Top 10 Great Works of Literature I Am Still Drafting
) A sonnet about the medieval combat and roleplaying game Mount and Blade.
) A short story about a young woman experimenting with sobriety while working as a staff writer on an animated kid’s TV show.
) A novel called The King of Not Killing Myself. Every chapter starts with: “In the year of the ____ (insert animal here), I _______ (insert unhinged behavior here).” It’s unreadable. So incoherent it’s borderline offensive. I hate it.
) A tweet about how the teens in Euphoria dress weird.
) A poem about my roommate and his love of birds and Magic the Gathering.
) A poem about my other roommate, who I gave my 20-gallon aquarium to when I moved here to Iowa City.
) An email to a man who may become my new therapist, possibly, maybe, if all goes well.
) An ode to myself titled “Ode to Steven Duong.” Horrid.
) A story/chapter in which the narrator stalks a man who once pulled up on him in a parking to yell at him after he cut him off on the road.
) A poem with the lines: “I’ll be better, chemically speaking. / Even so. When I hear you speak / of and to the devil, I’ll feel it big time.” It’s a ghazal. It’s for Elliott Smith.
On Phoebe Bridgers, Ancestor Worship, and Copycat Killers
This blog post was originally featured on Medium’s music page on June 24, 2020.
I’ve had the new Phoebe Bridgers record on heavy rotation since it came out on Thursday, and while I’m not yet sure where it stands in comparison to her past work, I seem to keep swinging back to that title track. “Punisher” is Bridgers’ sung letter to the late Elliott Smith, a gesture through the veil at the Portland songwriter she describes as one of her biggest influences, her own signature double-tracked vocals a quiet homage to his. Something about the track feels immediately alluring on first listen, but it’s tough to pin down. Maybe it’s the sweeping melodies, or the keys dancing high behind her vocals, or the yearning, just slightly mischievous tenor of her lyrics: “I wonder if she ever thought / the storybook tiles on the roof were too much / from the window it’s not a bad show / if your favorite thing’s dianetics or stucco.”
It’s sharp writing, but when I listened again after learning the song’s you was Elliott Smith, it bit deep, and I mean really deep. Chipped some bone, maybe. The song assumed this new form, the words and melody I’d heard the first time around molding themselves over something else, something darker in substance, yet somehow brighter for its attempt to hold such an impossible conversation. It’s a letter to a ghost.
One of my goals this year while traveling and working on my writing was to understand my experiences and identities as a writer on a more global, communal scale. It’s easy to think of writing as this very individual thing, something done in your room alone, by candlelight, on a typewriter, wearing black, pouring your feelings out, etcetera. Part of this is owed to notions of artistic genius, this idea that the individual rises above the mores and masses of their time to pen that classic book, poem, record, whatever. Bridgers isn’t exempt from this — she’s constantly assigned this exceptionalism by critics and music journalists, despite her insistence that her new record is “nothing avant-garde,” that she mostly just borrows from the artists she loves. She observes and she writes.
And that’s just the thing — perhaps her music speaks so directly to me and my experiences as a writer because it’s in constant conversation with the art and music she herself holds dear. “Punisher” articulates that feeling of writerly communion so directly: “What if I told you I feel like I know you but we never met?” I’ve idolized (and unidolized) a lot of different artists and writers over the past twenty-three years: Sean Bonnette, Kanye West, Ruth Madievsky, Joni Mitchell, Noname, Terrance Hayes. I can’t help that their words have bled into my own. Sometimes I hear one of their songs or read one of their poems for the first time in a long time and well up with genuine emotion, as if I’ve just gotten off the phone with an old friend.
Sometimes, taking in the work of an artist foundational to my growth, an artist whose voice I’ve internalized so much over the years that they begin to read like kin, feels like communing with an ancestor. I don’t necessarily mean this in a spiritual way. I just mean that writing and art-making is truly such a communal act. Art isn’t made in a vacuum. It is necessarily in conversation with the artists who came before you, the ones who laid the foundations that you’re either building atop or leaping from, the artists you call your peers, the artists you fucking hate, basically anyone, artist or not, who’s ever made an even slightly apparent physical or emotional impact on your life. These are the voices hiding in the crevices of your own.
Art = theft is a cliché at this point, but still, I’ve struggled with this from time to time. I’ve written stories that read like Denis Johnson fanfiction. It’s hard to read Sula and not go ahead and write Toni Morrison knock-off prose for the next week-and-a-half. It’s hard to read Terrance Hayes and not splice his warm warhammer of a voice into your own sonnets. These words are some of the sharpest words to be written on paper. Ever. Why pretend they don’t shape you? Writing is, to a great degree, ancestor worship, and that’s not a bad thing. Why does it have to be corny to love art so much that you begin to see the artist as a ghost you can talk to? Light that incense. Put that bowl of fruit out. Sample that record. Throw that séance.
The last verse of “Punisher” is such a deft move on Bridgers’ part. When she labels herself “a copycat killer,” she unravels for the listener what must be the simple yet overwhelming reality of Smith’s impact on her own understanding of herself — her voice has always curled around the darkness of Smith’s, which circles so often themes of addiction, depression, and toxic relationships. She admits to stealing, but she shades it with the ambiguity of her own admiration: “either I’m careless or I wanna get caught.” There’s a hint of pride there, alive and grinning. It’s a real admission, and it comes just after “I swear I’m not angry, that’s just my face.”
