By Jonathan Chan

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
Nam Le
Knopf (2024) / 80 pages / SGD 26.50

Call it an interregnum. 16 long years after the publication of his seminal short-story collection The Boat (2008), Nam Le's 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem arrived in 2024 with a ferocity and formalism distinct for a debut collection. These were not years of silence; Le had been working with intensity and devotion on a novel as a follow-up, but the arrival of his child required some form of relief, which came through the itinerance of poetry. Le had also penned On David Malouf in 2019, commenting on Malouf's oeuvre as part of an Australian 'Writers on Writers' series. Schooled in Melbourne and Iowa, Le's reputation as a fictionist had been solidly established by his first book, though he has suggested that poetry had been with him for a longer time. In an interview, he describes poems and lines in the collection "which existed in old notebooks of mine from 20, 30 years ago". I remember the ways his collection seared itself into my memory, the verisimilitude and intensity of 'Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice'. I remember the shock and delight of hearing his second book had dropped, a poetry collection no less, and rushing to purchase a copy in London.

This is, perhaps, a retrospective review of sorts: Le's return has already been hailed with a particular critical reception from across the Anglophone world, with profiles in The Guardian and Tin House, with his having already been awarded Book of the Year, as well as the Multicultural NSW Award, at the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. Central to the criticism surrounding the book is a particular attention to anger, or rage, as the defining trait of the book's poetics. It is an anger against the violence of the English language – not just in terms of the imposition of English, whether through imperial influence or the assimilative force of immigration, but also the way it became the primary medium that structured perceptions of the Vietnamese. That is to say, Vietnamese refugees, the 'boat people', such as Le as an infant, were configured in a particular way through stereotypes enacted in English and replicated elsewhere.

Le's is a definitional poetics, with the collection's title suggesting each poem to be a way of defining what a "Vietnamese poem" is, across varying conceptual bases. Perhaps what has distinguished Le's writing from other poets of the Vietnamese diaspora, particularly Vietnamese American poets like Ocean Vuong, Paul Tran or Hieu Minh Nguyen, is the way his poetry erupts beyond the somatic into the plane of discourse. Le's seemingly singular task is his contention against racial formation and interpellation within a primarily 'Western' context or imagination, to the extent that imaginings and mockery of Vietnamese refugee poverty are cognate across the United States, Australia and perhaps Europe. It is a sedimentation of prejudices, harkening back to the orientalist conceptions of writers in the early 20th century, such as Ezra Pound, to the images of desperation and suffering that inundated television screens in the 1970s and 1980s, to the enduring impression of Vietnamese in service roles, famously as nail techs, that Le takes as his subject of critique. The poets on Le's reading list include Terrance Hayes, Monica Youn, Cathy Park Hong, Kaveh Akbar, Solmaz Sharif and Diana Khoi Nguyen.

Le, with his legal and literary academic training, is able to articulate a response across the discursive, linguistic and theoretical planes. Some might find in Le's poems a predilection towards the theoretical, a poetry that may not always be self-evident to the uninitiated, a poetics that is operating at the wavelength of postcolonial and diaspora theory. Le's intention, surely, is not just to humanise the "victims or prejudice", so to speak, but to attack the rudiments of such prejudice. In such respects, Viet Thanh Nguyen is a closer analogue, another writer schooled in theory who has allowed that to shape his creative and imaginative approach. However, if one criticism of The Boat is its seeming overdetermination within the structures of the writer's workshop, with the variety of subjectivities presented indicative of successful performance within a workshop setting, then 36 Ways could be seen as steeped in a similar overdetermination of discourse. It is here, perhaps, that we can begin to engage with the array of allusions, references and troubles that make up the 37 poems contained within Le's collection.

'[1. Diasporic]' sets the collection's tone. Combative, indignant, shot through with a righteous fury, it critiques an imagined "You" who "dink I write Yiknamee". The uncomfortable distortion of English through the transliteration of a heavy Vietnamese accent is followed by the accusation that "Your violence dumbed me / Smeared me, reaved me". The war "Moved me / From place and sufficiency". It is an anger reminiscent of Caliban, of articulations against imposition, subjugation, humiliation. The speaker is the refugee, punning "Dis place ment / Everything to me", riffing on the seeming mispronunciation in English of the refugee, inverting such expectations to describe the severance of wartime escape. The poem's final line introduces the definitional impulse that persists throughout the collection:

What's Vietnamese in me
Could fit in a poem.             

In Le's case, it is at least 36. The first poem is an early attempt at defining the "diasporic" Vietnamese poem. The next is '[2. Invocative / Apostrophic]', as in invocation, or apostrophe, an address to the "you" who holds "Your language your leash", where the speaker has "My face my pedigree". It is the face that constrains the speaker to assert:

Whatever I write is
Vietnamese. I can never not –
You won't let me not –
Lick the leash or bite it.

It is a state of subjugation that the speaker describes, likening himself to a dog that can neither retaliate nor rebel, his use of language condemned to be filtered through the lens of "Vietnamese" experience. The speaker is unable to overcome the supposed incongruence of language and "this face", where the "you" is a "living palm, / The wind, the phoenix song, / The house in my head". The "you" is accorded vitality, vivacity, movement, ubiquity and a begrudging familiarity. Where the speaker is "really from / The dead bird stays dead", a site of dereliction. It is the imagined "you", the arbiter of culture, expression, recognition, that dictates the continued perception of the speaker as being only ever truly perceived as "Vietnamese".

'[3. Ekphrastic]' responds to a monochrome photo of the speaker's grandmother. In alternating lines of couplets and tercets and the occasional quintet, each indented, the speaker describes the portrait, almost like a surveyor or valuer, examining the extent of an artwork's damage. The speaker makes multiple notes with attendant commentary: "Note: spots and blotches / À la calligraphic ink" like a "Spilled logogram / Smeared morphemes" like a character that "cannot cohere". Notes on "overexposure", "low contrast", "lack of contour", all of which give "effect of flatness". The speaker's grandmother wears a "French ao dai" with an "off-centered mandarin collar", flat hair indicating acceptance of a "(path of) totality". What is absent is suggestions of colour – "T'ang green" in painted eyebrows, if a smudge on the brow is actually "gold foil / in the Southern Dynasties style", if "unseen teeth" or "black-lacquered?". The passivity of the grandmother's expression lends itself to ambiguity, or interpretation: "passive as craters, / scuffs on jade terrace". The speaker has licence to "write about it what you like", a participation in a kind of nostalgic diasporic aesthetics, both fecund and cliché.

