After answering the call from Grant Jarrett, I tagged Maggie Thach, a talented nonfiction writer who has recently relocated to San Diego. Since she doesn’t have a blog, I’m posted her responses here. Make sure you scroll down to see who she tags…
What are you working on?
I am working on editing the first draft of my memoir and dabbling in shorter essays I get inspired to write after reading an amazing Modern Love column or New Yorker article.
How does your work differ from the other works in the some area/genre?
My memoir is about my time in South Korea as an English teacher. I decided initially to live in Korea because I had met someone amazing in my low-residency grad school program, who was working and living in Seoul. I had just gotten out of a long relationship, and I was grappling with issues of what I wanted to do for a career and finding my place. I just felt really unsettled at the time, and then I decided to take this huge leap. It turned out my time in Korea gave me that solid footing I was looking for. It grounded me in a lot of ways. So my memoir is essentially an immigrant story. There’s a lot of inner conflict and asking myself questions like, “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?” I am the oldest daughter of Vietnamese immigrant parents, and I have always wrestled with feelings of otherness. This story is one about identity, but it’s a reverse immigrant story. I make myself an immigrant by living in a foreign country, and in doing so, I understand my parents and my roots a little bit better.
Why do you write what you do?
A big part of it is to find out about myself and my family’s history. In writing this first draft, I’ve asked my parents a lot of questions I never would have been brave enough to ask before. I asked my dad about his time in the war. He never talked about it when I was younger. He told me how he was a paratrooper for the South Vietnamese army and how, after the fall of Saigon, he was in a reeducation camp for six years before he came to America. My dad was 40 when he had me, and I never realized that he had this whole, full life before I came along. We tend to think immigrants from the Vietnam War were young and on the cusp of making a life for themselves in their home country before being violently torn away from it. Or, at least, I thought that. I’m closer to my mom, and she’s told me more about her escape from Vietnam. I think this project has been a vehicle to help me probe my family’s history. Also, I think that the immigrant story is an important one to tell. It’s ever-evolving and so multi-faceted. The world will never be without immigrants, so it’s important to understand that journey.
How does your writing process work?
I just graduated from my low-residency grad program last December (UC Riverside Palm Desert), and it has been a struggle to maintain a schedule since then. What usually happens is that I’ll put off writing for a few days or weeks, telling myself I need to work up the momentum to really start writing and pouring out words. I’ll make it this huge obstacle to conquer until it gets so big that it’s overwhelming. Basically, I just pysch myself out. And then when I have felt thoroughly guilty, I will pull up my playlist on YouTube, put in my earbuds and start typing. The worst days are when I’m just stuck, when I know what I need to write but not know how to get there on the page. The best days are when my writing takes me somewhere totally unexpected.
Maggie would like to tag Cynthia Romanowski who holds an MFA in fiction from UCR’s low res program in Palm Desert. Her short stories have appeared in The Weekly Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, MARY: A Journal Of New Writing and The Whistling Fire. She is a regular contributor to Lit Central OC and co-producer of Tongue & Groove OC, a new reading series for folks who live behind the Orange Curtain.