Thien-Anh Nguyen

Both of my pieces, “Freshly Caught, Humanely Raised” and “Notes on Westward Expansion,” focus on being Asian-American while engaging with Western consumer culture. Over the past ten years, there has been a dramatic shift with Westerners more readily embracing Asian cuisine and media. On one hand, it’s never been easier to access ingredients and imports from Asian countries in places like Target and Wal-Mart. We no longer need to seek out our cultural marketplaces for every little thing. But, at the same time, we often choose to seek out these cultural sanctuaries anyway, since the West, in turn, still views us through a lens of being exotic, or other. Through my pieces, I hoped to be able to capture the sense of loss and uncertainty that comes with being perpetually othered during a time where the world around us keeps changing. Furthermore, I hope to assert that the act of consumption is enacted both physically and psychologically. 

“Freshly Caught, Humanely Raised” originated from an interview that I conducted while shopping at Hong Kong Supermarket in Grand Prairie, Texas. The woman I interviewed had just come from the butcher, and she confided in me that she had simply wanted a catfish to make cà kho, a Vietnamese catfish stew. She called her brother, asking him if such brutal killing was typical for ordering catfish. After a moment, he answered that this has always been the norm. She was thoroughly shaken and told me that next time, she would only purchase catfish again if it was already dead. The poem is composed of eight stanzas of varying lengths. The decision to keep it in a free-verse format allowed me to experiment with shape and the line, in order to create the effect of stilled time. In particular, line breaks are heavily utilized to fully capture the jarring nature of the woman’s recollection of what happened since it was still fresh on her mind and consuming her thoughts. Image, too, had to be sharpened and as potent as possible to most strongly evoke the horror of the unexpected and brutal slaughter. 

“Notes on Westward Expansion” came from my struggle to reconcile my Vietnamese heritage with my queerness, as well my observations of how technological advancement has affected the way that people perceive others. Because of the West’s current fixation with Asian culture, Asian-Americans have become transformed into objects of projection and fetishization: in effect, we, too, have become goods. Trends that utilize our heritage often originate from websites like TikTok, where information is shared on an unprecedented scale that, adversely, reinforces generalizations about us. The poem is composed of couplets, which ensures that the reader is attuned to the precise rhythm and diction used in each succinct line. This allows for the flow of ideas within the narrative to create a fluid sense of motion that is meant to mirror the changing nature of time, the internet, and the effect this has on the narrator’s uncertain sense of self.