'[4. Aegic / All-encompassing]' implies something that coats, or as the poem's title implies, encompasses. The speaker refers to the ways that violence is contained in "blood", in one's kin, in "the very walls of your cells". '[5. Violence: Taxonomic]' extends this biological metaphor into the register of a taxonomic biological discourse. Within the binomial system of Linnaeus, the poem's first part is laid out in Latin, concluding on the pseudoscientific classification of "Asiaticus fuscus". Its rejoinder is in its second half, with the opening reference "Nosce te ipsum", know thyself, inverting this base logic of classification and applying it to Linnaeus' own appearance, skin "yellowish" then "sallow", "irrigated by black bile", the "grave, haughty, greedy" posture that accompanies colonial scientific authority. '[6. Reflective]', which follows, is a pause, referencing poem 3, a flatness that meets "itself in a mirror", seeing "everything". These three poems tie together conceptions of the somatic within varying forms of recognising and resisting racialisation

'[7. Violence: Paedo-affective]' bears the note of being read with a 'SLAM DECLENSION', as it decries modes of fetishisation. This demands a kind of vernacular imagining of a slam poet, beginning in media res, describing the "super cute children" with "uncommonly big" but "hard eyes". The speaker plays with the image of the cute, helpless child only to undercut it with depictions of wartime disfiguration – "mooned-out tummies / and clef palates and cataracts, deformities / and birth defects". They are children who suffer the trauma of being "blown up, grown up, orphaned, homeless / hard up, hopped up, ganged up". Listing and repetition recur throughout the poem, critiquing the "GI boom boom", referring to those who were subject to militarised or sexual violence at the hands of American soldiers. For those who break free from the strictures of such childhoods, Le introduces the possibility of acceptance into "Western, / Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD)" countries. Coined by the anthropologist Joseph Henrich, the notion of "WEIRD" was introduced to challenge the assumption of generalisability of psychological research findings; herein, Le uses it as a catch-all to describe the contexts of locales where Vietnamese refugees settled in North America, Europe, Australia, only to be subject to prejudice and mistreatment. If not mocked as "slant or chink or nip or ching chong" or castigated for their appearance or food, the speaker introduces a contrasting prejudice: "exoticised" and "Hello-Kitty'd" or "Hypersexualised" women, including children, coming alongside "desexualised" men who are "brawnless, gormless, beardless". Le takes up the whole gamut of stereotypes ­– between fetishised or boys cornered into "maths, computer games, / maybe even kung fu." The weight of such essentialisms, or severance from "mother country and tongue", collides with a thin filial piety, mocking the speaker for studying "Communications" in return for parents who risked their lives. A "cleaner guilt and adulteration" comes from "[chasing] the dragon, [shooting] the horse", metaphors for drug inhalation or injection. The poem enters into a questioning mode, of the children who know that these "WEIRD" locales question "who? and what? what for?" They face their concerns being treated as "inferior, / knocked-off, mass manufactured, low-rent", must bear the condescension of "their names mispronounced as though being done / a favour", and the return to Vietnam reveals an "unbelievable / capacity for forgiveness". Le's poem makes no attempt to resolve these tensions, contradictions or descriptions of unbelonging. The speaker must respond to everything by being "unbelievably / composed". There is an extent to which this interpellation extends not simply from a "WEIRD" Australian context, but perhaps to other common locations of the Vietnamese diaspora – the United States, Canada, France and so on. The poem that follows is the former's opposite: its long title is '[8. Violence: Geopolitical / Historical / State Conflictual / Territorial / Socio-political / Ideological / Sexual / Physical / Carceral / Chemical / Communal / Tribal / Psychological / Judicial / Cultural / Structural / Spiritual / Dictatorial / Oligarchical / Genocidal / Collateral / Domino Theoretical / Dialectical Materialist / Social Darwinist / State Terrorist / Eugenist / Imperialist / Colonialist / de Mission Civilisatrice / Ethnonationalist / Settler Nativist / Scholastic / Scientific / Educative / Bureaucratic / Economic / Hegemonic]'. It is Le's attempt to synthesise, perhaps categorically, the multiple structures and forms of violence that have gone into the creation of a contemporary Vietnamese poem, bearing in mind the deep wounds inflicted by multiple colonial projects on Vietnam and its diasporas. If the former poem ends on the image of the forcibly "composed" speaker, the latter seems to rebut it with its single line: "[Uncomposed]".

Rage is the wellspring. Le's has been described in the Times Literary Supplement as a "coruscating reckoning". In '[9. Elliptical / Tangential]', the speaker cites Emily Dickinson's adage to "Tell it slant." The poem enters the plane of a mathematical discourse – the geometry of the "perfect circle" made of "only straight lines / If you honour every tangent". Le's speaker examines the liminality of such a counterintuitive formulation; the poem itself is slanted on the page. This is a riff on Dickinson's injunction for the truth to be told "slant", circuitously, while also an allusion to the stereotype of those of Asian descent having slanted eyes. The poem concludes that there is a "white complicity". A circuitous return from tangent and diversion back, perhaps, to the question of race. Beside this poem is '[10. Reclamatory: 1]'. If the former was "elliptical" in its seeming diversion from the collection's engagement with questions of racialisation, the latter brings that sharply back into relief:

            Me chink but not so fast with
            console or condemn, me chinked,
            self-chinked in pidgyhole & niche,
            notch cranny-hole creft crack –
            cramped in here it is, & humid  

Telling it slant gives way to a return to the parody of a thick, stereotypical 'Asian' accent, albeit waving away pity or outrage, embracing fully the "niche" of an 'ethnic literature', a tight space inhabited by the speaker. The reclamation of a linguistic self-orientalisation. "[Dat] magic / straight & true" is rendered in the transliteration of an articulation seen as offensive. The speaker asserts "promise past da jag & glint & hard O", for the "not-too-thinky chink-head O". It is discomfiting reading, hardly touched upon in many of the book's existing reviews. "Chink" is a slur common not only to Australia but also in the United States and the United Kingdom (and apparently India, according to Wikipedia). Both the term and the apparent caricature of accented English become the medium by which the speaker refutes perceptions of disarticulation or maleducation or stupidity.