I’ve always admired the ease with which Bridgers can lurch from heartache to humor, the way she can deadpan a crossbow bolt of a one-liner over melancholy strings and hovering synths. Her music is frequently described as confessional, in the vein of singer-songwriter acts as far-ranging as Mitski, Taylor Swift, and Bright Eyes, but it’s how funny she is that sets her apart in my book. The confessional indie singer formula doesn’t quite fit her — she knows when to temper her earnestness with a funny little observation or reference that tips the whole fountain over. That capacity for humor and homage in her writing is what actually feels most honest to me. The delivery is plaintive and quiet, but there’s so much damn heart in every one of her half-spun jokes and sampled turns of phrase.
Anyhow, I’m writing all this from a place of admiration too. I’m at home, still listening to the record, turning it over in my head with each play. I’m writing some stuff that borrows pretty heavily from Seamus Heaney and Diana Khoi Nguyen, not to mention Phoebe Bridgers. I’m making plans to move to a different coast. I’m adding to my roster of ancestors on the daily. I’m a copycat killer with a chemical cut — either I’m careless or I wanna get caught.
Sending love to all my favorite ghosts.
Squirrel Flower’s Caroline Polachek Cover is a Soaring Act of Translation
This blog post was originally featured on Medium’s music page on July 13, 2020.
Steven also wrote the artist bio for Squirrel Flower’s forthcoming sophomore album planet (i), which you can find here!
When Boston-based indie artist Squirrel Flower (aka Ella Williams) released her rendition of Caroline Polachek’s “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” it had been just two months since her headlining US tour was cancelled. Since then, the future of live music has been strained and uncertain. Artists whose livelihoods depend primarily on shows and associated merch sales will likely have to wait as far as 2021 to get back on stage, and to make matters worse, long-standing venues (including Williams’ local haunt, Great Scott in Allston) are facing closures at every corner. For folks that rely on music and the safe spaces, communities, and funds it sustains, the path forward seems hazy. There is no going back to normal — we have to find new ways of understanding music and how we live it. Which is, in many ways, what a cover song is.
Williams says this of her “So Hot” cover: “For the last show of my truncated tour in March, my band and I decided to play a cover of ‘So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings’ after rehearsing it once during sound check (we are all huge Caroline Polachek fans). It was the last song I played live before quarantine. I got home from tour and immediately recorded it in my basement.”
I’ve seen Williams play maybe half a dozen times in college venues and house shows, and yet it is this cover that most faithfully captures the tangible, rippling energy of her live full-band performances. On the track, Williams trades Polachek’s glittery synths and syncopated bass for a steady beat and a set of warm, nearly liquid guitars, throwing her stirring voice over that instrumental like a blue veil. It’s glorious and molten and alive with color. When the drums crash and Williams’ voice sails out with the guitars and bass at 1:08 (“get a little lonely / get a little more close to me”), I picture that veil of her voice soaked in honey and molten steel, melting into itself and releasing all of its dye into the air. This cover makes me feel smoke and fire and heat. All of that feeling is rising, rising, trying to get as close as it can to the sun but never quite reaching it. There’s such longing here.
Polachek’s original lyrics tore at the frustrations of a long-distance relationship made close-but-not-close-enough through the digital curtain (“don’t send me photos, you’re making it worse / ’cause you’re so hot it’s hurting my feelings”), but delivered by Williams, they become heart-melting and downright haunting. She translates Polachek’s art pop sugar into indie rock honey, and in doing so, gives it a new explosive power, both mournful and triumphant. In a way, the song too is about translation — translating desire across distance and digital media, translating longing into something tangible and fleshed by melody.
New wave songwriter Nick Lowe once said: “when I find a cover song that I like, I’ll work away at it until I kind of believe that I wrote it.” Covering a song, especially a beloved one, is at its core an act of translation. As the artist, you take the lyrics, melodies, and rhythms of a song written by someone else and filter them through your own understanding of and relationship to that song. A good cover, like a good translation, is as reflective of the cover artist’s creative spark as it is the original songwriter’s. The best covers breathe new life into the song, illuminating it from within, like a white paper lantern pitched red by the flame lit inside it. It’s a kind of community-building too, a way to relate to one’s musical contemporaries and ancestors. Think Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” and Whitney Houston’s “I will Always Love You,” which twist the sounds of Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton into surprising and now-iconic forms. This is where the Squirrel Flower cover succeeds. It rewrites. It recontextualizes and reanimates and reimagines.
In a tweet, Caroline Polachek commends Williams, saying the cover “sounds less like a cover than the original does which is to say it sounds more like the original version than the original does…” It’s high praise, and it’s dead-on. Williams’ hazy, lush rendition digs at the folksiness of the songwriting lurking behind Polachek’s pop-flavored original. It’s the P.C. pop heartache of a digital dancefloor bop translated into the indie, nearly-country yearning of a basement studio record. A cover is such a strange thing. It’s a work of beauty and a work of translation. This one is a testament to two artists at the height of their songwriting powers, and it’s a sign of good things to come. Polachek has signed onto 2021’s (hopeful) Outside Lands roster. Williams has been playing live shows online throughout the quarantine. As long as musicians keep making art and spinning each other’s work into new and incredible shapes, music and its potential for building communities will have a future.
