by Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen

When I was a little girl growing up in Minnesota I used to love to race. I loved the sensation of my heart roaring against my chest and how the world around me would become a peripheral blur—the suspension of time and sound—the focus and exhilaration of speed. I have never felt more free.

Lately, more so than ever, I have come to realize that to be an artist, one truly needs that sense of freedom—space for ideas and feelings to grow, room for the spirit and stories to run wild, lightness to encounter the darkness inside us. Having grown up in a fairly traditional Vietnamese family, it is safe to say that as a woman artist, I have a complicated relationship with the concept of freedom.

I am the youngest daughter of seven children. My family left Sai Gon right before the fall in 1975. I was born in Sai Gon, but grew up in St. Paul. Even though my family was isolated from other Vietnamese people in the Midwest and I seem “Americanized,” I was raised by both parents with a strong sense of what it meant to be a Vietnamese girl. I grew up hearing from my mother, “Girls don’t do this...Girls don’t do that...” and desperately envied the freedom my brothers were allowed but my older sisters and myself were not. I learned that it was a woman’s duty to wash the dishes, take care of children, clean the house and cook all the meals. That duty is passed down from daughter to daughter—married to unmarried, oldest to youngest.

Being the youngest, however, I was luckily spared the pressure of having to be highly “successful” or be one of the first in my family to produce grandchildren. (All seven children did go to college, however, and my parents now already have fourteen grandchildren.) I was also lucky that my parent’s weren’t, and aren’t, materialistic people and never insisted that my siblings and I become lawyers or doctors or engineers. I was lucky that their main concern was that we had good, well-paying jobs and that they didn’t have to worry about us financially. Hell, they’d be happy if I made a living getting shot out of a circus canon as long as it didn’t involve drugs or sex and I had health benefits.

With all that in mind, I graduated from high school thinking that I was going to become a “journalist” since I was good at English and it was more “stable” than being a poet even though I excelled in my creative writing classes and loved to write. Not only did I love to write, but it was my main source of consolation —my journal was my closest friend and I loved reading books. I even opted not to study Calculus or Physics during my senior year and took A.P. English and Speech class instead. Yet, despite my passion for language, I knew that some day I would have to help take care of my parents and that I had to be “practical.”

I started college in the Twin Cities at the University of Minnesota with the best of intentions, and innocently enrolled my first semester in “Introduction to Women Writers” as one of my electives. That semester I read A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and I was hooked. There was no turning back. Gasoline had been poured on the match and my heart was struck. I wanted to be a writer.

The next two years at the University of Minnesota I took Creative Writing and Women’s Studies classes as my main electives, and my desire to major in Creative Writing and get away from the patriarchal constraints at home became stronger. I did a daring thing as an unmarried Vietnamese girl and ran 1,500 miles away from home to transfer to Mills College in Oakland, California where I could at least major in English Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing and not be the only person of color in my classes. Fortunately, my brother Hieu was nearby at the time, getting his Ph.D. in Math at UC Berkeley which helped my parent’s feel okay about me being far away.

With the freedom of being away from my parents and siblings, and the freedom of being in the Bay Area, I came into myself as a feminist and artist. At Mills I studied Shakespeare and poetry and ventured into book arts and photography. I spent weekend nights in the dark room and months in the book making studio. I took more classes in Women’s Literature and studied film with Trinh T. Minh-Ha at UC Berkeley. I letterpress printed my senior poetry thesis and hand bound it too. I immersed myself in the creative process and reveled in the ecstasy of producing art, all the while not caring how expensive art supplies were and getting into debt.

When I graduated from Mills I didn’t realize how hard it would be to make a living, not only as an artist, but in general. I had naive illusions about not selling out and not buying into the hyper-capitalism of the 90’s and wanting to be an artist (whatever that meant). The reality was that I was working several, random, part-time jobs and not even making enough money to pay my rent, credit card bills AND student loans. As much as it was painful to admit, I needed to move home to figure things out.