Many of Le's poems are titled violence, albeit of varying categories. Three have preceded '[11. Violence: Anglo-linguistic]'. The affixation of "Anglo" suggests a specific form of colonial inheritance, one inflicted across locales as diverse as Wales and Singapore. In this poem, English is the "One language to rule them all. / Billions strong." It is the language of "Empire and industry. Science, technology, narratology. / Transaction". The speaker challenges the expansive and evolving, and assimilative qualities of English. The speaker speaks of being:

            Bonded now to long Western bent.
            Western lexicology, logorrhoea, lexithymia.
            Western grammar.  

Here is Le as linguist, challenging the structures and epistemologies that accompany English itself: the form and meaning and behaviour of its words, its loquacity, its resistance to emotional articulation. It is a kind of decolonial turn, resolutely anti-imperial in its orientation. The speaker decries the ways that "English demands" across three stanzas: pronoun, noun, adjective, subject, object, tense, mood, perfect and continuous. Le is a writer who is consciously aware of the limits of the English language. The speaker turns, instead, to Vietnamese as "openness, manyness at once". The grammar of English is "violence", its way "narrow / Exaction." Precision is a straitjacket. The poem concludes that "Nothing (I say) (ha ha!) is more important / Than freedom." The freedom of expression enabled through language; Le references the famous quote of Hồ Chí Minh that "nothing is more precious than independence and freedom", uttered upon the American invasion of Vietnam. The possibilities of articulation in Vietnamese are rendered in English by Le. It is the segue to '[12. Communist]', the political ideology and structure of contemporary Vietnam. The poem riffs anaphorically on the imagined diktats of communism:

            We are for perpetual revolution!
            We are for monkeys and tigers!
            We are for permanent re-education!
            We believe in necessary rectification.
            We are against cows and snakes!
            We are against monsters and demons!
            Let rocks and pebbles turn into race!
            Let a hundred flowers bloom!
            (Tell us: What are the correct
            revolutionary traits of the moon?)

One detects a conflation with Maoist thought, perhaps the same brush by which all Communists of a particular era in Asia were characterised. Perpetual revolution, re-education, the positivist turn against folk mythology, the magical thinking of plenitude from scarcity, the famous invocation of a hundred flowers blooming. The speaker bears his own suspicions; the revolutionary doctrinaire finds a faltering vocabulary in the face of the image of the moon.

Poems 13 and 14 come together. Titled '[13. Eastern-epistemological]' and '[14. Standpoint-epistemological], their common concerns seem, ostensibly, to do with the gathering of knowledge, the former seemingly within a Sinitic intellectual tradition, the latter referring to standpoint epistemology, or the subjectivity induced by an individual's social position and identity in terms of knowledge formation, especially for those from marginalised communities. What binds the two poems is the notion of "sincerity". In poem 13, the speaker addresses encountering forms of "sincerity" in poetic discourses – "sincerity in life / correlating to quality in poetry" as explained by Heaney on Yeats, parallel to William Blake's notion of "revolting and desiring" one's "whole true self", and sincerity being "the first question of poetry" in "Hass on Oppen / on Zukofsky". There is a citationality at play, primarily across Anglophone poets of Ireland, England, the United States: Robert Hass, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, not to mention the mononymous Heaney and Yeats. What is apparently "Eastern" in this epistemology comes from two American Orientalists ­– art historian Ernest Fenollosa, who had expertise in Japanese art, and the infamous Ezra Pound. It is the ideogram, rather than the noun, wherein sincerity is located. It impels Pound to compose "an ideogram tree" and sing "sunrise through its higher branches" until sunlight lances through shade to where "word's made perfect", the word being "sincerity". Pound's view of sincerity in poetry is commonly tied to his emphasis on technique, rather than expression, a preference that would put him at odds with Blake's notion of "revolting and desiring". Pound himself, in addition to his support of Mussolini's Fascist project in Italy, also supported the work of Objectivists such as the Jewish American Louis Zukofsky.

This is ironised in poem 14, with poem 13 containing the conspicuous absence of any "Eastern" poets. These are, of course, the "nine white masters sitting in a tree". Poem 14's epigraph is the last line of poem 13 – "the word is 'sincerity'". The standpoint epistemology introduced is presumably that of the Vietnamese diasporic, or Vietnamese Australian, speaker, claiming the agency that what is "mine is mine. / To mine, to meld" and that "It's not meant for you". The notion of sincerity, derived seemingly in part from Pound's engagement with Chinese writers, meets the force of the speaker's rebuttal, who asserts, "I know / You don't get it. / You don't get to get it." It is the white masters who seem to "Take and turn it. / Make (your) terms with it ­– / Earn trophy from it". The speaker locates the etymology of trophy as being "from trepō" in the Greek, or "Meaning to turn", where what has been abandoned by a turned enemy "Is yours to take". The accumulation of literary prestige and acclaim is achieved at the expense of a marginal community. The onus of representation, especially a corpus of Sinitic literary tradition and its afterlives, cannot be borne purely by these "white masters". The speaker declares, "It is not a single thing". There is a protest for a kind of narrative plenitude, as Viet Thanh Nguyen might argue, for a multiplicity of representations, however unvarnished, detached from any brush of sage orientalism. These two poems, too, are ways of writing "Vietnamese poems".

'[15. Dire critical]' is itself a pun. It is a reference to diacritics, the sign, or accent, or additional glyph, added to a letter to indicate a difference in pronunciation. It is a central feature of the Vietnamese language. Le's speaker mimics an intercessional language: "Give us each day our diacritics – our low and high, fall / and rise, our horns and holds." These are counters to the "flat euphony" of English, forms of "full mouth music". The speaker outlines the crucial tone marks representing distinct pitches in Vietnamese: "dấu sắc, huyền, ngã, hỏi, nặng." This is juxtaposed by lines in italics, presenting a juxtaposition of images of beauty, "Rising tang of early season mango in the mouth", "reflected sunlight, prismatic, on rice paddies", against the "Coloratura descant of U.S. bombs", perhaps the postlapsarian rupture of an imagined, Edenic, "native" idyll. The speaker participates in, to some degree, a show of "blunt-force ethnic credibility", to borrow from Som-Mai Nguyen – the word ma presented in its multiple meanings depending on tone – "mother", "cheek", "sack of flesh", "but", "ghost", "devil", "cipher", "tomb". Perhaps what Le does in his handling of this polysemy that wrests it from a "performance" of ethnicity is the way he weaves these meanings across the horrors of the war, describing gauntness, "agent orange", the "unborn child", the "corrupted womb". Le refers to his own name "Nam" as "the south that is my name", alluding to the use of a different word for mother – "mẹ". It has its own polysemic associations – of his son's wheeze ("my son, whom I named peace"), "sesame" (which induces his son's allergies), "crack" (like the cracking of his mother's composure against "smiling white devils" who "splash you with dioxin, with napalm". The speaker describes "her seed of a daughter going hot inside you" and "her whole body foreign, future-tensed, / gathered to its fast, heavy, unhatched dot". It is a return to the diacritic located under the word "mẹ", its weight, dreams of a daughter fading into the birth of her son, the speaker.

