racist.” So those are the things I wonder about, like how that will change as we think about things more, are more open-minded. How do we navigate talking to each other in a way that is more open and inclusive even though our background is this very subtle discrimination. Not because anyone wants to be that way. But how else are you supposed to communicate with someone? How else are you trying to communicate, “I’m curious about your heritage,” without being [like], “What are you?” How do you say that and also be considerate and respectful? It’s such a big pool to navigate as we talk about, “Hi, I’m a Vietnamese American gal born to Vietnamese immigrants and this is just my experience since ‘93.”
[1:30:25]
ZM: I have just two questions left so we can race through and we can also walk and talk if we need. These are big questions. It’s always a little big at the end. In your mind what role does being Vietnamese American play in your life? And I think this is something that you’ve really spoken to throughout but I don’t know if you have any additional thoughts to share on that. I’ve really seen that woven through. Good on that? OK, this is the last one, and we’ve actually spoken to this already, too. What differences [do] you see between older and younger generations of Vietnamese Americans? Differences or similarities?
VL: American politics: We’re all Americans so that plays a big role and a lot of my friends and I have noticed who our parents vote for, and that big distinguishing like, “What? How could you? What is going on?” And after all the gasping and the, “How could you do this?” and the dismay, I really sat down and I talked to a bunch of my aunts and uncles and my mom, and just ask[ed] them more openly, “What are you drawn to in a political figure?” Because I can tell you that, just from my mom, she can’t understand a lot of it. So a lot of the points are through emotion, a couple of words, and that’s going to be your selling ticket with them. So for her, I had to walk her through, “When this person says this, I need to tell you their actions because I know you can think about it, but no one’s ever translated to you what this person has done.” And unfortunately, there is a Vietnamese YouTube, but it’s very charged and they shout a lot of opinions on there and I’m like, “Woah! You shouldn’t watch those anymore.” I do have aunts and uncles that that’s their main news source. For the ones that they watch American news, it can be very polarizing. In their mind, for my mom, it’s really unfortunate that a lot of politicians will capture onto very emotionally-charged points: “Communist.” [gasps] It’s immediate. You know exactly what response they’re going to get: “Nope, they should just burn in a fire. Whatever it takes just make it go away.”

ZM: It’s absolute.
[1:33:21]
VL: And I get that. Your parents almost died because of that. Why would they have any sympathy for any of that? And they don’t talk about it. That’s the thing: We’ve discovered that they don’t talk about it. That means that is almost fifty years of un-talked-about emotion and now all of their decision making is based on that: the fear, the anger, the resentment. And so much so that talking to them logically, they don’t care. At the end of the day they don’t care if it makes sense. It doesn’t feel good. If you’re telling them, “We need to treat people of the communist party like people,” they’re going to fight back and say, “Well they didn’t treat me like a person.” And it’s like, “I know but…” [sighs]. I tell my friends, “Just think about it. I know you’re mad at your parents, that they made the decisions that they made but you have to be sympathetic and realistic about where their background is on that. It’s not like they want to be an awful person, it’s that they’ve been dealt by awful people. It is so bad and they’ve never had a time to talk it through that their decision making is going to be coming from that.” I always think I have to be forgiving about that. I know that my mom and my family and people that [have] come here from ‘75 can be very, very discriminatory and very prejudiced, and very racist, and things that we don’t want to do. Things that we don’t want to say that we are, but I’m like, “Well, I know. I forgive you for it. I get it.” There’s a reason for the backstory behind it. What I wonder about is my generation: do you see it all the time? Do you just kind of let it just be like, “it is what it is”? I feel like that adds to that alienation because you don’t look at your parents in this way of, “That’s what it means to be Vietnamese: It’s to be bitter, and angry, and resentful about that time period. I don’t really want to be Vietnamese then.” I can tell there’s not really a strong sense [of] not just community but just communication between that generation and the next. How do you resolve that, too? But at the end of it, too, I wish I could tell my friends and my peers and have those meaningful conversations with their parents, of just them being themselves. I think my favorite conversation was just my mom telling me things she did as a kid. It’s interesting: I can tell people of my generation want to connect again, “How do I connect past the trauma and the war and the politics, but more just them as a person? What do they actually care about?” Could you say? Because I feel like a lot of kids of my generation don’t know what their parents care about on that level.
ZM: Thank you for sharing. The last thing is: Is there anything you’d want to share in closing or that we haven’t touched on?
VL: I think we’re good.
ZM: This has been Zoë Maughan. It’s December 19, 2023. We are at Symposium Coffee and I’ve been talking with Van Le. Thank you so much for joining me.
VL: Thank you for letting me talk!
[1:36:18]

Additional Information

Date: 2023-12-19
Interviewer(s): Zoë Maughan
Interviewee: Van Le
Location: Tigard, Oregon
Subject: Portland (Or.); Business; Rites and ceremonies -- Vietnam
Creator: Le, Vân, Lewis & Clark College Special Collections
Format: mp3
Duration: 1:36:18
Language: English
Rights: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

For questions about rights statements, or access to the original document please contact Lewis & Clark College Special Collections and Archives http://specialcollections.lclark.edu