Sophia Terazawa on Mistranslation and Writing in a Traitor Tongue

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Rarely do I occupy my father’s tongue in literary spaces, though this tongue technically came first.

In Texas, I grew up in the demilitarized zone that my parents made out of English. My mother’s Vietnamese and my father’s Japanese were set aside for their love toward each other, but English became a site of giving and taking. When my father was kind, he spoke through music, especially American folk songs of protest and justice. When cruel, however, his words inverted. He could be harsh. He raised me to be like the boy he could never have. He insisted on total power and zero weakness. This performance had been passed down from his father’s memory of being a prisoner of war at a camp in Siberia, which my grandfather eventually left with his life because he simply learned the language of his captors. Like my father, my Japanese grandfather could be charming.

My mother, implicitly, preferred that I learn very little of her language. She was a refugee, which meant Vietnamese became a private speech of banishment, and surrender. Much like Ojiisan, she pledged allegiance to another country to escape her own. On the boat, she too bound her chest to appear like a boy.

Today, I struggle to inherit my mother’s music, picking up what I can and stumbling like a fussy child forward. I’ve suffered around this topic elsewhere and wish to pivot toward a conversation about meter, ambiguity, and, of course, the national traitor. I’ll direct our attention to an exhibit:

Exhibit (A.3)

Une pomme một quả
roots in Sino-Vietnamese

apiece the black car ruin.
果 in Hà Nội (kwa) or (wa)

of Sài Gòn’s angel. Quan
Âm help us merci trop.

That catalogue of sound
between us blew an apple

grove apart our diplomatic
man inside his diplomatic

vehicle. We stood there
and inside of that another.

[From Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum, 2021), “Exhibit (A.3)”]

These margins invoke my Vietnamese grandfather, his untimely death, and what little I know of his character in the fabric of a larger story of forced disappearances, public executions, but most importantly, resilience and metamorphosis.

Recently, I found myself in Saigon among my mother’s elders. Rumors of danger continue to stalk my aunts and distant kin to this day. But like most rumors, there are numerous inconsistencies. We don’t know who remains alive. Language perhaps conceals further harm. We hold vigil for those taken by the state. But which state?

“It doesn’t matter anymore” is a phrase I often hear. A gravestone is set with an alleged date of birth, an alleged photo of the vanished, and no conclusive date of death. Among such silences, I realize my role as a missing ear. What I don’t know protects my family; I can’t indict a ghost.

Ông ngoại died in a car decades ago. His wife survived the blast. His children fled their country quickly and efficiently. The choice I make to document only half of a story reflects a desire to simultaneously conceal and tell. I too just want to go home. Yet, lines of thought veer from overlapping maps. Voices follow each other into the shadows. Clarity eludes us.

Somewhere near Huế, minutes away from the dynastic capital, a man—let’s simply call him Uncle—turns to look at me in our rental car. We’ve been talking about education during the war.

“At the time,” Uncle says obscurely. “You can pick a second language to learn: Russian or English. Choosing one means you are with us, the other to betray us.”

“Can you guess?” Uncle begins to laugh. “Which one your mother chooses?”

He makes a sound, voo-voo, of a land mine going off. My mother, sitting next to me, isn’t laughing. I think of Amelia Rosselli, a “poet of research,” who wrote in three languages, often at the same time—French, English, and Italian. I think of the Japanese mōra-timed system of linguistic stoppages: 病院とキャンプと子供たちとか 。。。何でもない 。。。でも何ですか、あの赤い空 。

Thus, I speak of camps and hospitals in undulating tones. In Saigon, I’m further shaken by a similar motion sickness of speech. No public figure has said a word about Palestine here, not in the airports, not on the state television, not in the karaoke machines sprawled on concrete across the city’s centers, not even in the villages, where my cousins continue to dutifully plant joss sticks on unmarked graves. Genocide has become a marker of ongoing consciousness on Vietnamese soil, but one line splits between the silences of then and the silences of today.

It’s December. I visit museums commemorating a people’s resistance to colonial occupation. There are underground tunnels, ruins, well-lit with escape routes in multiple languages, as Uncle repeats, voo-voo. Today, he works as a tour guide to war veterans and their grown children. He collects cash from my mother, as well. I don’t ask where the money goes.

“Death,” he says proudly glaring at my mother. “Death to all imperialists!”

My mother only shakes her head. She knows to not talk back. I share this publicly and become a traitor to both Vietnam and the United States. My heart breaks for a second time. I don’t know where to go next with this talk. For the last two or three minutes, I hope to demonstrate a point of further mistranslation.

*

Post-performance note: After this brief lecture, I instructed the audience to barricade me in an adjoining room behind a pair of unlocked doors. “Under no circumstance,” I said, “should anyone let me out until my time is over.”

The audience took a moment to fully plant their bodies against the metal doors. Then, I proceeded to run and throw myself against the barricade, against the audience, from the other side. I screamed and cried out in terror. I clawed at the doors. I slammed my shoulders into the metal. No one let me out, as instructed. Soon, the performance was done.

Kansas City
February 10, 2024

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Tetra Nova by Sophia Terazawa is available via Deep Vellum Publishing.