The poems that follow the tour de force poem 15 are variations on prior themes. Sincerity makes a reappearance in '[16. Violence: Autologous]', albeit with a curious reference to Yukio Mishima, "per Hass" again, "per Scott Stokes", a former Tokyo bureau chief for multiple Western newspapers and also apologist for the Nanjing massacre, for whom "sincerity dwells in our entrails", demonstrated through "seppuku". It is this that is an "autologous" violence, emblematic of Mishima's extreme conception of masculinity, seppuku being the conclusion to a failed coup attempt galvanised by his ultranationalism. His far-right ideology, while opposed to "Western" decadence, finds a parallel with that of Pound. In '[17. Culinary]', framed as an "offertory", the speaker draws upon the culinary metaphor, often framed matrilineally, invoking "longan, mangosteen  sapodilla / star anise & lotus seed" but "with Western tang". Describing the "blood ligament" of "kitchen labour", a form of wisdom "compressed / into this blank deep-strata rock", the speaker eschews the "silence" of cooking in favour of the voice that shall now be "loud with every flavour, every humour, / equally of north, south, east, west". It concludes "as she made me / I will make you, mother", perhaps not through the re-enactments of a recipe, but a resuscitation through poetry. It is incantatory. And in '[18. Palpebral]', itself a reference to eyelids, the speaker returns to perceptions of Asian subjects through the lens of the West, framed in a set of contrasts through anaphoric lines, for example:

They'd rather you be inscrutable than difficult.
They'd rather you be impassive than original.
They'd rather you be enlightened than ambiguous.
They'd rather you be opaque than unpredictable.

It is the rehearsal of common stereotypes of a sort, of the passive, stoic, inexpressive, silent 'Asian' subject, at odds with a vision of a cantankerous, livid, vituperative, individual, particularly in the world of publishing with its expectations of 'Asian' writers. However, the speaker recognises the limits of the poem's repetitions. The poem ends:

They'd rather you be correct than slanged.
They'd yada you be yin than yada.
They'd yada you be yada than yang.

Clearly, one can tire not merely of a conceit, but of the mundanity of prejudice itself.

Visually, '[19. Oral-metaphorical]' resembles a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It seems to mimic a sense of Hopkins' famed sprung rhythm:  

Always with the tongue!
That raw, that flayed, crazed eel
laired in the wet mouth cave,
thrashing the cheek wall
 
guarding the throat, clogging it
throat's root.
The tongue is long – longer
than what's not seen of it.  

The poem proceeds in four-line stanzas with indentations, its declarative mode isolating the role of the tongue in the creation of meaning, "vibrating air". It is the rambunctious and uncontrollable organ. "Chinese speech" is said to spit "double word and flame", the flame of the tongue burning by "aerated intention". By contrast, "to French is to do / with tongue". The Vietnamese tongue is shaped by imperial other tongues. The "betal blacking / enamel, the fatted lips" that are "shaping         sloping meaning". Tongue as metaphor for language, though at the same time integral, or constitutive, of its expression. The speaker continues:

Mother country            mother tongue
      motherfuckers on the run
eat their words and white bread, son
            earn your white man's tongue.  

The turn to vulgarity and bathos, the morphing of the poem to capture the rage of a different kind of linguistic imposition. The tongue that expresses is the tongue that tastes, or is made to taste. The speaker ironises vulgarity by asking, "Kiss your mother with that mouth? / that can't what intonate / her name?" Diacritics make a return without explicit mention. A blunt force ethnic credibility of having "metaphor by the throat" once finding "the tone". The poem concludes, "Master's house, master's tongue […] Tell / toll            no dismantling, just / burn it all down.          Just for fun." Audre Lorde's famous adage makes its return – of the inadequacy of the "master's tools" to "dismantle the master's house", referencing not just the material and linguistic and systemic conditions of slavery, but in Le's hands the systems that have sustained the subjugation of the Vietnamese people under military engagement and in the diaspora. In '[20. Titrative]', the speaker scoffs at the notion to "Unself-consciously". It is "too late". The self has been too tarred by another substance.

If '[19. Oral-metaphorical]' and '[15. Dire-critical]' indulge an indignation towards the English language, '[21. Transfusive]' and '[22. Logographic]' perform a kind of atavistic turn, or recovery, a regression to a pre-Sinitic, pre-Gaulic, pre-Anglic linguistic condition. The former beseeches "Restore to us, before this modern alphabet", a kind of language system preceding "Portuguese missionaries", appealing to a move beyond older names of Vietnam: Đàng Trong or Nam Hà (names of Vietnam in the 17th and 18th centuries), Cochinchina (which the poem describes as derived from Malay and Chinese names), Quinam (as determined by the Dutch East India Company), and when Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) was known as "Prey Nokor" or "forest city" when the city was under the Khmer empire. The speaker describes a kind of decolonial turn from the names imposed upon Vietnam by various empires or imperial influences. The speaker seeks a restoration preceding the scripts of "Latin", "the Romans", "the Greeks", "the Phoenicians", "the Egyptians", curiously markers of imperial transmission in a 'Western' imagination. The language the speaker seeks is "consecrated / from the sacred dragon and the sprite" while "taking" and "breaking" from the Chinese: Chữ Nôm, or the logographic system wherein Chinese characters were used to write the Vietnamese language. There is some irony to this articulation being performed in English, though the poem is saddled with the knowledge of inconsistency, linguistic transfusion, and the forces that have shaped the Vietnamese language in its current form, with a Sinitic provenance but now rendered in Roman characters.

