Viet Thanh Nguyen, Helena Lee, and Jessica J. Lee join in conversation for BBC’s Radio 4 Start of the Week.
The Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen was awarded the Pulitzer prize for his debut novel The Sympathizer in 2016. Now he turns his attention to memoir, in A Man of Two Faces. He was four when he was forced to flee Vietnam with his family, but as he looks back at his life he explores the necessity of forgetting and remembering, and how far the promise and dream of America can be trusted.
The journalist and Deputy Editor of Harper’s Bazaar Helena Lee wants to showcase the voices and experiences of writers from the East and Southeast Asian diaspora living in the UK. East Side Voices celebrates the diversity of that experience and explores the impact on identity, community and family.
Jessica J. Lee was born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father and in her collection of essays, Dispersals, she muses on the question of how plants and people become uprooted and cross borders. Combining memoir, history, and scientific research she explores how entwined our fortunes, movement and language are with the plant world.
Read below for transcript.
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Adam Rutherford:
Hello, I’m Adam Rutherford, and this is Start the Week from BBC Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the show.
Hello. In the 18th century, classification became the foundation of the new science of biology. European colonizers and explorers sent back samples of organisms from all over the world, which were given Latin names. Now, this taxonomy with its inherent displacement, sense of place, is the rich subject of Jessica Lee’s new book, Dispersals, the complex, evocative and political entanglement of plants and people, identity and belonging. Now, humans were also included in that classification system, four types initially, including homo sapiens Asiaticus, a crude grouping of hundreds of millions of people from a dozen or so disparate countries. Today, the racism rooted in this system is rarely discussed in the West, even though it visibly went up during Covid. Remember, president Trump referring to the China virus and even kung flu?
In East Side Voices, Harper’s Bizarre deputy editor Helena Lee brought together actors, writers, and poets of East and Southeast Asian ancestry. They talk about their experiences and the stereotypes they endure in Britain today. And we have Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen and his memoir, A Man of Two Faces, about being an American Vietnamese citizen and how the Vietnam War shaped his parents’ experience in their home country and his in America. So just to get us going, Helena, I want to ask you this first, but it’s really for all of our guests, about terminology. The group crude classification of East Asian people is kind of incoherent when you’re talking about a hundred, well now more than one and a half billion people, from many different countries. So is there a useful way to refer to people of Southeast Asian ancestry?
Helena Lee:
Thank you, Adam, and thank you for having me. Yeah, it’s a really interesting question because the acronym EC, which stands for East and Southeast Asian people in the UK, is a relatively new term. And I think it’s one that has helped, I guess, the diasporas, those of Vietnamese descent, of Chinese descent, Taiwanese descent, find a term they can kind of get behind and self-identify with. And it’s by no means a perfect term because the whole point of all of our work is to show that Asians are not monolithic, that there is lots of nuance and diversity in the diasporas. B.
Ut I think it’s probably the best we have at the moment. I mean Asian in the UK generally refers to those of South Asian descent, so including those from Indian and Bangladeshi heritage. And what’s difficult is that in the recent census, well actually 2011 census and 2021, we have categories that are Asian, which obviously means South Asian and Chinese, but then everyone else who is from of Korean or Vietnamese descent, then what would they be classified as? And they would have to tick, “Asian other.” So we actually don’t know how many of those of East and Southeast Asian descent are in this country.
Adam Rutherford:
It points to a question which many people like us, because I’m also mixed race, get asked which Viet you talk about specifically, “Where are you really from?” And I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t really know what it means, but how do you address that question?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think I tried to figure out what the intention of the questionnaire happens to be. And of course there’s a very stereotypical story if you happen to be of color in the United States and someone asks you that question, they’re really trying to figure out where your parents were from or where your grandparents were from. And so if you said, “I’m from Los Angeles,” and you don’t look like their perception of whatever a Los Angeles person should be, they’ll keep on pressing. It hasn’t happened to me in a long time. And the times it does happen often come from other people of color. And then I think it’s actually a friendly question. Then we sort of understand that there is a racial connotation, but we’re avoiding that. We just really are curious about what global routes have taken us to the country, to the United States. And I lived in California for the past 40 years. It’s really its own country in a lot of ways, and maybe there’s more racial sensitivity there than there is in the rest of the United States.