A brief history of aquascaping, or how Steven met a famous person
I just left Hong Kong. Since I last wrote, I spent a month and a half in Shanghai, a week in Guangzhou (with my lovely friend Angela Xiao), and five nights in HK. I just checked out of this nice hostel on a street that happens to be a big thoroughfare for many of the protestors right now. Honestly, I’m not sure how much I should share about the events going on, considering I’m back in Ch*na now, but I guess if you’d like to hear about things going on in the city from someone who has been there and seen these things firsthand, call me/beep me (if you wanna reach me).
The primary subject of today’s post is a nice gentleman named Dave Chow. I stumbled upon him quite by accident two nights ago while walking up and down Hong Kong’s busy famous goldfish market street. Walking amongst the busy crowd on the sidewalk, I caught a glance of a cool-looking second-story storefront with a beautiful tank in the window, and so I tore off into a side street and climbed up a flight of stairs to check it out. Boom. I step into a room full of these absolutely gorgeous fish tanks of various sizes, hand-arranged and detailed so immaculately, so painstakingly, that I had to bug the bald guy in glasses cleaning one of them to tell me who put it all together. This man happened to be Dave.
His store is like the Apple Store of aquarium shops, clean and minimal and bright, with brilliant colorful displays shining behind sheets of glass. We talked for a long, long time. Only after I left and looked him up did I learn Dave was VERY well-known in a VERY niche international community. I mean, I thought he was special, given how singularly beautiful his aquariums were, but like, the dude has videos on Youtube with a million-plus views. Look him up, he’s cool. Also, at this point, I’ll admit the title of this blog post is clickbait. But still, even though he’s not a beauty influencer, a bunch of aquarium nerds (including me now) follow his work avidly online.
Dave Chow (I didn’t take this pic, it’s from the iNtErNeT)
Something you should know: Dave is known throughout the world as an award-winning aquascaper, and for those at home unfamiliar with the term, this means that Dave is a master in the art of arranging natural materials and elements in a freshwater aquarium to create a cohesive scene completely underwater. Wikipedia calls it “underwater gardening,” but Dave insists the hobby is a lot more nuanced than that. It’s part gardening, sure, but also a bit of sculpture, painting, architecture, and animal husbandry. The scale at which aquascaping can be done ranges from small five-gallon nano-tanks kept in offices to massive hundred-thousand-gallon exhibits at public aquariums. It all began with the Dutch, who pioneered their own lush garden-style tanks in the 1930’s, but the current incarnation of the hobby is largely indebted to the late Japanese aquarist Takashi Amano, who revised European aquascaping by incorporating artistic elements from Japanese gardening and Buddhist wabi-sabi tradition, pioneering the now-ubiquitous Nature Aquarium (NA) style, and a distinctive standard to which all contemporary aquascapers owe their craft to. Nowadays, aquascaping is a worldwide hobby. Dave’s Hong Kong aquarium and aquascape store caters to the many aquarium hobbyists in the region, as well as local clients who want custom designed freshwater fish tanks in their own homes and offices.
Dutch style scape. Honestly I don’t really like these. They look too colorful. Colors are gross.
Nature scape by Dave. WHOA
As the above image demonstrates, Dave is damn good at what he does. I’ll include some photos of his tanks I found online, but the centerpiece tank I saw in his shop blows everything here (and everything I’ve ever seen) out of the water. It’s this absolutely huge rimless glass aquarium with a sloping dirt bottom, with these beautiful stone mountains rising skyward at an angle. Descending from these stone structures are long, winding driftwood roots, drifting downward like windswept trees. The tank is blooming with a variety of aquatic plants, though none are so large as to obscure the centerpiece stones. I wish I could’ve snapped a pic, but this tank’s aquascape is under wraps. It’s apparently a work-in-progress for a competition next year.
As I spoke to Dave, I quickly became aware that he views aquascaping as not only a hobby and a craft, but a truly unique art form, a breed of visual communication and expression that he has fallen in love with over the years. For Dave, aquascaping is a practice spiritually descended from sculpture and drawing, but also Chinese calligraphy, Classical Chinese poetry, bonsai dioramas, and Zen gardening. When I began to tell him about my own artistic project, which ties poetry and aquarium-keeping together under the concept of containment, he was intrigued, telling me that he actually sees his own work as closer to that of poet than a fish keeper or gardener. There is a big difference, he says, between a craftsperson and an artist. Anyone can learn the techniques required to build an aquascape, and anyone can use those techniques to emulate, stone-by-stone, plant-by-plant, the styles they see, but it takes an artist to devise a vision, and more specifically, a narrative behind each tank. Aquascaping, in Dave’s mind, always demands craft, but a truly good piece of art depends on the vision.
His own self-described aquascaping style is a cross between biotope (a style in which the artist tries to depict specific regional natural habitats as accurately as possible) and Nature Aquarium style (the Asian landscape painting inspired style pioneered by Amano), with a dash of diorama (a newer style that uses aquatic plants and rock/wood elements to create miniature terrestrial landscapes like hills, mountains, and forests). Although the “all-natural” biotope style is rapidly gaining popularity in the hobby these days, Dave knows that aquascaping depends upon the human touch, and it is the creator’s artistic vision that gives life to the tank, rather than its simulated accuracy to nature. At the end of the day, Dave says, these are just glass boxes. These boxes are not true representations of nature, but reflections of the artist who fills them.