The next poem carries this forward: '[22. Logographic]' begins with a single Chinese character presented in calligraphic writing – 南, or 'nan' in Mandarin, or 'nam' in Vietnamese, meaning south. It is the same 'nam' in Vietnam, and indeed, in Nam Le. The poem, composed of quintets, reflects on the form and structure of such language, on the "Picture of (picture of) thought", reflecting on the seemingly 'purer' representation of thought through image, or the logographic language of Chinese characters. The speaker is compelled to remember the "apparition of my father", in "forced sessions that don't stop", on some of the Chinese characters that "are radicals", a seeming recollection of learning these characters through the practice of calligraphy. The speaker's mind turns to other images: water, karst, fossilisation as representations of ossified cultural practice; interconnections of figs and leaves; the "Storm", "bomb", "glacial drag", "Time and waters", "Fire" that create a "grinding syntax". Images of sedimentation, rhizomes and war shape a relationship with language. The rupture of language lies not only with the "continuous-present blast" and "Ringing still in inward tension" after bombardment, but rests always in a "larger incompleteness". The deepest "sound and sense" are "beneath the wreckage" and "mangled Linnæan trees" and "ink-black lithic strata": "Perfect language". Here, Le references Derrida's assertion that philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz idealised Chinese as a perfect, non-phonetic alternative language to a Western phonocentrism; the word itself being an image, a logographic representation of reality. The speaker refutes this, declaring that the "character is wholly corruption, /Brain mania", nothing more "Than reave and smear". Le dismantles any seeming Sinocentricism, whether in the valorisation of classical Chinese as a medium or for its linguistic implications.

This signals a turn towards the collection's engagement with the strictures of such a classical Chinese tradition – in language, in translation, in gesture. It begins in '[23. Analectional]', referring, of course, to Confucius' Analects. It is short, proceeding in a similar spirit of defiance:

Confucius say:
            Respect ghosts and spirits
            but keep them at a distance.
 
Or don't.

Le apes the stereotypical representation of the Analects through the prefix "Confucius say", the common, ungrammatical introduction of his sayings and aphorisms. What he introduces is a saying not present in the Analects, playing with the notions of ancestral veneration and the acknowledgement of spirits, but downplaying the need to "keep them at a distance". It is a kind of hauntology that sees not merely the Confucian implications of engaging with "ghosts and spirits": the weight of history, inheritance, trauma. It forms a prelude to '[24. Violence: Translative]', eschewing the return to a 'pure' language in favour of the importance of translation, or at least a supposed importance that Le satirises. The poem ironises, hyperbolically, the perceived importance of the "Poet-Translator", the "Keeper of the great keep" that mans "many great Gates – / Of Meridian, phoenix-turreted", the "Over-Man / With apex intent", the translator a "Cosmopolis". The role of the translator as a bridge between cultures and lineages is swiftly undercut by the revelation that the subject the speaker addresses does not know Vietnamese, to which the speaker responds, "Did Pound know Chinese? Did Rexroth? Snyder? / Fenollosa?" The transmission of Chinese literature as translated into English is facilitated by many who did not know much Chinese at all. "The unlike must be forced together", the poem pontificates, quoting Heraclitus: "'All things take place by strife.' / East-West, man-wife, yin-yang". The injunction comes to "Make Your status out of their / sincerity". Sincerity returns, albeit this time as the substance of translation; the speaker discards notions of ethics in translation, instructing his addressee to pick up the "orphaned fragments" of "detrital figures / Fuguing across a burning lake / That You set alight". The speaker cites that "Their Word in the strife of Your Will" is "[obliterated] into bụi đời ­– / Dust of life". Bụi đời, not only means "dust of life" literally in Vietnamese but also refers to the mixed-race children of American soldiers abandoned and shunned in Vietnam in the aftermath of war, many of them street children and vagrants, the term popularised in the musical Miss Saigon. The word "orphaned", therefore, takes on a doubled meaning, as the addressee seems to be implored to assume the responsibility of presenting their narratives in "the lingua franca", in "Safety. The comfort of hierarchy. / Currency." It alludes to the seeming popularity of narratives of war, hybridity and mixture, a kind of exploitation of tragedy for one's literary prestige and currency, within the 'safe' confines of an English-language poem, a seeming stronghold of respectability politics.

The two poems that follow can also be read as a pair. The collection has thus far woven between an abstract and actual violence. In '[25. Grand-gestural]' is a retelling of the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức in 1963, protesting the persecution of Buddhists under the regime of Ngô Đình Diệm in South Vietnam. The poem is centralised on the page:  

Old man, sick man, dead man, holy.
Lotus soaked in gasoline.
A struck match
Awakens the silence.
 
Becomes one, bronze orange
Skin lacquered black
Amidst the beautiful gasses
One with process.

It is laid out almost like an obituary, halting, yet intentional in its articulation of images, the juxtaposition of horror and beauty of the act itself, stripped of the broader context of restrictions on Buddhist practice and public recognition. This decontextualisation, of course, mirrors the decontextualisation of the image itself; the speaker describes "No one now remembers why / His votive offering". It describes his "heart / Which the Reserve Bank keeps", alluding to how Quảng Đức's heart reportedly remained intact after his immolation. The speaker describes it as "the great gesture: / Stunning, plasmic, silent, blank". It is almost a canvas onto which a host of interpretations and meanings can be laid over, with its original significance within the religious, ideological and political context of the Cold War in Vietnam pared away. It is this that pairs the poem with '[26. Erasive]', a redactive poem that blacks out lines to spell out, in individual and pairs of letters: "No archive is safe. But is this all there is to it." The lines themselves are a list of different kinds of archives, including "Newspapers", "Articles", "Treatises (Scientific, Political, Anthropological, Ethnological)", "Missionary Memoirs", "Ledgers", "Articles of Incorporation", "Contracts", "Land Grants". The poem's first stanza, which spells out "No archive is safe", takes a lighter shade, allowing the letters to be discerned. The second redacts the lines completely, showing "But is there all there is to it". Le's concern here seems to principally be epistemological, with such an avant-garde approach recounting the violence that accompanied acts of classification and bureaucratisation, but also the burning, dispensing of, and censoring of archives and history. Le the historian can only piece together meaning from the remnants of such documents, the blackout poetry serving as a metaphor for gaps in records and archives, particularly given the continuing contest of memory over the war in Vietnam between those in Vietnam and those who are part of its refugee and immigrant diaspora.

