TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO:

 

This is a wool suit passed down to me by my grandfather when he moved out of my house back to my uncle's house in Ottawa, so he was living with us for about a year, I'd say. And then he left a bunch of his formalwear to me after moving out.

 

There is a, there's a poem inside the left chest pocket that I showed it to my mom, she's like, 'Oh, this is a poem that he wrote for like, your uncle's wedding'.

 

[Reads poem in Vietnamese]

 

The general sentiment of that is just like: good kids; the Nguyen and the whole family are getting united; you, you have good jobs; and reflect well in the Vietnamese community, is the general gist of that. 

 

My grandfather is Vietnamese. So my family are refugees, in particular, this is my mom's side of the family. My grandfather came here, it was after his sister was in Japan, after the end of the Vietnam War, she moved to Canada, and then sponsor basically the entire family to come here. And so that's how my family ended up in Ottawa, and my mom spent, like, the first three years of her adulthood in Ottawa after having grown up in Vietnam.

 

I was born here and not having any context for like, the missing country, other than what my parents told me, but it's just like, from day one, it's like, I was growing up as a Canadian kid, right? And it's just like, my problems are not like, preoccupation by like, what the communist government was doing. It's about like, you know, all these kids have YuGiOh cards, and I don't have YuGiOh cards. But the knowledge of the history with something that's like, sound like a background noise to me for my entire childhood. And it wasn't until later that was like, ‘Oh, the vast majority of kids in this country did not grow up with that same experience’. And I just like, I feel like on some of those assumed a lot of the other immigrant kids had the similar experience. And just like, yeah, you had to flee your country, for whatever reason. It's not something I like, probe deeply until I was an adult.

 

Yeah, I feel like this is like a bunch of questions I have about like, where it came from, first off, so like, I don't even know which country he would have worn it in. It's probably not from Vietnam because people weren't bringing suits over when they left the country. That's like a lot to pack. Not that my grandpa didn't leave on a boat, like my dad did. But like, yeah, I don't think most people were leaving with like, huge amounts of stuff. And when they came together, they were very poor, right? So I think it's like an interesting, what you wear on the days you get to pretend it's all fancy, right? Instead of just like, ‘Ah, we're refugees in this country. Life is kind of shit a lot of the times’.

 

I'm in my third year of university, I used it in like three different plays in this campus theatre scene, just like for various roles, one is like an evil capitalist, uh, evil capitalist city councillor. One was just like a bar owner. One was, you know, just boy at prom, basically. So yeah, it I get a lot of mileage out of it. Just because like it's a suit that fits me very well.

 

Of what the stories my mom tells me, he seems to have worked like a lot of odd jobs over his life. And she just tells me, ‘Yeah, yeah, your grandpa was a barber, just get haircuts from him that he way cheaper than the $20 haircuts we get now’, and it's like, ‘Oh, I can't do the fade properly’. Mainly his occupation that I remember was, uh, he was a poet. Yeah. And he had like a, he had like a few collections of his, like, written works in my house growing up. My sister who actually works like, she's a master student, she had to interview him for like her thesis. And yeah, she looked through a lot of his stuff. It's like, yeah, it's really sad emo stuff here, he’s talking about like, the sense of loss that I think a lot of Vietnamese families carry with them. 

I actually found out like, after I started writing plays that you know, he actually used to write a few plays as well, and my mom was just like, we were in Ottawa at the time, and was just like, ‘Yeah, Nam writes plays now, just like you’, and I was like ‘Ohh, what’s this? I thought you just wrote poetry?’ And it’s like, uh, we have a creative lineage, I suppose.