Khanh Ho is writing the first Vietnamese American Detective Fiction ever.  Why?  Because being the first is a power trip.   Like what you read? Share, comment, subscribe. 

I’ve been dreaming about going away to a foreign country to write.  Everything seems better, more glamorous, if you’re an expatriate writer—as if you smoked fancy, little cigarettes and wrote everything with a fountain pen.

For a period of three years, I traveled around third world countries—this was right after grad school—and when I returned to the States, I promptly got a gig teaching Creative Writing at a small college in the great State of Iowa.  This is when the writing stopped.  The irony of being a Creative Writing professor is that all the creativity gets sucked right out of you by the constant demands of teaching.

When I was a traveler, though, I wrote all the time—longhand, in little notebooks.  At Bob Marley Cafes.  Rooftop bars.  Next to great, roaring cataracts.  On slow-moving barges that crossed sacred rivers:  Ganges, Mekong, Amazon.  I wrote on top of a volcano on the desert borderlands of Bolivia, with its immense salt beds that extended so far, they caused the most dramatic optical illusions.  The mountain tops looked as if they were castles floating on clouds, foundationless.  Everywhere there were flamingos: reds and pinks and oranges.

I know this is a pipe dream.  It’s best to write where you are.  Packing, moving, flying, checking into hotels, paying cab drivers, haggling in foreign languages—these are all nuisances that hamper the process of writing.  But still, I think of the great writing I did while traveling.  And I think of what could happen if I spent a month in the Yucatan in a little grass hut, doing nothing but spilling forth the seeds of my brain-energy onto the page.

Evenings I would grill freshly caught fish brought to me by a little native boy—Rico—who also would run to the store for the price of my change.  The locals would know me at the one little cantina, where the flies gather on the sugary countertops that the one bartender constantly wipes down.  I’m sure the people of that Yucatan fishing village would miss me when I was gone, pointing proudly to an empty stool, “This is where that American wrote his great novel of detection.”

And Rico, now twenty and a father of three would look up from his cerveza and say, “Yes.  This is exactly where that American wrote his novel.  I know:  I brought him his fish.”

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