Adam Rutherford:
Jessica, you raised the term Oriental, which has really fallen out of favor in the West and Orientalism, and Edward Said, but it’s an interesting term that you point out is really in reference to us being in the West. Oriental is only East if you’re in London.
Jessica Lee:
Yeah, and it’s one of those terms that I think it’s fallen out of fashion now, quite rightly. But for someone of my mother’s generation, it’s the term she often uses to describe herself for understanding her positionality as someone who’s come from Taiwan to Canada, who was married to someone from Britain. I think… I don’t know. It was one of those terms that I grew up feeling was kind of normal and then was problematized as I got older and I’ve had to develop a language to really articulate how I feel about that.
Adam Rutherford:
Okay. Well let’s talk about Viet’s book, A Man of Two Faces. Right at the beginning, you write that this is a memoir but it’s a war story. You can’t escape the Vietnam War as being foundational for your narrative and your parents. Is it an event in history, in American history, which is definitional for many people?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think certainly for the Vietnamese people and for Americans too. I grew up in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s realizing that just because the war was declared over in 1975 didn’t mean it was actually over. War was being fought over again in memory for many of the Vietnamese and many of the Americans. So certainly a foundational event for the United States because it was the first war in which the United States was truly defeated and the ruptures that erupt, that came up because of it are still affecting the United States today. So I think a lot of the divisions that we are seeing in American society, we can see a direct line to internal conflicts in the US from the 1960s, and then also the role of the United States in terms of foreign policy still being shaped by this legacy of the war in Vietnam.
Adam Rutherford:
You talk about how you left when you were four and the quote, “What does it mean to be rooted to a country you left when you were four years old?” What is the answer to that?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s a very complicated thing because I certainly was there for the end of the war in Vietnam, but I don’t remember any of it. So can I claim being an eyewitness to something that I was present for but can’t remember? But I think the psychological idea that I was born there, that I spent the first four years of my life there, and that my life has been shaped irrevocably by the conflict, has meant that there’s a deep psychological and cultural connection to this country of Vietnam and that I keep returning to.
Adam Rutherford:
And very different experience from your parents though who are actually scarred by having left just after the fall of Saigon in ’75.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
They were born in the 1930s, so they saw 40 years of famine, colonization, war, and becoming refugees twice. And they, as a result, I think were obviously shaped deeply by these traumatic experiences, but never wanted to speak about them. I was shaped in a secondhand way by these traumatic experiences, and all I want to do is to talk about them. So I think it’s very different generational relationship to history based on how much time we spent there and what we saw.
Adam Rutherford:
Do you feel that you inherit some of your views about Vietnam and your sense of identity from your parents’ experience? And I suppose the follow on question is do you pass that on to your own children?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I was definitely shaped by everything my parents had been through, but in relationship to growing up as an American. So this idea that we were raised with all of these American values and American culture and then seeing those values and culture be enacted disastrously in Vietnam, but in many other places definitely did produce the friction, made the friction that turned me into a writer. As for my children, yes, I try to pass it on in a way that is beneficial for them. So my 10-year-old son, for example, he’s fully American, but he also knows he’s Vietnamese. He knows the words colonialism and racism. He knows how to identify these things when they take place because we’ve had healthy conversations about this history.
Adam Rutherford:
It’s interesting that because when I talk to my own children, they have very little recognition or even understanding that they are in fact a quarter Guyanese-Indian and they don’t look it. They just have good skin. That sense of cultural belonging is so rooted, not in that ancestral experience, but just where we are in Suffolk or in Southeast London. So I don’t know whether do you feel that there’s an obligation to pass on this ancestral memory to your children?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That’s obviously an individual question, but I think there is, and the tricky challenge is how to pass on history without traumatizing your own children. And I think it can be done. And one of the reasons why I want to pass on the history is because my children would not be who they are and have the advantages that they’ve had without their grandparents on both sides and everything that they’ve been through. My father-in-law, for example, was a South Vietnamese paratrooper, so was deeply involved in that history. But in any case, it’s everything that their grandparents’ generation went through, sacrifice and so on, for myself, my brother, my wife, that created the conditions for these young 10-year-old, 4-year-old kids of mine to live the lovely lives that they do. So I think there is an obligation for them to know.
