Ep1. Cathy Linh Che

ZG: Hi, Cathy. Welcome to Proverse. And I would like to start off by saying we feel as though there cannot be a better time to host you. Congratulations on Becoming Ghost, which was just published on April 29. I got my copy yesterday— your book is truly inspiring. There's so much I would like to talk about! One of the first things that stood out to me was that multiple poems in this collection share the title “Becoming Ghost”, which is also (coincidentally) the title of the book. Could you talk about the significance of that title, why you chose to repeat it across several poems, and whether there's a common thread or seam among among them that readers should look for something that might form a larger cohesive narrative?

CLC: The poems in the book Becoming Ghost arose from some of my experiences as I was exploring my parents' experiences as Vietnamese refugees who ended up as extras in the film Apocalypse Now. What happened was there was an incident between myself and my father, which resulted in the two of us not being in contact with one another anymore. And in that moment, I felt that I had become this ghost daughter to him. He had this real person living in the world, but, actually, this other person, this other ghost self was also in existence. The person that he imagined me to be or he imagined would be I'd be doing in that moment. So that had also became talking to him? Who is my father if we are not interacting anymore? So it it's like, who is my father if I'm not talking to him? Who is my father if we are not interacting anymore? So it he became a kind of figment of my imagination in some ways. And as I was writing the book throughout, I was also engaging in, automatic writing practices, which involve just listening to the next line or the next voice that comes and transcribing it. And so in some ways, I had also come to realize that some of the work that I was doing was I was just listening very carefully to the ghost in my life. So my grandmother who is no longer alive, for instance, and writing out her voice and her story. And my father, my mother, you know, these people who I have, some understanding about that type of writing, which, you know, in poetry we call it persona. Right? But they're not really personas to me. They're people. So I came upon after writing much of the book that it was it was like a kind of poetic seance where you channel the voices of the people that you love or care about or you channel different voices. Even there's a even though I I mentioned all of these voices of my family, I also have a poem in the voice of, the actor Steven Yeun who, played Glenn Rhee in The Walking Dead, which is about the zombie apocalypse. And so that was a voice that came through because I was just watching The Walking Dead so insistently at that time. And it was during a time when my dad wasn't talking to me. And it was a way of sort of being able to channel feelings toward my father or towards somebody, you know, I also wasn't talking to, you know, somebody who I had fallen in love with. And so it was a and he was, like, Korean American. Right? So there was a way where it was the act of watching this television show was a way to channel feelings toward people who were absent in my life.

ZG: That's definitely an aspect of “walking dead” that I didn't understand before talking to you, but I also have a question kind of on the same tangent. In an interview with NBC News, you said that you saw a connection between the show Walking Dead and your parents' experiences as refugees of the Vietnam War. What does that say to you in terms of how people often choose to engage with post apocalyptic stories that are not based in reality rather than facing the real histories of war? What does using imagery from Walking Dead allow you to give more attention to the trauma of war and migration?