“Wind of Kind” - Dave Chow
Dave begins his scapes by painstakingly sketching a 2D scene on paper, then erasing bits and pieces and making edits. This can take a long time, but for him, the sketch must occur before he actually procures the materials and plants and fish, and brings the elements together to reflect the vision on paper. “It’s an experience to see it move from 2D to 3D,” he tells me. Every piece is given a short and evocative title, like “Phoenix Reborn,” or “Journey to Bari,” which he believes is very important to an aquascape. Lately, he says, he has thought about deploying longer and more unorthodox titles, perhaps even taking an old Chinese poem and using its entire body of text as a scape title, in an effort to evoke even more of a narrative and to strike a chord with a Chinese audience. Dave dreams of one day holding his own show at a professional art gallery, featuring his tanks in all their typical planted splendor, but also incorporating human elements into the natural imagery such as Chinese painting and calligraphy.
aquascape sketch of a scape by dave
Back to the process. Once the elements of the scape are in place, and the tank is planted and stocked with fish, the scenery begins to grow and mature over the weeks, assisted by Dave’s pruning scissors and his careful eye. As I brought up the topic of fish in our conversation, he reminded me that when it comes to his work, fish and other aquatic animals are only one part of a much larger equation. The natural and compositional harmony within the tank includes the creatures, but also the plants, stone and wood elements, and soil/substrate. When I asked him what fish he plans to place in the massive new tank he is preparing for next year’s aquascaping contest, he told me he wasn’t sure, but probably something “long and slender and small, because this piece has such strong lines.” The sharp rocks point upward at a rightward diagonal angle, while driftwood tree branches arch downward, intersecting almost perpendicularly with the rock line. The plants are mostly low the ground, allowing the striking hardscape of wood and stone to stand strong. The plant-in-progress looks like an old Japanese painting with its incredibly harsh and detailed mountains, and its fallen trees, shrouded in greenery.
what the sketch became IRL …. by… dave…
When I asked Dave about his relationships with other hobbyists in this field, we began a very illuminating discussion about the nature of art. For him, aquascaping absolutely requires communication and community—this art form cannot be done in a vacuum, but must respond to the works and ideas of other scapers, whether they are masters/mentors, peers, competitors, or students of the art. Dave travels internationally many times a year to teach workshops, compete in tournaments, visit landmark aquariums, and meet friends and colleagues. Without the community of hobbyists who produce work alongside him, the art doesn’t have any meaning. I feel the same way about my relationship with other writers and poets. Without my fellow writers and the wonderful workshops I’ve been lucky enough to be a member of (shoutout Ralph Savarese and Dean Bakopoulos), I’d be writing into the void, and I would never have grown into my own voice the way I have.
Honestly, I have so much more to say when it comes to Dave and aquascaping, but I thought this would be a fascinating little tidbit to put out there. Setting up a fish tank isn’t seen by most of the world as an art form, and even many aquarium hobbyists see aquascaping as something more to do with beauty than real artistic merit or creative expression. Anyway, since I’m working on a project that is essentially about the nature of art and the lives of artists, in which the main character relates to his evidently non-artistic profession (gambling on betta fish fights) in artistic terms, and other characters do the same with other seemingly non-artistic fields, I wanted to hear about how Dave views other aquarium related hobbies. We also spoke a lot about fish fighting (bettas) and selective breeding (goldfish and arowanas). I’ll write something up on that later. Just wanted y’all to know I’m doing well, and I’m bouncing around meeting cool-ass people and artists.
“Whisper of the Pines” - Serkan ÇETİNKOL
Very unrelated note, (cw: animals killing each other) I saw a stray frog hop into a fish shop on the ground floor of the market, and the lady who ran the shop picked it up and tossed it into a tank full of baby Arowanas and Jack Dempsey cichlids, who proceeded to maul the shit out of it. Like I could see the frog legs just sticking out of the biggest cichlid’s mouth, twitching and being weird and stuff. Freaky deaky, as they say. I’m definitely writing a short story that features this scene at this very moment. Anyway, much love, friends. Stay dry and uneaten.
ok, I’m ending on this pic of famed Japanese founder of aquascaping, Takashi Amano, looking sexy asf
Now all of China knows we're here...
Hi there. Long post alert. I’m writing this at the Shanghai Library which for some reason has a Starbucks inside it. Been in the city for a full week as of today. Some initial notes: big big big shock to go from village life in Malawi to a city of 24 million in China. Things I miss in Malawi: the lake, the sun, the friendly chance encounters with folks, the lack of spending, the people I worked with. Things I’m glad to find plenty of here: boba, noodles, dumplings, really easy-to-use public transport, well-dressed babies, fish kept both as pets and as pre-meals. My day-to-day has less structure in Shanghai than in Kande, which maybe makes it more true-to-form to the Watson mission of independent exploration, but also forces me to be more proactive about my plans and my writing process.
En route to the Shanghai Museum
I’ve done a couple cool things since I got here. I spent a night out at a rooftop club in the Bund called Bar Rouge, where I got a wonderful view of the city (and drank two really overpriced drinks, one of which was on fire for aesthetic reasons??). I visited the Shanghai Museum which is home to some really cool artifacts from China’s long history including this wild Mongol Chess Set (Brass and Jade, Qing Dynasty 1644-1911) I’m trying to write a poem about and this Ming decorative plate with designs of plums and little red bats flying around on it. I’ve never seen a bat on ceramics or like anything before? I guess bats in general aren’t as pretty for ornate decorations as birds and flowers. But for some reason, that plate stuck with me.