Adam Rutherford:
The memoir is called A Man of Two Faces. Where are your two faces?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Wow. Wow. That’s a good question. The two faces, I mean, when I was growing up, I felt that I was an American. But I was living in my parents’ very Vietnamese household, so I felt like an American spying on these Vietnamese people. And then when I left the house I felt like I was a Vietnamese spying on Americans. So those are the first of the two faces and I always feel in the United States as if I’m wearing them simultaneously.
Adam Rutherford:
Jessica, I want to ask you about grandparents and that relationship with your ancestors because you talk in your book, you went and researched the history of your maternal grandparents. How was it to get them to open up and to talk to you about their experiences?
Jessica Lee:
It was quite a challenge. I never got to ask my grandfather, and in my second book I write about finding his memoirs after his death. But with my grandmother, I had a sense of that involvement in history slipping away. And so I sat her down, I put out a recorder and I asked her to tell me her life story. And I think for me it was challenging because it was asking her to articulate traumas that she, for the most part didn’t speak about, but that manifested in our daily lives in the family. And in a way it taught me that even in our own personal familial domestic ways, we are implicated in history with a capital H.
Adam Rutherford:
Yes. You talk about how little you questioned your parents and how little curiosity you had about them. What was the reasoning behind that and did you get over it?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, I think the reason was I thought my parents were strange and alien people. I mean, I think it was sort of a common child’s reaction. But again, I was growing up watching them carry out these speaking of Vietnamese language that I was beginning to lose. They were practicing Vietnamese customs I didn’t fully understand. They were devoutly religious Catholics, and I was not a believer myself. And I was very withdrawn. I mean, my parents had a very difficult situation being refugees in the United States and suffered quite a bit, economically and personally. And again, I was an eyewitness to that. And I think I didn’t know how to cope with what I was watching, what my parents were undergoing. And because my language ability was I was fluent in Vietnamese when I was four years old and I remained fluent in Vietnamese at the 4-year-old level for quite a while. So very difficult to have a complicated conversation with my parents.
Adam Rutherford:
And was this a teenage rejection of just whatever your parents are or was it sort of culture specific? Helena, you talk about stopping using chopsticks as, was it a protest?
Helena Lee:
Yeah, it’s my little rebellion when I was about eight. I mean, my parents weren’t particularly discursive. We weren’t particularly discursive family. And so I think I just fell into that and probably found it difficult to use my voice and voice opinions. And so my way of sort of saying, “Oh, I’m not Chinese. I really want to fit in and be what’s perceived as British,” which is to look at my best friend Michelle who had blonde hair and blue eyes, and I know it’s a very common story within the sort of Chinese diaspora here and say, “Yeah, this is something that I can take control over and for my own friendships and stop using my chopsticks and use my fork and eat McDonald’s, rather than the amazing noodles that you’ve made me instead.”
And that was my way of claiming my own space and making sure that I belonged here. That was my way of reckoning I have just as much right to be here as anyone else. But actually, obviously when you look back, you realize how painful that is for my parents and all they were doing was just trying to get along and exist and do well for us. But in doing so, probably in the silence sort of alienates a little bit the children that they’re bringing up.
Adam Rutherford:
Well belonging, you want to belong, but at the same time you want to belong within your family set up as well, I presume. And food is a big part of that. Jessica talks about that extensively.
Helena Lee:
Food is a massive part of it, and it’s something that actually I think many people bring with them as a way of keeping a link and keeping in touch with their heritage. My mother is Malaysian Chinese and my father is Hong Kong Chinese. And so when I was little, I didn’t appreciate how different that was and the vocabulary that they use and what they talk about and their customs. And actually, they had to form their own little ecosystem here because they didn’t really have many relatives here. And so the family…
Adam Rutherford:
That distinction being that they’re Chinese, but neither of them actually from China?
Helena Lee:
Yes.
Adam Rutherford:
Yes.
