I still get excited when I hear about a Vietnamese artist who gets a shot at the spotlight in these United States of America.  You see:  I grew up in a time when Vietnamese people were simply refugees, boat people—ciphers—the latest wretched of the earth to pile up on the clammy, bronze-blue feet of the Statue of Liberty.

Not so long ago, the appearance of Vietnamese in the mainstream press was a rarity—usually occasioned by a high-profiled murder or some equally sad incident that you would rather disclaim.   But this has begun to change; and in this time, as we cross the threshold of a new millennium into a brave new world of dazzle and bright, Vietnamese artists doing cool, spectacular things have become more of a commonplace.

(Also, we have had many more wars and many more refugees to take our place on the evening new.)

So this morning, I was so excited to see that a Vietnamese artist has been featured on one of my favorite programs—Tiny Desk Concert—on NPR.  For those who haven’t checked it out, Tiny Desk Concert is a program that features artists performing, live, in the offices of National Public Radio.  Usually, these artists are true craftsmen, virtuosos.  Usually, they’re little-known but on the rise.

That’s what I love about NPR—they’re always giving you a taste of some real interestingness—like those hair-netted buskers at Costco that give you a bite of good, nutritional deliciousness.  I often make a special trip to Costco, just to sample:  to wander around like a nomad and take bites of everything and then leave satisfied.

I can skip a meal.

A visit to Costco is a whole paragraph in a dense and learned tome.

This is how I am, too, with Tiny Desk Concerts.

NPR usually favors musical selections that are poppy and much more mainstream—accessible music that is only “alternative” in the way that Rolling Stone might define it:  palatable music for the liberal suburban set that isn’t so much into Billboard Magazine hits.  Van-Anh Vanessa Vo—the featured artist—is an outlier in this regard.  She plays traditional Vietnamese instruments and, though she has won many awards (even an Emmy!), she is not accessible in the way that Britney Spears is.

Vanessa Vo comes from a musical family, is the Vietnamese National Champion (of what, I don’t know…but her website mentions this!) and is notable because she has become a master of traditional Vietnamese folk instruments in a world dominated by males.  She plays a menagerie of instruments on NPR but the 16-string zither is the one that she is known for…and what fascinates me is that, though she sounds traditional and plays traditional instruments, she is actively trying to be modern.

Here is a link to her, playing the Tiny Desk Concert.

I think this is what is at the center of the creative dilemma for most writers but, especially, for writers of Asian descent.  So many forms—the novel, for instance—are simply borrowings, which must be revitalized and made relevant.  Otherwise, their use is the worst form of imitation.  The great Japanese novelists—Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe–had to make the novel something completely their own…or else their attempts at the form would have simply created pale imitations:  moths that only remind us that butterflies are more beautiful.

The Japanese novelists, like all Asian writers, also had to reinvent traditions that they inherited.  Take the haiku:  the haiku is an especially modern form that rips off the senryu form—a series of linked poems—and leaves us with a fragment of the very best part.  So while Americans think of the haiku as an old and venerable form, it is as modern as a horseless carriage:  all steel and girders.  What the Nobel Prize-winning writer, Yasunari Kawabata, does with the haiku in adapting it to his novels is a high wire act that fuses the traditional with the relentlessly modern.

Vietnamese writers are now grappling, too, with how to work within forms that only a few decades ago, they knew nothing about.  They are learning to adapt a language that is not entirely their own.  For me, waking up this morning, Vanessa Vo was particularly instructive because she takes the question from a different angle that few Vietnamese artists in the United States are thinking about:   how to make traditional stuff new, shiny, bright—worthy of a spot in the spotlight.