‘Sài Gòn, 1985’
— Joyce Chong
This beautiful and succinct poem explores themes of departures and conflict with a single, crisp image. The language is uncomplicated, images colliding in unexpected turns, “withered nails, rusted / sunlight.” There is the strong, underlying sense of humanness, of the quiet and ordinary in a time that is nothing but.
This is a wonderful example of how poetry doesn’t need to be complicated or hectic or breathless for the words to affect us. How descriptive language can be emotive, how an image can pull you in, make you search for the words beneath. I found the last few lines the most affecting for its implication. The narrator as distant, the second person POV as a mirror, reflecting back another’s memory. This poem wonderfully eludes to distance, in its multitude of forms. Between generation, between continents, between time and the faded wear of memory. It’s the sort of poem where the more you look, the more you find within it.
As an aside, I also highly recommend you listen to this conversation between Ocean Vuong and Viet Thanh Nguyen, on similar themes of generational trauma, poetry, stories, and what it is to be Vietnamese-American, how history intertwines with art and lived experience.