Helena Lee:
Yes, exactly. And so they would refer to different food stuffs and they would laugh at each other because they didn’t know what each other were talking about or their vocabulary was different and they wouldn’t understand each other even though they both spoke Cantonese. So again, I didn’t appreciate how difficult that is to live somewhere away from your home country and build something together. And I think that’s a real act of creativity to do that.
Adam Rutherford:
Viet, cinema plays quite a significant role in your story. And indeed, I think many people in Britain and the West, much specifically of my age, grew up in the 80s watching Vietnam movies. How did that play to you as an American Vietnamese boy growing up in California?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I felt like I was an American watching American war movies. I totally rooted and identified with American soldiers. And so my first time encountering an American Vietnam war movie was watching Apocalypse Now, cheering for the Americans up until the point they massacred Vietnamese people. At that point, I felt that I was split in two. Was I the American doing the killing or was I the Vietnamese being killed? That had a real psychic impact on me that took me years and years to realize was actually really, really damaging.
And it wasn’t just Apocalypse Now, it was the entire genre of America’s movies about the Vietnam War. I’ve seen most of them and most of them, and I can’t recommend that to anybody, especially if you’re Vietnamese, because we really don’t have much of a role in these American fantasies except to be killed or raped or rescued. And we have very little to say. And watching those movies brought home this idea for me that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory, certainly true for this war and for many other wars. And I made up my mind that I was going to become a writer and get my revenge on Hollywood.
Adam Rutherford:
Which you did in The Sympathizer, which has a lot of satirical angles about the representation of Vietnamese people, and that’s about to make it to broadcast. I wonder if the difference between the films, the earlier war films of Hollywood, which were very gung ho and patriotic, the films about the Vietnam War represent a transition from, “Oh, this was maybe not quite as patriotic, and I think we were the bad guys in that war?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The paradox is this, which is that yes, these movies show Americans doing terrible things. However, it keeps Americans at center stage and that’s the trade off that Americans are willing to make. Okay, we’ll be the villains or the anti-heroes, but we’re still the stars of these movies and these TV series. And that’s a very pernicious and paradoxical impact that we still keep looking at American voices, American faces, and hear American stories even as they depict Americans do atrocities.
Adam Rutherford:
Yeah. I just want to ask you briefly about the prose style in the writing, that it is… You use a lot of textual spaces. There are sections which are right justified, and there’s bits where the font changes size, and I wondered what the reasoning for that was. There’s a couple of moments where I feel like I assumed it was the man of two faces having conversations with other versions of himself is that…
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
All that is happening. But really what was happening was I was having fun. I was playing. I have little children, and when I read their literature, the children’s literature, there are no rules. You can do anything in a children’s book and a child will never say anything as long as you entertain them. But then you get into these big adult books, and if you deviate just a little bit from adult expectations, adults freak out. They’re like, “Oh my God, there are no quotation marks. How can we understand if there are no quotation marks?”
Adam Rutherford:
Am I doing that now? I wouldn’t class this as freaking out, but I did notice it.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, you notice it. I’m talking about other people will have many questions if there’s any deviation for whatever they think a prose book or a memoir should look like. And I just wanted to claim some of that lovely freedom that my children have and that writers like poets have. Poets can also do whatever they want and no one says a thing, but a prose writer who does anything a little bit different is then called experimental and avant-garde. And that’s not what this book is at all. This book is playful.
Adam Rutherford:
I’m glad you enjoyed writing it as much as we enjoyed reading it. Helena Lee, let’s talk about East Side Voices because following on from Viet’s experience, what do you see as the significant differences between the East and Southeast Asian communities in the UK, your nationality, and the ones that Viet is describing in the US?
Helena Lee:
I think we’re probably less politicized. I mean, you’ve had Korean Wars, Vietnam War. We’ve not sort of rallied together to have a cause to fight against in quite the same way. And so I think the mindset is quite different. And I know that when I first started East Side Voices, which is a platform that helps to amplify British East and Southeast Asian voices in the UK, it was really difficult finding the vocabulary to articulate why certain things were racist or why things that happened to the diasporas and that were levied at us were not acceptable. And I think people were worried about calling it racist. And I certainly think when I look at the older generations such as my parents, they would probably never use terminology like that. So I think, again, when I was having this conversation with my literary agent about the idea of East Side Voices, and she has many US writers as well, she was saying that she thinks we’re probably about 20 years behind the US in that regard.
