Uyen Phoung Dang
​
by Angeles Alva Villatoro
Fourteen Hills: You have a remarkable list of achievements and have made a name of yourself in many literary magazines such as Fourteen Hills, The Pinch, and Black Warrior Review to name a few. Anyone can search you online and describe you as an anthropologist or artist. How would you describe Uyen Phoung Dang?
​
Uyen Phoung Dang: I don’t know; I don’t really think of self-
categorization. I find it hard to slot myself into anything, so I would prefer to let other people decide (laughs) what I am. But at the end of the day, I do love writing whether that’s creatively or academically. In this time period, this academic era-slash-phase I’m in, I feel like I would just slot myself as a writer, or just someone who loves to write and it can be in anything. I’m stretching, just thinking about craft and ways language shapes whatever story that I’m telling.
​
14H: Can you talk about the kind of work you do as an editorial intern for the American Ethnological Society?
UPD: I’ve never really done editorial work for others so that position is to think with others who are experimenting with writing in anthropology. In anthropology, you have these well-crafted published articles and peer reviewed what not, so you don't really get the rougher side of anthropology. For me, it feels cutting edge, but I like the roughness and the textures that some of these pieces come in as and seeing the ways that it doesn’t have to be perfect on the first go. My role is to read over things, develop my own collection, if I really want to, and think with others about how to, you know, bring other emerging and established anthropologists into the best light that we can put them in. It’s always nice to see the shadow edges.
​
14H: When did you start writing?
​
UPD: Oh, that’s a hard question. I don’t know; I think when I was young, especially in elementary school when I was first learning English. I immigrated pretty early; there was this space where I was between English and Vietnamese so there were always these writing assignments I had to do at age 6 or 7 in elementary school. This past summer, I looked over some of the old journals. Some of those assignments were poetry and it was kind of amazing to see people really thinking about poetry and storytelling at such a young age and I don’t really know what it looks like now.
​
14H: How did you go about writing, “The River Keeps Running Through All Our Wars?”
​
UPD: How did I come to the idea of it?
Support Fourteen Hills!
​
Also, Check out our Fourteen Hills archive:
​14H: Yes, the idea of it, your experience.
​
UPD: I think I just sat down because I don’t really come into writing with any preconceived idea of what it is that I want to write. At the time, I was living in Vietnam, specifically in Ho Chi Minh City, and outside my window, I saw the Saigon River. It was always a mainstay of my time there and the city has changed so much with development with all these large complexes and buildings. The urban ecology of Saigon really pressed itself on me and when I sat down, it molded the piece. At the time, my mother recently had surgery for something she should have dealt with earlier. I was thinking about the delays in prolonging a wound because there is other stuff that needed to be taken care of and so both of these factors shaped the piece itself. Me being there and not being able to help or support her because she was in Florida. I was thinking about how writing can be a way to bridge these different worlds and one of these worlds was my mother who lives by herself.
​
14H: I do hope that your mother continues to be in good health; that must have been a horrible experience, being separated from your mother.
​
UPD: At the time, I was thinking a lot about maternal figures; what is my relationship to my mother’s mother and plural mothers. My mother, my most immediate mother, was in Florida but my grandmother, my ancestral mother, was buried or living in Vietnam. I was thinking about these maternal ties and lineages; there is so much happening that I can’t just write an entire story about it. The demands on time didn’t allow me to do that because I was also doing research at the same time. I tried to put it into something that was containable.
​
14H: Your grandmother is the central focus in your story. Does she know of her role in the piece and if so, what was her reaction?
​
UPD: I wish my grandmother could read English. For me, I feel most comfortable with English, which is not to say that I can’t speak Vietnamese, but I think I have learned that I can’t force Vietnamese to come to me. Especially when it comes to Creative Writing. I [also] wish she could read Vietnamese but what I actually do is kinda retell her or reproduce the story in Vietnamese and she just finds it cool. (Laughs) at the end of the day, my grandmother didn't go to school and was redirected in her life due to all of the violences, the wars, everything that happened in Vietnam and I also retold the story to my mom, my most immediate mother. She’s also like “That’s incredible!” At the end of the day, what matters most to me is really dwelling with my mother and bridging those geographical distances through the labor of writing itself.
​
14H: I’m sure they're both proud of you and of the work you’ve achieved. What are some authors or poets you read as a kid that helped influence you to write?
​
UPD: As a kid, I read anything that I could get my hands on because it was hard for me to get books as a kid. My mom didn’t know the library system that well, but I think as I started to get more autonomy with my material world, I started to get into translated Japanese literature. The Tokyo Ueno Station, I carried that thing all over with me. I love magical surrealism, magic, and just a bit weird into a piece that felt really ethnographic or the genre of anthropology. I brought it to Vietnam and then started to get into other books and strangely enough, a lot of it wasn't Vietnamese literature. It was mainly Kawakami, Carmen Maria Machado, and K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary. These influences kinda shaped my own writerly interests, and I wish I could blend in more writing with whatever I’m doing but this is where I found my literary home.
​
14H: Have you ever dealt with Writer’s Block and if so, have you found ways to combat it?
​
UPD: I think with writer's block, I don’t know if I would call it a block, there are other things I have to focus on and writing itself isn't the demand. I turn to my relationships, friends, family, mentors, and just stop thinking, doing, and spending time. I think that’s how I’m able to slow down and return to writing.
Uyen Phuong Dang is a Vietnamese writer, anthropologist, and currently pursuing a PhD at Yale University. She describes herself as “Part bird, part ghost” on her website and has a vast publication collection which includes poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction. She was previously published in Fourteen Hills Issue #31 with her poem, “The River Keeps Running Through All Our Wars.” Aside from being published in Fourteen Hills, Uyen has published work in The Pinch, Black Warrior Review, Moon City Review, and The Cincinnati Review to name a few. She’s often traveling back and forth, between Vietnam and New Haven, and runs “field.breaths”, an Instagram project where she captures a “space for visual learning” through the means of photography and fieldwork.
Angeles Alva Villatoro is a writer and editor that resides in San Francisco. Having attended and graduated from San Francisco State University with a Bachelors in Creative Writing, Angeles is currently finishing her first semester as a Graduate student. She was a former Fiction Editor for Transfer Magazine and is the current Editor-In-Chief. Aside from writing, Angeles is an avid walker, reader, sketchbook artist, and takes pride in her latino/indigenous heritage.