Blog #2: Poets, Poems & Sense of Place - Tien Dang

Prompt: In this collection, the sense of place has shifted or taken on life in the eyes of the poet.  Talk about the place, the meaning of it to the speaker, the way the images make it specific

I gravitated towards the poems more this week because I felt the beauty and language gave me more of a picturesque sense of place and evoked a certain beauty behind pain of history and the past.  Specifically, I felt I could relate to Pham Tien Duat's poem because it spoke of Viet Nam and the labor market.  I felt more sympathetic towards this poem because a large portion of my family still reside in Viet Nam and I've heard a lot of stories from my parents on what it was like to grow up in Viet Nam before, after, and during the war.

Pham Tien Duat writes "hunger gnaws at your gut" and I could imagine the desperation for someone to make ends meet financially to provide for him or herself and his or her family.  I visually see someone looking at all the job opportunities and just thinking of the need to land a job - any job, to financially provide.  Going back to the beginning of the poem, Pham writes "They don't care who you are, where you come from."  The rich or economically sound take away the identity from the poor or economically unstable because their identity no longer matters to them - as long as the job can be done, that's all that matters to those who only care about making money.  They want a driver who gets results no matter what it takes.

My dad told me near my grandma's village, a Nike store opened up and a lot of people thought that was a good thing- it meant that there would be more stable jobs.  However, I've seen enough of what it means to have American brands or American corporation open up factories in third world countries and the cost of it.  It was much more than stable jobs, but the working conditions.  This poems speaks to the mental state of these factories - they provide labor but at the cost of laborer's health and the environmental health.

I love that Pham has contrast in the poems like "A new sky must mean new kinds of clouds."  Though there is vast and expansive opportunities, there's a new set of problems.  A new sky, means new sets of clouds whether stormy or not.    It's just so beautifully written.  Like the adage "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," there's always two sides to a story and a positive with the negative.

What I am a bit confused about is the "you" that Pham refers to.

However, I did look up the poem to see the Vietnamese version and how it differentiates from the English translation:

Overall, the Vietnamese language takes more words to express a feeling or thought so there's a bit that's lost in the translation.  I definitely get a different feel for it reading it in the language it's intended.  Pham talks about all the people who are working in the labor force and he understands who they are and they're taken from pieces of the mountains and rivers of various places, and bringing them all to this one place to work.  As a result, the history of war is slowly changing where people are no longer directly linked to the war.  Healing commenced, and less can recall or relate to the war that our ancestors escaped.  Thus, there is one person left standing, with little relation or recollection of the war.