And so when the impetus to start ESV was after watching Quentin Tarantino’s film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and there was that one scene with Bruce Lee where he’s humiliated by Brad Pitt’s character Cliff Booth. And in the cinema, the whole cinema erupted with laughter. And it was clearly meant to be the funniest scene in the film. And in a film that is trying to celebrate the golden age of Hollywood, which is a little bit ridiculous in itself, the only minority in the film who is revered in many circles, was taken down at the expense of that character. And so I think coming after that film and realizing I was finding it difficult to explain to people around me why that was racist, hurtful, et cetera, and only finding really two articles about it. One was from Esquire, which broke down why it was the most controversial scene in the film. And then there was a mention in the New Yorker, and that was it. No one else…
Adam Rutherford:
Even recognized it as a problem.
Helena Lee:
No, not at all. Everyone was very glowing about the film. All the reviews were absolutely fantastic. No one really referenced that scene. And then obviously when you think back to instances such as when Maradona, the football player, well he was caught on camera accepting praise from a group of Korean fans at a football match. And then he turned around and he was caught on camera and pulling the sides of his eyes. And again, that was laughed off in the program afterwards. It wasn’t brought up in any particular way. And so when all these instances build up and you realize that there’s no acknowledgement, there’s no recognition, there’s nothing that you can fight with. And I realize there’s such a dearth of stories, there’s such a lack of empathy between someone who has a face like mine and the general public. And so to me, the only thing I could do within my sphere was to sort of flood the plane with stories. That was the only way I could think of how to build empathy, generally.
Adam Rutherford:
Cinema comes up a lot in East Side Voices. And you mentioned the Tarantino film just then. I remember, I can’t remember what year it was made, but Lost in Translation always struck me as being a film that was really deeply rooted in racism, and it was widely praised and loved by so many. And yet the stereotypes that are racist stereotypes are sewn through that film from beginning to end. And like you were saying about Tarantino, no one seemed to notice that.
Helena Lee:
No, I think it’s very othering and people are still wedded to these stereotypes that exist, which is why when something like Beef on Netflix does appear, it is absolutely fantastic for the communities to see because they realize that all the little nuances that exist on our lives can be recognized and seen. I mean, when I think about…
Adam Rutherford:
You’ll have to say what Beef is.
Helena Lee:
Oh, sorry. So Beef is a fantastic series on Netflix starring Ali Wong, and it’s about two people who have a chance encounter in a car park and go at each other to quite disastrous consequences. And it swept up at all the major rewards and allies of Vietnamese and Chinese heritage. And what it does is it takes you away from those stereotypes of not having a voice, of being like Lily Onakuramara in Pitch Perfect, who is mute throughout the whole thing, of being a computer nerd, of being a gangster, of having to do martial arts to justify your status on screen. And I think it’s such an amazing thing to be able to see yourself reflected on screen. But when I grew up in a very suburban household, which I think is personally very ripe for humdrum comedy, why are there no comedies that show the breadth of Britishness and what it is to be British, which includes those of Asian heritage?
Adam Rutherford:
One of the chapters is written by Katie Leung who played the character Cho Chang in the Harry Potter films. And she was 12 when she was cast in that?
Helena Lee:
That she was quite young, I think, 15 or 16.
Adam Rutherford:
But describing her experience of really entering a world where she became absolutely typecast as the British Chinese character. It’s very eloquent.
Helena Lee:
It’s very eloquent. And I think she found the experience difficult, partly because everyone was so articulate around her and she found herself becoming that stereotype of being conscious of the way that people were looking at her and how she should be. And she hated herself because she didn’t really have the confidence to speak out and talk about her own experiences.
Adam Rutherford:
What changed during the Covid era? The sense that this was a virus which came from China became part of the narrative and not helped by many people, including President Trump, just giving the most clumsy and quite racist descriptions of it. But was there a recognizable, there is a shift in the recognition of racism?