Le moves seamlessly between discourses: theoretical, scientific, anthropological, bureaucratic. If there is a tendency that places him in the company of his contemporaries engaging with issues of diasporic trauma, it is the tendency to foreground the place of the mother figure. In '[27. Matri-immigral]', presented as a "lullaby", the "mother" figure is presented across a variety of roles and positions, labour often performed by Vietnamese women. It begins with an epigraph in Latin: "Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga", translated to "What place is this, what region, what coast of the world?" An epigraph to Seneca's Hercules Furens, written in the first century, used as well as an epigraph by T.S. Eliot in his 1930 poem 'Marina'. The quote bespeaks disorientation as well as an awakening from disarray, the tragic, bewildering clarity that comes upon the recognition of a loved one. Four of the poem's five stanzas, each 10 lines, begin anaphorically:  

            My mother wipes your mother's mouth,
            Wipes her body clean and dry

              […]
 
            My mother wipes your children's bums,
            Smiles at their lordly cheek;
 
            […]

            My mother paints and strips your nails
            Shaves your heels of remnant skin
 
            […]
 
            My mother takes your cash in hand,
            Picks your fruit and bones your meat,
            Concentrates and clarifies,
            Lays her spirit on your plate  

The stanzas conclude on the "mother" figure in various states of deference, or repose. Lush, verdant landscapes bring to mind that of a childhood memory in Vietnam as she works as a nurse. The "mother" shuttles between a babysitting and housekeeping job. The "mother" serves as a nail tech, physical touch with customers drawing to mind memories of caring for her own children. The single stanza that diverges quotes the Belgian playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck – "Nothing happens to us which / Is not the nature of ourselves". Such a truism is rebutted by the speaker, who asserts how Maeterlinck was not subject to immolation, degradation, rotting, grief. Memory is "the only plot" to help give structure against the weight of "gravity". These are the burdens borne by the speaker's mother, whose "spirit", "corpus" and "mind", her "Sacrifice, anxiety" are "There for you to monetise". The speaker now turns to his mother, stating:

            Sleep now, mother, there is time,
            Let them call and let them come:
            You are safe in memory.

There is an end to the labour performed by the speaker's mother, the opportunity to rest, protection from the incessant demands across the feminised, domestic occupations she has been made to perform. Memory becomes the safe harbour, the fortress that withstands indignities and pressures. It yields the clarity from the disorientation of refugee immigration, from the toil of labour, the strained stoicism that the speaker has been made to witness.

Confucianism persists as an operating moral paradigm, or framework, taken as an object of Le's critique. The metaphysics and ethics of Confucianism, with its emphasis on rigid social relations to preserve harmony. In '[28. Inter-Analectional]', coming after '[23. Analectional]', the poem leaves two open-ended questions for discussion: the first that "Confucius say" that "a woman's three submissions: / father / husband / sons", and that "a woman's four virtues: / morality / speech/ comportment / (breeding) works". Coming after the previous poem with its depiction of feminised labour, one is wont to assume that such a discussion would tilt towards a rebuttal of an ingrained patriarchy. The poem contains a footnote that emphasises this, albeit within Vietnamese history itself, stating "(But how about those Trưng sisters?!)" Perhaps it is bewilderment, or indignation, or awe present in the invocation of the Two Trưng sisters who famously led a rebellion of Luoyue tribes against the Chinese domination of Vietnam in AD 40, becoming Vietnam's first female monarchs as well as enduring emblems of Vietnamese nationalism. The suggestion herein, perhaps, is the contradiction of a history that has valorised Confucianism while also being indebted to a subversion of some of its precepts. Confucianism is invoked again in '[29. Arithmetical]', providing an articulation of why "36", as in the book's title. It is an exercise in satire, exposing the absurd illogic of approaches to numerology in geomancy and divination. Take the poem's opening lines:

            36, because highly composite, square
            triangular (4 line, 3 line) with 9 divisors,
            9 being the sum of the 3 Confucian
            Submissions, the 3 Prohibitions
            And the 3 Fundamental Bonds.
 
            36 + 9 = 47, of Avtomat
            Kalashnikov note; set to enfilade
            Buddha's 8-Fold Path, spanning
            4 Truths and 5 Precepts, breaking through to
            the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching.

The pretence of mathematical authority quickly crumbles upon the realisation of a lack of apparent connection across any of these equations or even quantities. Of course, the speaker winks to the reader with its reference to the AK-47. The speaker continues to describe, authoritatively, the application of the "36 Stratagems", including quantities to abnegate "Buddhist Sins" for "49 full days beneath the Bodhi Tree", to "Abandon 12 Zodiacs through 3 Temporals", the relinquishing of Vietnamese alphabets and diacritics, the "10 Fetters / squaring 10 Good Deeds" before the final numbers: "214. – The number of Kangxi/Nôm radicals." Beyond the building blocks of Vietnamese are Chinese, or at least the foundations of Sinitic languages. The poem is delivered with the madcap energy of a sagely mystic. Yet, despite these radicals demarcating "all articulations" and "all possibilities", the speaker wonders if "At the end / of number – mere/more language?" The endpoint of such conspiratorial calculations is, in effect, the generation of more words. Does this suggest the multitude of possibilities intuited by the decision to write 36 poems? Is there a resignation or disappointment to the realisation that mathematics begets more language?

'[30. Asymptotic]' bears the suggestion that it will continue along this mathematical, or pseudo-mathematical, line of motifs, with the asymptote approaching infinity, or zero, in a curve. The proximity, but distance, from a limit, is the central metaphor for the poem, in which the classical Chinese tradition veers near, but falls short, of being 'Vietnamese'. The poem cites common fixtures of classical Chinese poetry – the "moon-made lake", the "memory-made moon", the elements of "moon and lake" to "compose a unity of self / From a fantasy of self". The recollection of elements of one's hometown is a common image among the classical Chinese poets. It is a certain kind of imperial imagination, of "the hollow mulberry tree, which was not a tree, the sacred fig tree and the spiky sugar palm", suggested to be common in literary depictions but not of Vietnam. Perhaps it is an imposition of the imagination, dependent on the cultural markers of the hegemon. Li Po is the poet the poem cites, yet it goes on to refute the confusion over the poet's nomenclature experienced namely by Ezra Pound. Li Po was "not Rihaku" and "Cathay was not China". These refer to the references to Li in Pound's collection of supposed classical Chinese poetry translations, Cathay (1915), in which he refers to Li as Rihaku because he studied the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, who had studied Li's poetry in Japanese in Japan. At the same time, "Vietnam was not China". Nor is "The Way", ostensibly the Dao, Vietnamese, nor the "same moon". The speaker suggests that the "Way" is not Vietnamese because "there are not 36 of them". The importance of 36 implies plenitude and abundance in Vietnamese, but such a meaning is absent from a Chinese context. The poem concludes, again with its refrain of "but close enough", as it has ended across the former three stanzas. Yet everything is on fire – the "man", the "lake", the "palm at the lake", the "bird", the "moon", the "memory is fire, and of fire". Immolation returns as a source of total engulfment. That which is burning is not "quite itself ­– but close enough". Le's poem operates by conflations and approximations and essentialisms, approaching but never fully meeting the needed thresholds for definition as 'Vietnamese'.