The Bund was beautiful until I had to pay a ludicrous cover charge that night :/// )
Yesterday, I spent my day at the Wenshang Flower, Bird, Insect, and Fish market, which is this old market tucked behind a couple of buildings on South Xizang Road. There are maybe fifty to sixty stalls that all sell live animals. The first thing you notice upon entering is the noise—a persistent high-pitched drone, constantly rising and falling, like a tiny traffic jam. One of the big draws of the market is its crickets—they sell both singing varieties and fighting varieties and all of them are loud as hell. Like so loud. I got to spectate a cricket fight with these old Chinese dudes (who I think were gambling on the winners) and it was wild. Other creatures sold here: maybe a hundred different freshwater tropical fish species, salamanders, snails, Caribbean hermit crabs, Pomeranians, siamese cats, hedgehogs, bearded dragons, ball pythons, cockatiels, Chinese songbirds, and so many damn turtles. I saw snappers and red-eared sliders and soft shells and just like every possible turtle. Baby turtles the size of a 50-cent piece and big-ass ones the size of a small dog. It was a strange and interesting and colorful place, and I’m going to try and visit a few more times. I spoke a little with the woman in charge of the store’s only fancy goldfish stall, which had some really beautiful breeds. I’ll attach some pics.
You can see Orandas, Ranchus, Lionheads, Samsaras. Pond varieties in the plastic boxes.
Anyway, I should clarify: the central fish associated with China in my project is the goldfish. As the world’s most popular pet fish, and the ones least well-suited to their most commonly chosen homes (bowls), they fit neatly into my project’s theme of containment, but what’s even more intriguing to me is the history of their breeding. Hundreds of years of selective breeding of the Prussian carp (probably) have produced hundreds of goldfish varieties, many of them so far removed from their original form that they look almost alien. Like little flesh balloons with bulging eyes and humpbacks. No joke, just look up “Prussian Carp” and then look up “celestial eye goldfish” and “lionhead goldfish” and “ranchu goldfish.” The differences in these fish are like the difference between wolves and yorkies. The container for these fish is the pond, the tank, the bowl, but also the body. Their bodies have been stretched so much in so many directions, and so, I think goldfish are a good place from which to write about the body in flux. Anyway, I’ll end on this lil excerpt from a fiction project I’m working on. It concerns goldfish, and hopefully frames the kind of stuff I’m trying to explore. Some background: the speaker is an artist who lives in Ho Chi Minh City. That’s it lol.
Excerpt:
The thing with goldfish is they do not really exist, at least not in their natural state. I have tried to explain this to my mother many times. Any specimen you will find in a shop today is at least a hundred deviations from the original, the history of this deviance beginning in Ancient China with a series of artistic experiments in which the great sculptors of the day attempted to carve dragons out of carp.
The emperors of the Song Dynasty began with a handful of wild-caught Prussian carp, which they selected for especially bright scales and colorful streaks. Red and orange were shades of good fortune, and in those days of intermittent war and famine, good fortune was hard to come by. Next came massive heads and protruding eyes. Markers of wisdom and foresight, both kingly qualities. The fish were becoming something else, something more than themselves. Finally, the long fins and flowing tails and distended bellies. To be veiled was to be shielded by heaven. To be fat was to be swollen with luck. Each ridge and whisker, each little gesture of dragonhood, had its grand purpose. These were designs passed from heaven to human to animal. Centuries before oil and canvas, these emperors painted dragons with scale and bone.
As a former poet, I will tell you this: in every line of work there is something called metaphor. Metaphor is a type of torture in which you take a body and make it say what you want it to. This is what the emperors did. When they said goldfish, what they meant was mythic. Celestial. Full of heaven. What they meant was, your body is my body because it is mine to shape. Gnarled backs and long whiskers. Fins billowing like war banners. Scales brighter than pearl. In my hands, you are more precious than gold. The first artists to sculpt these fish knew that names were powerful. They knew that naming itself was a kind of alchemy, a way to turn words into flesh into history.
I know many artists today who still work in this medium. There is Ji, the Taiwanese monk at the temple on Pasteur Street who breeds Ranchus and Orandas in plastic tubs. There is Geoffrey, the German expat who lives down by the beach and sells hybrid fantails to important men living in glass towers. I visit them on occasion, to workshop their pieces and to show them my own. Their art is oftentimes an imprecise one, but I cannot deny the results are impressive when executed properly.
Flotsam
So I think this is a nautical term with a really specific maritime definition, but I’m going to use it incorrectly to describe the odd things I have found washed up on the lakeshore in the past two months here in Kande Beach, Malawi. I walk up and down the beach at least once a day on my way to the fishing village east of us. I’m leaving the country on Tuesday for Shanghai, so I wanted to commemorate the things I’ve happened upon by accident. The best things I’ve done/experienced here have mostly been accidents.
