As
part of a writing exercise, I was asked to write my contributor's note à la
Michael Martone. So here it is in all its glory, truth, and candidness.
Hong-My
Hong-My
Basrai grew up in Saigon, currently a ghostly name in Vietnam although
ironically, it is still very much alive and kicking hard. At age twenty-two she
relocated to Southern California where her interrupted life resumed with all
the fervor of a resurrected soul.
Until
then her goal had been so simple: to survive. Her sole destination: toward the
open seas. One single vision: to be free. Having moved from a totalitarian to a
capitalist state complicated her living process entirely. Her country of
adoption was not the all-perfect heaven she envisioned. The choices and
opportunities given her, from career to living mode to the varied means to
express her individuality, in fact, muddied up her path to happiness.
The
practical immigrant pursued Chemical Engineering only to realize several years
into her profession that she desired to live intensely. She did not enjoy to be
locked up into the four partition walls of a cubicle. She wanted to use her
mind in a different way, to write about life and life's experience instead of
water qualities reports. She disliked to have to follow the strict formulaic
style of technical writing, to always have to insert the words
"respectively" or to have only Flow A and Flow B for objects of
discussion. Flows that did not seem to flow and populated with fish, with grassy
banks on both sides where fishermen dangled their poles and further on, lovers
rolled like logs in locked embrace, making new lives amidst birds and butterflies; but adhered
strictly to nonsensical numbers as dried as dead skin.
Free
to choose, she switched field to become a freelance writer, the true, literary
kind. She devoted herself to writing short stories and books--a memoir was born
of her passion and countless poems and short stories--to discover soon enough
that she couldn't conjure two cents out of her hard work. She learned to accept
the state of perpetual rejection as a blessing in disguise, because at least,
the bitterness of it kept her pouring herself onto the sterile, blank
pages--her disappointments, wrath, hopelessness, but also her courage,
persistence, her fierce ability to survive and navigate to the places of
visionary dimensions, cycling back to the time when there was no choice but to
sail, to sail on a leaky boat like a paper boat in the monsoon rain, to the sea, despite the risk
of losing her life at the hand of extreme elements or the pirates, or
recaptured and locked up like a farm animal, to be sent to the labor camps
until God knows when.