'[31. Nautical]' and '[32. Intra-diasporic]' depart from what one might consider a conventional lyric form. Denoting the maritime, or navigating the seas, the word "Nautical" invariably brings to mind the phenomenon of the 'boat people', or the refugees who fled Vietnam and all manner of sea vessels. The poem itself plays with typographic symbols and space on the page, the suggestion of seeking refuge coming in the phrases "we slip" and "exiled". The phrase "(Eiffel Tower)" is presented in italics, perhaps connoting an idealised destination, alongside other locales mentioned such as the "Palawan Trench", "Chagos Trench" and "Eauripik Rise". Respectively, they refer to the area west of Palawan Island between the Philippines and Vietnam beyond the South China Sea, to a deep underwater canyon in the Indian Ocean, and a coral atoll of the western Caroline Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Present is a sense of the expansiveness of the maritime world, as well as the places refugees traversed. The word "ARCHIPELAGO" is presented at the centre of the poem, surrounded by words, dashes, front and backslashes, equal signs, parentheses with dots. Perhaps what is present is a sense of being adrift, spatially, typographically and linguistically. Yet, despite such attempts to "escape", the speaker still states that there is "no escape", allegedly from "Pound" and the "mirrors &/of mirrors". Is the image of the refugee irreversibly defined within the orientalist imagination of such a figure as Pound? The word itself becomes "interstitial" and "unpacific", tidal metaphors or images related to liminality and violence. The poem has a fluvial quality. Literary scholar Michelle Hamadache suggests in The Conversation that the poem is reminiscent of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets of the 1960s and 1970s and Stéphane Mallarmé's 1897 poem ' Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard', with the poem's layout inviting "alternate thought-routes and encounters", the poem itself both a "visual artefact" and "semantic packet". The fragmentation and fracturing of language, arrangement and lineation bespeak the particular disintegration of meaning and perception across the seas, perhaps a parallel to the devastating emergence of the Black Atlantic. '[32. Intra-diasporic]', which follows immediately, uses footnotes as its avant-garde technique of choice. The poem is three lines, speaking of a father coming to "this country", presumably Australia, with "nothing more than a small knapsack", "full of cut diamonds". The footnote declares that humour as a "coping mechanism is a violence", perhaps an elision or submergence of as traumatic an experience as intuited in '[31. Nautical]'. The footnote itself has another footnote, describing how the "failure to differentiate" between refugees from the North and the South, between those who left earlier and later, is itself "a violence". There is a far more self-reflexive tone at work here, at once lampooning a familial narrative of emigration and critiquing the homogenising of many narratives.

'[33. Euphemistic]' seems a call back to poems such as poems 8 and 12 in the collection, working through the euphemisms that have configured a memory of the war in Vietnam. The use of bureaucratic, or military, language to mask, to conceal, to misrepresent. The speaker declares:

            We know. When they say
            kill ratio they mean death – our death. When they say body count they mean our bodies, our death. But when they say non-effective they also mean death. When they say             area target they mean death. When they say             take & hold or search & destroy they mean death. When they say             harassment & interdiction they mean death. When they say free-fire zone they mean death – any gook is enemy or becomes enemy soon as you shoot them.

Le's judicious use of the epistrophe creates a dichotomy between a "they" and an "us" – the "they" with the power to shape perceptions through the softening power of euphemisms, words almost like codes to mitigate an understanding of mass killing. Whether these are bombardments that kill many, or targeted killings, or unintentional killings, "death" becomes obscured by its many descriptions and justifications. This linguistic logic is taken to another degree in subsequent lines: "collateral damage or spillover", a euphemism for "rounded-up death", or "attrition" meaning "slow and steady death". The poem concludes that "When they say X it is us who are X / it is us who are X'd / it is we who die." The forms of dehumanisation inflicted upon Vietnamese during the war are enabled by the linguistic subterfuge masking a more systematic cruelty. One sees parallels in the current genocidal campaign of Israel against Palestine, with similar language use to conceal, deflect or minimise perceptions of mass killing, despite information suggesting the contrary. Such a strategy of dehumanisation is resisted in '[34. Megaphonic]', which insists:

            They'd rather we be one than many.
            They'd rather we be many than One.

  The individual who does not care for the collective is easier to exploit and manipulate. The many individuals who lack the willpower or motivation to mobilise will never be able to create a "megaphonic" projection of rage, resistance, protest than if they came together as "One". Motives and strategies for population control and manipulation persist into the plane of diasporic memory, and the perpetuity of diasporic communities, alongside the memories of the Vietnamese in Vietnam itself.

The last two poems of the 36 are deceptively short. '[35. Reclamatory: 2]' departs from the first 'Reclamatory' poem, poem 10, with its activation of heavily accented transliterated English. The poem performs a reverse reclamation of the images of "Moon and jade and silk". The poem questions their being described as "Clichés", asserting that they were used as metaphors "Millennia before / The first French matrix" was impressed "Upon wet metal". The speaker makes reference to the impressing of seals and movable type, printing technologies seen as transformative in the mass production of books and enabling of mass literacy. The poem's lines are spaced out across the page, slowing the cadence and the reading of the poem. With a section break in the form of three asterisks, the poem concludes "There are other violences / Of type". A pun, perhaps, on movable type, itself obscuring the earlier inventions of block print within Tang China; a seeming conflation, though Annam was the southernmost administrative division of the Tang Dynasty. The last poem '[36. Violence: Patri-confessional]', is the seventh and final "Violence" poem of the collection. Its title is a portmanteau of the words "patrimony" and "confessional", the speaker stating: "I buried my father in the great light, / the corroded pink, burning the eye to see". There is a seeming sublimation, or transfiguration, of the father, launched "into dream commons", into "a new matter of time". One wonders if this is a reference to the Dreaming of First Nations spirituality. This cosmology is immediately grounded as the speaker buries "our father under the great terebinth". What is the confession? "mother's face was made newly easy, sloughed / of all last trace of girlhood. / And the earth reseeds." The mother figure, finding one form of rest after a lifetime of labour in '[27. Matri-immigral]', now finds new relief in the aftermath of the death of the father figure. Invariably, my mind was cast back to Le's story 'Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice', central to which is a pained relationship between a fictionist son and his refugee father.