Actual Flotsam List
A yellow toothbrush
A rusted machete
Several wigs of varying colors
Freshwater clamshells
A crab’s dismembered claw
A pair of white briefs (almost spotless)
A rotting catfish the size of my arm (shoulder to fingertip, about the width of a handle of alcohol)
Torn fishing net with chunks of flip flops used as floats
A small plastic bag of what appeared to be cocaine but was actually laundry detergent
One fake size-8 Yeezy 350 Boost sneaker (lunar white)
Figurative Flotsam List
Free racist comments + cup of bourbon given to me by random auto-parts workers at a street corner in Mzuzu
Hitching a ride down a mountain in the back of a truck full of old ladies and live chickens
Slingshot (technically a purchase and not a find but it was still very cheap)
Talking to Lucie’s mom instead of Lucie whenever we talk on the phone
My own mother’s semi-regular fish tank updates via WhatsApp
Nolan Boggess downloading whole videos off of the social site TikTok and sending them to me in an attempt to drain my data plan
Holding a small dog like a hunting rifle (back legs are the handle, belly is where you grip, ears are the sights you look down, snout is barrel) and aiming it another small dog
The void itself
Advice from Joyce, the Malawian manager of the dive center (“if you get a wife do not cheat on your wife, wives are so much better than husbands, the least you can do as a husband is to not cheat on your wife”)
Hearing Afropop and/or dancehall remixes of songs such as Love the Way You Lie, All of You (by John Legend) and Colors of the Wind (Pochahontas)
Happy Friday.
A Weekend in the Mountains (and meditations on violence)
Manchewe Falls in Livingstonia, Malawi
Just got back from a weekend spent in Livingstonia, which is a town in the mountains here in northern Malawi, home to the University of Livingstonia where my friend Alfred is studying. It was a hell of a trek—two hour drive from the beach to Mzuzu, stayed the night, then took a five hour mini bus to Chitimba, and a 45 min bumpy motorbike ride up the mountain to Livingstonia. As tiring as the traveling was, the whole weekend was a much needed break from my usual schedule down here in Kande Beach. I saw a football game with the college kids, ate at their cafeteria, visited the local church, toured campus, and just tried to adapt my Grinnell College liberal artsy self to a very different and at times very similar college environment. I witnessed a basketball game, a rap battle, a lot of day-drinking, and some wonderful conversations about subjects including marriage, age differences, tuition hikes, Central and Southern African national rivalries, and how Americans woo their potential suitors. I also met a bunch of monkeys, though they were a bit skittish and ran from me whenever I tried to make contact lol.
Lemme tell ya, this guy’s a runner
The mountains are honestly stunning. I stayed at a place called the Mushroom Farm, which bills itself as an “eco-lodge” with “permaculture gardens” and “compost toilets.” Quotes aside, it’s all vegan food, all delicious, very warm, inexpensive, a bit hippyish and definitely worth the stay. The whole lodge is essentially hanging off the edge of a cliff, which means that 1.) the views are spectacular and 2.) you gotta watch your step. There were like five dobermans(?) guarding the lodge that are cuddly but bark a lot. I met a Dutch guy who was working as a martial arts instructor in the city and a German woman who had just finished an internship at a hospital. We ended up traveling back on Monday together, and it was real nice to get to hear the stories of other travelers, who came not for tourism but to work, at least at first.
The writing is going a bit slow. I’ve working on a poem from the perspective of a 30-round magazine belonging to an AR-15 rifle. The more time I spend here, talking with people from both Malawi and abroad, with different cultural values and beliefs, I’m reflecting a lot more on how my American identity affects my own beliefs and my own upbringing. My parents, especially my dad, have always been rather conservative while I’ve been quite left-leaning, which has historically resulted in a lot of bickering and arguments at the dinner table and in the car. An issue that really does concern them is gun violence—while they voted Republican in the last election, they are very much for gun control, and I’ve been trying to have more discussions with them about this in order to get them to reevaluate their leanings a little.
Pretty much every non-American I meet here will ask me about gun violence at some point, if we have a conversation longer than fifteen minutes. Have you seen someone get shot? Do you own any guns? Did someone ever attack your school? Why don’t they stop the violence? It’s something I can’t help but think about a lot, having lived both in California, a state with strong gun regulations, and Iowa, a state without strong gun regulations (in a town that houses one of the largest gun and parts manufacturing facilities in the nation). More personally, a friend and former teacher of mine lost his daughter in the Sandy Hook attack and took his own life (with a gun) just this year. These realities of violence in my own life and the places I’ve lived are part of why I feel so angry when the people I love support people and policies that contribute to that violence.
This is all sort of just thinking-as-I-write, but I’m beginning to connect these cycles of violence to the sort of cycles and violence I see here. There’s the natural violence of survival in the lake, fish fighting each other for territory, for mates, for food. There’s the violence of political upheaval—the recent presidential election here in Malawi was heavily contested, and there have been regular demonstrations in the cities, many of which led to rioting. There’s the economic violence that presents itself everywhere in the struggles of impoverished people, in the exploitation that tourism often gives rise to, in the mass migrations of workers from Malawi to South Africa, and the vast wealth disparity between the city elites and the villagers. I’m trying to use my writing as a tool to think more critically about these cycles of violence and how they link me with the people and places I’m meeting and visiting. For me, this begins with a poem in which I give an assault rifle’s magazine a voice, a language with which to make its purpose clear. I don’t know where it ends yet. Gotta keep writing!
Check out the Words section of the website if you wanna read new stuff I have published! Had a piece come out on the Academy of American Poets site and some more dropping soon on The Shallow Ends, Split Lip Magazine, and Hobart!