Helena Lee:
Completely, I think, not to the level that I think we would’ve liked. I mean, there were tangible, there was very clear results to cultural non representation. So because of that lack of empathy, it was very clear that the stories were not taken up again and again in mainstream media, racist incidents such as the women who were pushed over in the street, Jonathan Mok who was attacked, or UCL students, they weren’t really stories that were taken up again and again or being campaigned for. And there was a sort of otherness to those stories. And so I think it was very painful to watch. And so I was putting together the book of essays during that time, and what was very clear was a real need to bridge that gap between what was happening in the streets.
Adam Rutherford:
What was the experience like in America, Viet? Was it similar from what Helena was describing here in Britain?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It was exactly the same. And we have a long history of anti-Asian racism in the United States that the Covid response only typified in the shootings of six Asian women in Atlanta that you bring up as well in the book. But I make a point in A Man of Two Faces to say that America’s greatest acts of anti-Asian violence are actually its wars in Asia, which have killed millions of people since at least the Filipino-American war of the turn of the century, going through Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. So I think we need to remember that this violence takes place in an international context, not just our domestic context.
Adam Rutherford:
Because we’ve talked about film and cinema so much I just want to just wrap this bit up by asking you both, and Jessica, if you think things are changing? We are in an era where the Oscars have recognized films like Parasite and Everything Everywhere All at Once, and The Sympathizer is about to hit our screens. So are we witnessing a shift? And if we are, is it permanent? Is it token? How do you feel, Helena?
Helena Lee:
I feel that whilst there is recognition, it’s not really changing enough. I think the idea of, let’s say, Britishness or being Americans still doesn’t quite include those of Asian heritage. And so while it is fantastic seeing someone like Michelle Yeoh win the Oscar and be the first Asian woman to do so, I think it has to have more of an effect on the diasporas. So for example, I’d love the concept of a state of the nation novel to change and be not just about class, but also be more inclusive in what it represents.
Adam Rutherford:
I recently watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith and was pleased that although Maya Erskine, who plays Mrs. Smith, she’s a hit woman, she’s of Japanese-American heritage, and it’s almost never referred to. There are no stereotypes associated with it. And that felt like a positive representation, which is not what’s going to happen in The Sympathizer.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think we have to get past this idea of positive representations when there are no representations or when there are only negative representations. Of course, we want positive representations. But in fact, going back to that Vietnam War example, what we actually want is a full complexity of our humanity to be shown, which includes our inhumanity, which is why Beef is a good example. It’s Asian Americans behaving badly, or The Sympathizer, it’s about a spy who betrays and murders. So it’s that kind of complexity that we need, and we’re getting there. I’m moderately optimistic, but I’m also a cynic. And what I think what will really happen is when we achieve anything close to true equality, it would just mean that Asians can behave just as badly as everybody else on screen and behind the screen.
Adam Rutherford:
Right. Well, let’s get to Jessica Lee’s book. So she is primarily talking about plants, but really about humans and how we classify things, how we lump people together. It’s a very interesting way, Jessica, of talking about migration and crossing borders by looking at plants. How did you get to that point?
Jessica Lee:
Well, I think it was a combination of being a migrant myself from three generations of migrants. I’m mixed race. I’ve lived in multiple countries, and so have my parents, and so have my grandparents. So I think there was the personal aspect, but then I trained as an environmental historian. So I realized that anytime I asked a question professionally, sometimes my personal history, my own personal story of migration and identity would sort of bleed into it and vice versa. And so I realized that when I was talking about migrant plants, I was finding myself very often identifying. And I thought, “Okay, why is this and maybe I need to unpack that a little bit?” It became a very natural way for me to understand human migration because ultimately, human migrations for the most part were deeply related to the movements of plants around this world. When you think of sugar, of tea, things like that, those are interrelated stories. So actually telling them in isolation didn’t really make sense to me.
Adam Rutherford:
And as you have such an international existence, we’re talking to you from Berlin where you work now, but you’ve also been in Cambridge and Canadian, and you have Taiwanese parent. Is that part of how you felt about plants movements as a useful metaphor for describing your own existence?