CLC: Thank you so much for that question. It's very thoughtful, and I appreciate it. I was talking to a writer recently who was saying that while she is trying to write speculative fiction. It is difficult because trying to write an alternative universe that's dystopian and, you know, postapocalyptic is hard because our reality is also dystopian and postapocalyptic in many ways. So the term apocalypse is around you know, it's about the end of the world. Right? We're thinking about the world after the end of the world is postapocalyptic. So there's a way that our realities have often been inflected by or reflected in these other channels because I think a lot of times, realist literature or realist journalism doesn't hit in the same way that creating a new whole new world or whole new universe and seeing it fall apart and watching those parallels does for many people. So as a young person you know, this is a tangent. But as a young person, I remember watching this, TV show— It was an anime. It was called Robotech, and it was about the end of the world the end of the earth. And so these characters go off into space, and they're at war. They're at war in the universe. And there was something about it that didn't feel as heavy physically as real death, but it felt very emotive to me. It was just as emotive, as some of these spaces. So I think Walking Dead is very heavy. There's so much violence. There's a lot of blood. There's a lot of pain, and it's very gripping and it's thrilling. But it's also because it's fantasy and you're not looking at live death, it allows people space to watch it and emote to it differently. And so I think that real death or real people dying, real people living through war is oftentimes really hard to watch. And that's what people are experiencing now as they're sort of watching they are not sort of. They are watching on their phones this live streamed death happening. People are literally dying before our eyes daily, and it's really reminiscent of the Vietnam War, which was the first televised war. And now we're watching our first, like, cell phone livestreamed war coming at us. And knowing that, you know, when my family was in Vietnam, they were the ones who were being bombed. And now I'm you know, now that I'm a US, you know, born citizen, it's like that's what my taxpayer dollars are doing. And so there is this kind of interesting moment of parallel, but also twist because it's not just a parallel where I am living my parents' lives. I'm actually living on the other side of my parents' lives in many ways, fifty years into the future. And so I think that there's a lot of space for realism, fantasy, speculative writing, witness, action. All of these things, I think, are in concert. I don't think that they are opposed to one another. I think that they are part of the field. And I think that what I would continue to want and push for is that our field doesn't see itself as separate from the possibility of action or change. Because I think that sometimes people feel very locked into— what does art do? It's not useful. And I think that's obviously not true, but there has been messages along the way that teaches that. There have been messages deliberately seeded by the CIA within the writing spaces like the Iowa Writers Workshop, which is the kind of the the oldest space in the country for MFA programs. It's the model for people. And the model was funded by the CIA, was shaped by the CIA, was encouraged so that American creative writing could move toward a mode where we are thinking about, you know, individual lives, the nuclear family, and that being the largest drama. And I don't think that that is not valid drama to write about. But I also think that it is clear that that is a mode of American writing that exists because of the desires from the state to create this soft power that elevates the personal over the political or the familial over the political rather than seeing these things as, enmeshed, entrenched. And then so then it leads a lot of artists to be like, well, what does art do? And it leads a lot of writers to imagine themselves as very helpless and very powerless when you know that we are extremely powerful. Because if we weren't powerful, then why would journalists be killed and targeted to this day? Why are poets being killed and targeted to this day? Because there is a lot of power in our words and our naming and our truth telling and our imagining. So I probably packed in other things outside of your question, but these are some thoughts that I really care about when it comes to writing. Thank you so much for that. And, I saw the poem zombie apocalypse, the making of kind of a shift in perspective as you reveal that the zombies are not in fact mythical figures, but your family members with yourself as the director, which in some ways allows you to step into the shoes of Francis Ford Coppola, who is the director of Apocalypse Now.

ZG: In many moments from this book, Coppola is often brought up casually from your parents' perspective, such as giving stage directions to them. Were these interactions actual recounts from your parents of what happened on set? Yeah. Many are actual recollections of what happened on set. Many are researched.

CLC: Some are conversations between me and the director in my mind. So it the shiftiness of, you know, it shifts, but it is based on real Mhmm. Real dialogue or real sentiments or real things that occurred. And that zombie apocalypse now, poem, The Making Of features my family as zombies in in large part because I'm I'm thinking about grief. And sometimes when I read this poem aloud I'm surprised by how many people in my family have died, you know. And I remember once asking my mother this question and she's game to answer anything so I don't feel like I was being insensitive at all. But I said, do you know people who've died from war? And she said, too many to count. I I couldn't even imagine. So just thinking about my family creating the film about our own lives would require people who are not with me now to participate. So my grandmother, I have an I have an uncle who died during the war as well. He was a priest. I have four cousins who were children with him. You know? My older sister, was a baby. She died during the war, but not during not because of, you know, a bomb or something, but because of other things. So there's all of these people in my life who have died. They've perished. And how could we possibly go back and recreate something? And I think poetry is part of the answer. And thinking about that also makes me think about the power inherent in being a director or a writer and the difficult responsibility of it. So even as I do critique Coppola, I have to also critique myself because in the moment that one steps into power, it gives the possibility that you are getting it wrong and you're rendering other people people who do have their own agency and power. But in your own power, you are you are utilizing it in a way that could be flattening or dehumanizing or nonrepresentative. And if they are not there to represent themselves, then there is always that risk. So yeah, I think that in many ways, my book is an answer to the the very real the reality that Coppola didn't know that many Vietnamese people. Right? So then we need to be able to, as this generation has the ability to to speak for ourselves. But then when I'm speaking for my parents, like, what type of, what type of I don't know if violence is quite the right word, but what type of power am I taking that is not mine to take in many ways? Or you you can always wield it, but what type of power am I taking that isn't appropriate? So that polemic is is, not necessarily answered, but it's asked.

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