Poetry Feature:
'Only the Dead': Vietnam

And for them, boats . . .

Richard Streitmatter-Tran and Darlene Nguyen-Ely


Whatever I talk about with her
The conversation always comes around to babies
and Hegel.
And for him, boats.
--Kimiko Hahn

boats

more than metaphor
i've been missed.
uncertain--having disembarked in 1975 flight/exodus
expelled from womb and dismissed to
cat/a/holic charities,
packaged orphan, given new identity-- smiled and shipped,
product to the america's cup
aboard wronged boats, mothers drift toward asian horizons
and i to occidental theme parks
ticket still in hand
waiting
for the boat people to return home
and claim me.

-- Richard Streitmatter-Tran
Journey # 69: Caraero, 1999-2001

This work on view with others at http://www.geocities.com/paulely.geo/70.html

Richard Streitmatter-Tran was born sometime in 1972 in Bien Hoa, a village near Saigon. Shortly after birth he was placed within a Catholic church-operated orphanage. As he's been told, he was named Tran Trong Dat meaning "he who aspires to fortune" by a Vietnamese nurse and was assigned a birth date by the court. As an eight-month-old infant, he was adopted by an American family. For the next twenty-five years he searched for his biological family. In 1998, he found them--in the U.S.

I’ve searched for my biological family for as long as I can recall. It’s ironic that I’d find them, not in Vietnam, but in the United States, without melodrama and tearful reunions as I’d always imagined, but in a matter-of-fact search through archived Usenet threads.

Richard is currently studying at the Massachusetts College of Art double majoring in Graphic Design and Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM), concentrating on performance art.

Sculptor Darlene Nguyen-Ely made the smallcraft boat trip herself--at age 7, then spent a year in the limbo of an emigré camp. In her hands, wood becomes boat, becomes fish, becomes flying fish, becomes molecule and cell of motion.

Ms. Nguyen's work will be on view at the June 15 recording session event at Housing Works in New York. Her New York gallery is Gary Snyder Fine Art, 601 West 29th Street (646) 473-1847 (MH).