Jessica Lee:
Yeah, I think I kept thinking about this idea of describing people as rooted. We talk about, “Okay, where are your roots? Where do you feel at home,” and seeing that in a really static and limiting way. And I thought, “Well, plants actually, of course, we speak about them as rooted, but they disperse.” They move around the world, we move them around the world, and so do people. And I thought maybe this was, I think, a more productive metaphor.
Adam Rutherford:
Yes. And some of you discussed the languages as well, because a lot of the language have dual meanings, words like native and invasive species, we talk about a lot. You talk about weeds being just plants that are in the wrong place. How does that relate to the human experience?
Jessica Lee:
It’s one of those things that I think, like many plant people, people who like to garden, somehow those terms always sat a little bit funny to me. I always felt uncomfortable about them. And so being a historian, I thought, “Okay, let’s sit down and actually look at this history. Where do these terms come from?” And a lot of the earliest efforts to classify whether or not plants belonged, they’re not unrelated to how we classified people. So one of the books I cite in my book, one of the examples, comes from the 19th century in which the proposed terminology for how to classify plants was borrowed from citizenship law. So they’re really related stories.
Adam Rutherford:
Yes. Now, we can’t ignore some of the specific plants that you talk about beautifully in three separate chapters, and there’s more, but many people will be listening right now with a cup of tea. And of course, tea and the history of tea is incredibly important in this story, but you use it as a way of talking about your duality, your two faces.
Jessica Lee:
Yeah, I grew up with Taiwanese family. My grandparents were from China having tea with dim sum, the particular cultures that go with that. But then I was also partly raised by my Welsh grandparents, and I learned how to make a proper cup of tea at quite a young age. And I realized that those two tea cultures existed within me. And when I learned a little bit more about the relationship of Britain and its acquisition of tea from China between the 18th and the 19th centuries, the story of Robert Fortune in particular.
He’s often characterized as a swashbuckler and a spy and a thief. This is a man who writes quite explicitly in his travel logs of penetrating China, of disguising himself in what he calls Mandarin dress, sewing a cue into his hair, shaving his head so that he might pass as Chinese so that he could enter China to steal tea plants. So for me, reading that history, I have that academic impulse to say, “Okay, I should take this objectively.” But of course, being mixed race of Chinese, Taiwanese, British heritage, I can’t help but take that a little bit personally and wonder what does this history then mean to me?
Adam Rutherford:
Two more specific plants that you’re going into great depth with are, well, seaweed is not one plant, but the relationship between seaweed and kelp and algae is another big part of your theme.
Jessica Lee:
Yeah. I wanted to talk about seaweeds because I was quite afraid of water and swimming and quite grossed out by seaweeds when I was growing up, despite the fact that of course my mother loved to eat them. My family being Welsh loved laverbread and things like that. And I really couldn’t make sense of it for a long time. But I had this inkling that seaweeds could tell us a little bit about what it means to migrate. So one of the stories I trace is of wakame kelp, which is considered in Europe to be one of the worst invasive species. But ultimately, this is a plant that we’ve picked up and moved through shipping, mostly in ballasts.
After Fukushima, it famously washed up on wreckage that washed ashore on the US pacific coast and the Canadian Pacific coast from the tsunami in Japan. It travels the world, very often on anthropogenic structures. So understanding these migrations, these invasions as deeply related to our movements was important. But I was so struck because wakame is a kelp I eat all the time, and I would buy these packets of it in the UK from a company that would harvest it by hand off the Spanish and Portuguese coasts, and it was framed as a super food on their Instagram. And I thought it’s a funny thing to hold how much complexity we place on this plant.
Adam Rutherford:
Yes. And there’s an element of exoticism as well in the West of looking at foods which we haven’t typically eaten, although of course there is seaweed in Welsh cooking. Mangoes is another one, another super exotic food, at least in its history, which I suppose has become normalized in British culture to a certain degree.
Jessica Lee:
Yeah, I think what I wanted to explore with mangoes is this idea that I think very often we talk about things becoming fraught or they become stereotypes. And there was this really hefty debate in a lot of South Asian literature for a while about whether or not people ought to be writing about mangoes if it was just creating this crude shorthand for exoticism. And when I started diving into the story of mangoes, which they’re so important to so many cultures around the world, basically everywhere they grow, they’re kind of revered.