These are Le's 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. There is, however, after a page break, a 37th poem: '[37. Post-racial / -glacial]'. One is bound to wonder if the pre-determination of writing a 'Vietnamese poem' can be 'sloughed off' just as easily in a 'Post-racial' poem. The phrase seems to recall the supposed "post-racial" era of the United States after the election of Barack Obama; "post-glacial" seems to connote the catastrophic effects of the climate crisis, the ongoing melt of glaciers, the calamities that render all measures of ethnic difference irrelevant. The poem contains 12 stanzas, each 9 lines each, each with different spacings and indentations. Its conceit is also one of transfiguration, beginning:

            If I must be something
                       let me be outwash plain
                                                 lowland
            past glacier's margin, glacier's edge
                          thaw and drift convene
            breathtaking arguments of light
                                    over me
            where what matter was argued
            has long evaporated

It is an image of seeming disembodiment, the speaker transformed into the land at the bottom of a gentle slope, the creation of sediment deposits from the meltwater of glaciers, beyond the glacial edge. The water itself has evaporated, perhaps much in the same way that discourses of ethnicity and race might evaporate in an apocalyptic, post-human world. What remains is "spill     spoil    residue", the remnants after "passion has dragged / over". The speaker becomes "an open mouth for Your waste", for "silt, sand, gravel, clastics, / clay". The capitalised "You", seeming to borrow from a religious parlance, a devotional mode, is "Lord Glacier", its deposits the outflow of "all that long-held deep-time", a "burden" to be laid down. The outwash plain is where Lord Glacier can "forget / Your reason", "unlearn Your compaction", but also where the Glacier cannot "apprehend all my forms of loss", "All the forms of collapse". The plain contains "Stands of verglassed breccia", "Dead-ice   in disintegration". All manner of sediment is deposited upon the plain. The poem turns to optic metaphors for the glacier, which is like "one glaucomatose blue eye / rebuffing every wave of light". The glacier is characterised by nerve damage, and no light is able to penetrate it. The speaker declares "Let what's pure be / perturbed in me", before stating in the stanza that follows "if You are eye / let me be aperture  the clear / all-accommodating blink". The speaker is that which lets the light in, every "flow", "retreat", and "thaw", for nothing "escapes me / I am the escape / the vast secular sweep". Centuries' worth of deposits – "light form", "land form", "liquid life itself", "labile", "microbial". The relationship between deity and devotee turns: "I am (let me be) / because You left (now leave)". The "work" that is left is "more than enough". It is a beguiling, mythological, even epic poem that ends the collection. Manan Kapoor suggests in the Harvard Review that this imagined post-racial world is "where writers are unencumbered and the expectations of representation are washed away." Michelle Hamadache suggests that the poem is "an exercise in speculative futurism", with the glacier as "an image, symbol and metaphor – of climate catastrophe, geological timeframes, and the 'sediments' of page and self." One wonders why the post-racial self is no less given over to utopic idyll, why the outwash plain remains the grounds upon which centuries of accumulated remnants are deposited, as in '[22. Logographic]', in much the same way Le has taken it upon himself to be the "outwash plain" of centuries of racial prejudice, overdetermination, dehumanisation and marginalisation of the Vietnamese self in the Anglophone literary imagination.

In a profile in The Guardian, Le speaks of the recurring question that bedevils him, of "what it means to write as a writer that will always be described as a Vietnamese writer, or a hyphenated-Vietnamese writer – whatever you want to call that". It is the trap of authenticity, the burden of ethnic or national representation, the weight of tropes and stories, and the publishing industry constructed upon them that Le sees as constraining non-white writers. 36 Ways is a response that teases, stretches, tears and subverts these structures, fully cognisant of the irony of doing so in the language of empire it seeks to denounce. Le has spoken of his dream for the collection to sustain a "cold read" as easily as "an academic assault". One wonders about the positionality of a Singaporean reader in relation to Le's work, operating as it does within the confines of a marginality within a Western literary tradition. Is there a similar feeling of alienation that the Anglophone Singaporean might feel, the more one construes the imaginings of the Asian self (broadly construed) within the Anglophone literary imagination? Do the overt predeterminations of the range of literary subjects available to the Anglophone Asian writer apply only to Singaporeans who seek to be published in such contexts as Australia or the United States?

Admittedly, I had been tempted to think of some of these questions the book explores related to ethnic cultural politics as outdated. The ferocious eruption of the far-right, xenophobic March for Australia rallies across Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, not to mention their counterparts in London, Bristol and Birmingham, alongside the ongoing assault on the rights of migrants and immigrants by the Trump Administration through the intense weaponisation and militarisation of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), has proven otherwise. One is wont to hope and believe that writers with the rage and courage of Le will help many withstand the hostility and cruelty of our present climate. In Singapore, while xenophobia may simmer, prohibitions on public assemblies obscure its full extent, while social agencies try to mitigate extreme prejudice. Around 25,000 Vietnamese people live in Singapore as of 2023, some of whom have become Permanent Residents and Singaporean Citizens. Nestled within the history of Singapore is the contradiction of its own role in the Vietnam War: as a provider of military repair services for American warships and aircraft, as a supplier of refined petroleum to the US military, as a steadfast believer in the containment theory, as a destination for American soldiers to enjoy some R&R after leaving Vietnam, as a rejecter of 'boat people' through its naval Operation Thunderstorm, as a place of transitory refuge through the Hawkins Road Refugee Camp before refugees settled in third countries. Within Hawkins Road Refugee Camp was a community of writers, poets and lyricists who penned their works in Vietnamese in camp magazines, some of which remain archived at the National Library Board. They have served as inspiration for such writers as Đinh Cao Tuệ, who presented poems inspired by these publications at the 2024 Singapore Writers Festival, and Alfian Sa'at. I believe the two are working on a piece on the camp inspired by these materials. 36 Ways may very well serve as one monument to guide them.

_____