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.