I realized that it was just so much more complex than that, wanting to understand what it means to lose a past place, to grow anew in a place that you’ve immigrated to. The mango, for me, kind of served as a portal. I write about asking my mother why is it that she missed a mango tree that we had when I was growing up so much? And she told me this story from her childhood of eating mangoes in Taiwan with her mother when she was six years old, eating I think three kilograms of mangoes as the sun set and the juice dripping down her arms. It was remarkable to me how much something like a simple fruit, a simple plant, could just unlock this whole history of migration and belonging and identity.
Adam Rutherford:
The descriptions that Jessica’s giving are these incredibly evocative memories of sense and time and place, are these ones that you experience in thinking about Vietnam whilst you’re in California?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Absolutely. I mean, certainly all the types of foods that Jessica was referring to matter to me as well, and early memories of being refugees in the United States and my brother just eating a mango and just dwelling on the fact that it brought back all these tastes of home and the difference between yellow mangoes and green mangoes and what kind of condiments you eat them with and so on. But my parents also owned a Vietnamese grocery store in San Jose, California, and the smells of that store I don’t think will ever leave me, the smells of rice and of coffee because Vietnamese are a coffee growing country. And the foods that were sold in that store that I got to eat because I was the grocer’s son, and they didn’t necessarily have to be Vietnamese foods, but they were the kinds of things my parents were selling. So the relationship of food and aroma and memory are definitely all intertwined.
Adam Rutherford:
And we’re being very positive about those memories as well. But it is of course possible that these foods which are often labeled as exotic or other, actually can have the effect of marking out groups of people as being different.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, absolutely. And we all have stories about that. What I think about is that my children are growing up in a very American household in some ways. So it’s a very deliberate effort on my part that you have to learn how to eat fish sauce, Nước chấm, or you are really Vietnamese if you can eat, Mắm Ruốc, which is shrimp paste, which is even way beyond fish sauce. So there’s a deliberate effort to cultivate taste in my household, and it’s tied to this idea of cultivation that’s also in Jessica’s work as well.
Adam Rutherford:
Helena, what are your taste and memory sensations?
Helena Lee:
Well, I was sort of being quite nostalgic because my mother worked for a Chinese supermarket, and so she would bring back things like Duran and there’ll be masses of reverence in the house when she brought back a Duran that would be ripening, smellily in the airing cupboard, and much ceremony when she opened it and passing on that ceremony to me was super important.
Adam Rutherford:
We’re almost out of time, but here is a big question that I want to ask all of you. We are talking about diasporas from something like 18 or 19 countries and one and a half billion people. Is there a shared experience? Jessica, you go first on that.
Jessica Lee:
I think, if anything, it’s in the sort of complexity of each of our different experiences coming together. So going to the mango, I asked writers from all over Asian diasporas, “What was the resonance?” And they all came back with these deeply intimate, really, really important stories. I think that for me was the point of connection, that we can constellate around one plant or one little story and all add to that with myriad narratives.
Adam Rutherford:
And Viet, you’ve described yourself as a cynic. Do you have a shared experience for these diasporic peoples?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think there are three things. One is anti-Asian violence certainly brings people together. Another thing is good culture, so everybody can love the different foods and flavors that we all have. And the last is politics. And the political part is actually the most important for me. And Jessica brought up Edward Said’s Orientalism, and when he talks about Orientals, he’s talking about South and Southwest Asians. What’s the relationship between those populations and South Asians and East Asians and Southeast Asians? Asking those political questions that bring up histories of colonization and war is also an important way of forging our collectivity.
Adam Rutherford:
Well, unfortunately, we are out of time, so it just remains for me to thank all of my guests. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s, A Man of Two Faces out now. Helena Lee’s East Side Voices is out in paperback. Jessica Lee’s Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging is published at the end of April. Many thanks to today’s studio engineer, Tim Heifer. Next week, Tom is talking about skirmishes between dinosaurs and priests, or rather religion and science. But for now, thank you and goodbye. Thank you for listening to this edition of Start the Week, produced by Katie Hickman. And if you’re after more conversations about culture, science, politics, and history, there are many, many more programs to listen to on the Start the Week website and BBC Sounds.