Getting on the back of a truck full of grandmothers and live chickens
Been in Malawi for 31 Days!
Hey, second post here. I’ve officially been in Malawi and on my Watson Year for a full month now (31 days!!). I’m still based in Kande, but I’ve spent some time bouncing around too—I stayed in the city of Mzuzu for a few days, went to a nearby village called Chinteche to visit some new friends (where I bought these dope knockoff Nike sandals for $3.50, imagine Tevas but NIKE!!!), and I’ve gone and spent more time with local people in the village.
Some notes: 1.) I made friends with a college student named Albert who just went back to school at Livingstonia University, I’ll be visiting his school in a few weeks (it’s a long ass way away), he’s really cool and we’ve been talking a lot about how college differs in the places we live and just kind of interesting convos about culture and ethnicity and values and smart phones lol 2.) I did a cleanup dive today, which is when we dive to the outer rocky areas of the island with diving knives and remove fishing nets that have gotten stuck… I got to untangle a bunch of sad little fish and watch them swim away joyously, 3.) I got like 8 pretty good poems and a big chunk of ~maybe~ a novel chapter, 4.) I learned how to cook soya balls from Joyce, the Malawian manager of the dive center (they are truly dank, like beyond belief), and when I cooked them for the staff for lunch, they DID NOT hate them!!!
Going to Mzuzu was wild—being surrounded by buildings and cars and people after three weeks in a very calm and rural place by the lake was quite a trip. I went to a grocery store and bought SOUR WORMS and PLANTAIN CHIPS after having done zero snacking for the past three weeks. I went to the local library and just stayed there for three hours, reading a wonderfully strange novel called Narcopolis. I met some Peace Corps volunteers from the states and got to help them haggle to buy puppies on the street(!) I stayed at a lodge owned by Joy, who is married to my dive center director Justin. She is Korean and a great chef and I ate bibimbap, kimchi rice, and noodles all weekend, which was truly wonderful and made me miss my Asian friends a lot lol. I made random friends with some guys on the street, which is to say they yelled “ni hao” at me, and I confronted them, saying I was American actually, and my parents were Viet, and I know they were just being friendly (maybe not lol) but if I saw you were African and greeted you in Swahili instead of Tombuka, what would you say, which is kind of a weak comparison honestly, but whatever, and then we went on to have an actually interesting conversation about culture and race and language, and then they passed me some of the brandy they were drinking as a peace offering, and I took a sip, and we just sat there for a while on the street corner, talking. One guy was in the army and had an auto parts shop nearby, the other dude had a clothing shop. Nice folks, honestly. A highlight of my time there. I don’t normally have that much tact in confrontations, so really, this was a best case scenario.
A little about the writing I’ve been doing, which I feel really proud and hopeful about: I wrote one poem about Phoebe Bridgers and antidepressants and dead insects, which honestly slaps. I wrote a poem about the relationship between rapper Playboi Carti and producer Pierre Bourne. I got a poem about the world drowning in the climate crisis and being taken over by giant catfish. I got a poem with a Frank Ocean lyric that also includes these lines of my own: “The opposite of Coke is Pepsi. The opposite of saying / is doing. When all is said and done, I resay, redo, / reload the page until it crashes.” Some good stuff—I think I’m going to be submitting them soon, this time to some bigger journals and publications. I think I might as well shoot my shot, ya know? Things have been good on the publication front—I had a sonnet published in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and its online publication, The Margins, which I am very proud of. I got an oldie but a goodie accepted by Hobart Pulp, coming October. I got great ones coming out in The Shallow Ends and Passages North and Pleiades. Lots of stuff on the way, keep your eyes and ears open. Don’t sleep on the boy!
The fiction I’m working on is going… okay. It’s been kinda hard for me to get my fiction pen flowing if that makes sense. It was stop and start for a while, but now I got a good chunk. It’s a continuation of a short story I wrote in a fiction seminar last year, and I’m kind of exploring expanding that story into a novel. The chapter I’m hacking away at features the protagonist moving into a flooded abandoned mall in Ho Chi Minh City with a woman named Vero, who happens to be obsessed with goldfish—she keeps hundreds in little jars in her room. Concept-wise, I’m exploring bodies a lot, using goldfish as a jumping off point. Goldfish were originally bred from Prussian Carp in the water gardens of Chinese emperors, and now they’re the most popular aquarium fish in the world, a prominent invasive species, and there are as many breeds as dog breeds, all of them so different, their bodies twisted and engorged and changed in so many striking and sometimes grotesque ways. People have complicated relationships with their bodies, me included, and I think this is partly where I want to write toward. But mostly, I’m just putting stuff down on the page.
The idea of containment works really well for poems, and even short stories, but I think I’m still working on putting enough pressure, enough restriction and limitations and linguistic stress on my prose to make it really sing, you know? I’m playing with containment a ton in the lives of these fish and these people and this city, but I really gotta sharpen up and apply that to the language itself. I want this shit to sing like a poem but still pack a good one-two punch the way a good paragraph of prose does. I want my shit to fly like a fish hawk (which live on the island nearby) and sting like a wasp (which built a hive in the bathroom and stung me on the back of the head while I was peeing two weeks ago smh).
If anyone is interested in reading/helping me with the fiction stuff, hit me up on WhatsApp. My Malawi # is +265 993 97 67 18 or email me at duongste@grinnell.edu. Thanks for reading, if you did! Much love.
