{"id":14,"date":"2018-08-31T11:08:06","date_gmt":"2018-08-31T18:08:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/?p=14"},"modified":"2018-09-11T13:11:28","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T20:11:28","slug":"dance-and-the-diaspora","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/dance-and-the-diaspora\/","title":{"rendered":"Dance and the Diaspora"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lam Hunyh ’18 keeps a quote from his mother<\/strong> on his iPhone: \u201cIn this country, no one will describe you as American when they first see you. The first thing they will notice is your yellow skin; and your Asian face. You don\u2019t have white skin, you don\u2019t look like them. They won\u2019t treat you as one of their own. In some ways they are right. You are not fully American; you are, at heart, Vietnamese. You look, live and speak Vietnamese. Vietnamese blood runs through your veins, and Vietnamese culture is embedded in how you walk this world. … Your roots are the foundation of who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lam<\/div>\n

For Huynh, human experience, formed as it is by nature and nurture, geography and history, also includes membership in the Vi\u1ec7t Ki\u1ec1 u: the vast diaspora of Vietnamese people living outside of Vietnam.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was raised not feeling as conflicted about my identity as other people,\u201d Huynh says. \u201cMy mom raised me wanting me to take in everything that\u2019s great about American culture and also Vietnamese culture. Her stories got me thinking a lot about the Vietnamese refugee experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Huynh\u2019s parents met in Southern California. His father, Loc, came to the United States from Vietnam before the end of the war in 1975. Huynh\u2019s mother, Huyenco Pham, arrived in 1992, one of 800,000 refugees who fled Vietnam by boat to settle abroad.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of her family and friends escaped by boat in the first or second wave, but she couldn\u2019t escape right away,\u201d Huynh says. The eldest of seven children, Huyenco Pham had to care for her siblings. Their father had been taken as a prisoner of war. \u201cShe went through over a decade of starvation and nearly died many times. She sees herself as a refugee. They came because they had to escape and ended up here. That played into how she raised me. She reminded me not to forget my roots.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lam
Lam and his parents, Huyenco Pham and Loc.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If Huynh wondered, as a child, how his experience as an American fit with his Vietnamese roots, he likely wouldn\u2019t have had a way to express that verbally. But in his freshman year in high school, he discovered an interest that, even without words, would become a way to understand himself and others like him: He found street dancing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was watching this TV show called America\u2019s Best Dance Crew,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was all hip-hop and street dancers. I noticed that half of one group\u2019s members were Vietnamese. I felt like I had role models.\u201d<\/p>\n

Huynh and his friends became obsessed with street dance, studying YouTube videos and practicing whenever they could. \u201cI started breaking,\u201d Huynh says, \u201cbut I didn\u2019t stay as a breaker because when I was practicing I made too much noise in my house. My parents would freak out.\u201d So, he began to learn other styles of dance, like popping, cutting and waving. \u201cI was like, wow this is also cool, and it\u2019s quiet!\u201d<\/p>\n

Huynh continued dancing through high school, but it wasn\u2019t until college that he found a real community of dancers.<\/p>\n

The summer after junior year, Huynh did summer research at Northwestern University. Living alone for the first time, away from family and his community at Harvey Mudd, he looked online to find dance communities in the area. \u201cI went alone, and there were just people dancing,\u201d he says. \u201cThey welcomed me. It was kind of scary at first, but I decided to just jump in and dance.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he returned to Harvey Mudd, Huynh joined more dance communities in the area. He also joined the Asian Pacific Islander Sponsor Program at Mudd (APISPAM). That\u2019s when thoughts he\u2019d been unable to formulate about the connection between dance and the experience of Vi\u1ec7t Ki\u1ec1u became clearer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Vietnamese\/dance connection was in the back of my mind, but I didn\u2019t have the vocabulary to dissect it and think about it. Why are there so many Vietnamese in these dance groups? Being in APISPAM allowed me to have access to other spaces where I could be in communities that talk about race with extensive vocabulary,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cAsian-American identity, perceptions of mental health in Asian-American communities, loss of language, intergenerational trauma. It clicked for me that this vocabulary can be used to think about why Vietnamese people dance. We had extensive conversations about what it\u2019s like to be the children of refugees. Where do we stand now, given our parents\u2019 experiences? Where are we as part of this diasporic community? All these conversations are happening, but no one is talking about dance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interested in exploring the topic further, Huynh applied for and was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Huynh will spend a year studying the Vietnamese diaspora\u2014which spans the world\u2014in France, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Vietnam.<\/p>\n

His project, \u201cVietnamese Diaspora: Counterspace Through Dance,\u201d will explore how intergenerational trauma led the second generation of overseas Vietnamese toward dance, specifically hip-hop, street and urban dance.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, I really think this is about intergenerational trauma,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve talked to people about this. There\u2019s a common theme of dance being healing. It gives people a community of support that\u2019s not available at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though he hasn\u2019t worked out all the details of his year abroad (Huynh isn\u2019t exactly sure where he\u2019ll stay in each country), he\u2019s confident he\u2019ll find his community of dancers wherever he is.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe dance community is really close-knit. I have a dance friends in the Netherlands; I have friends from Boston who are now in South Korea, waiting for me. I have an aunt in France whom I\u2019ve never met, but potentially, I could stay with her.\u201d<\/p>\n

One thing he\u2019s sure of is that he\u2019ll spend the longest time in Vietnam, perhaps three months. \u201cThere are huge dance communities in Vietnam. I feel like I\u2019ve been looking from the lens of the diaspora. I want to see what the difference is, if there\u2019s a commonality with the diasporic community. I want to see if I can find myself in communities around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lam Hunyh ’18 keeps a quote from his mother on his iPhone: \u201cIn this country, no one will describe you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-student-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}