First Post! I'm in Malawi
Hi, first post. I’ve been in Malawi for 10 days. Currently volunteering at the Maru Research Center in Kande Beach, Nkhata Bay district. My time here will mostly consist of doing fisheries monitoring at Masakahunju, a local fishing village, conducting underwater dive biodiversity surveys in the lake, and meeting local people in nearby villages and trading centers while I work on my writing.
Some initial notes: 1.) I live in a small thatch-roof cabin by the lakeshore in Kande Beach, 2.) I have running water and electricity and a couple bars of 3G most of the time 3.) A gecko fell on me today, it had the consistency of a fat leathery stress ball, 4.) I am now officially PADI open water SCUBA certified, 5.) I saw a submerged jeep on the lake floor (18 meters down) with colonies of cichlid fish living in it, 6.) I’ve written a grand total of one poem, 7.) it’s about the gecko that fell on me.
As of the last few days, I’m getting quite settled in with my living arrangements and my role at the center, and I’ve been taking my free time (of which I have quite a lot) to explore the lake, learn the language (Chitonga), do some diving with Justin (center director) and Douglas (Malawian staff member + great dive buddy), and do some writing. I don’t think the whole being-super-far-away-from-home thing as really hit yet, and I’m just taking my time getting comfy here. It’s weird because my Watson Project is at its core based on the relationships and conversations I have with people (specifically about their relation to fish), but I feel like even non-conversation interactions are bringing me a lot of joy and insight, and not specifically about fish. Of course, I’m sure it’ll all connect in the end.
With the project, I originally wanted to use fish and fish tanks as a loose metaphor to explore containment and artifice, what’s natural and what’s constructed, and patterns of community/migration—my 20 gallon fish tank at home, for example, has fish and plants from Australia, South America, Trinidad, Thailand, Malaysia, all thriving in unnatural harmony.
Here in Kande, there’s the local people, the Tonga, who live in Kande and Mbamba village (4-5 thousand ppl), and then the folks at the temporary fishing village (4-5 hundred), most of whom are transient migrants from Kalombe and other areas, and are just here to fish seasonally. Then there’s the Australian/British/American/European tourists (Mzungu=foreigner) who come here to swim and beach and vacay. And finally there’s me, technically a Mzungu, but also a special kind of foreigner—some kids I met on the beach called me “China,” which I responded to, to their delight, with a Bruce Lee karate chop combo, before explaining that I was American and my parents were from Vietnam. I don’t think they quite understood the specifics of my identity, but I’m still trying to figure things out too (lol) so I don’t blame them. There’s a whole lot going on here.
Interestingly enough, many of the species of fish in this lake, some of which are fished and some of which are ignored by the fishermen, are incredibly popular back home in the US in the aquarium trade. African cichlids are known for their territorial nature, intricate mating/brooding/childrearing behaviors, and bright colors. Look em up. The beautiful rockfishes are called mbuna. A majority of the aquarium cichlids back home aren’t wild-caught here in Lake Malawi, but bred in Thailand and Singapore and other Asian countries. There’s a strange web of movement here, something that crosses borders of nations and communities and species. A lot of stories that began in the lake have since migrated across the globe, translated and reinterpreted along the way. I’m doing my best to investigate and learn about each connection, each current, each path. Hopefully I’ll get to write the perfect crazy fish poem I’ve been trying to write for years, but for now, I’ll stick to getting to know the people and the lake and my gecko roommates.
If you wanna talk or read anything I been writing, hit me on WhatsApp. My Malawi # is +265 993 97 67 18. Or email me at duonste@grinnell.edu.
Watson Year in T-Minus 24 Days
Lake Malawi is the most biodiverse lake on the planet and also where I’ll be staying for two months.
As some of you might know, I’m a 2019 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, which means I get to spend a year (August 1st, 2019 to August 1st, 2020) traveling the world, conducting a big poetry writing project called “Freshwater Fish and the Poetry of Containment.” The whole conceit of this thing is a.) poems = containers for human experience of the natural world, b.) fish tanks = also containers for human experience of the natural world. I’ll be speaking to/volunteering with/working with a ton of people with their own unique personal relationships to the freshwater fish I kept in my own fish tank growing up. Biologists working in Malawi and Trinidad, fish hobbyists and breeders in Hong Kong, goldfish farmers and fisheries scientists in Shanghai, Betta fish gamblers in Chiang Mai, etc. Lots of folks to meet, lots of traveling to do, lots of writing to attempt.
Hopefully, I’ll have a solid poetry manuscript by the time I get back here to the states, and I’ll be able to send it to potential publishers/creative writing grad programs. Also got this lil budding novel in the works, and it takes place in a Southeast Asian city, and I feel like a phony trying to write a novel set in Asia when I’ve barely spent any time there, so I’m going to try and gather some firsthand experience or whatnot.
So yup, yup, this is my new website, and I’ll be keeping the blog part (this one) updated relatively often with details and notes and pics from my Watson journey. If you’re interested in reading a lil more about what I’m gonna be doing, you can check out this link from Grinnell College’s newspaper or this link from the official Watson website or even this link which is an interview with me from my high school’s paper lol. My first stop will be Kande Beach, Malawi. Will post pics and stuff, but for now, summer break. Bye!