[Russia Today’s On Contact, 3/13/17],
My Prison Norms in Paradises includes seven interviews from 2004 to 2022. I left out one by Leakthina Ollier from 7/12/2000. It’s included in Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogues (Palgrave 2001), coedited by Ollier and Jane Winston. An Assistant Professor of French at Bowdoin College in Maine, Ollier had to track me down in Saigon for that conversation! It occurred in my tiny District 6 room. Transcribing it, she had to ignore my noisy air conditioner.
As an ethnic Chinese born in Cambodia who had lived in Vietnam and, if I remember correctly, also France before moving to the US, Ollier’s story had to be fascinating. I should have interviewed her! I did learn she was planning on opening a Tex-Mex joint in Siem Reap.
By July of 2020, I had published just one poetry chapbook, Drunkard Boxing, with my watercolor on its cover accidentally printed upside down. Its indigo hue was also lost. I had also edited an anthology of contemporary Vietnamese fiction, Night, Again. My budding reputation was built on poems and stories scattered in obscure literary journals, such as Chicago Review, Threepenny Review, Sulfur, New American Writing and American Poetry Review. The last did have a circulation of 22,000.
At 36-years-old, I had not been to Europe, Africa, the Middle East or even Mexico. In Asia, I had only the briefest peeks of South Korea and Singapore during layovers. Italy, which changed my life, was still 17 months away. In short, I had experienced very little of the world.
Most importantly, 9/11 had not happened, so I didn’t even know what “false flag” meant. My political concerns, then, were too focused on my own pains and frustrations. Ollier’s very first question exposed this:
Leakthina Ollier: Linh, you have been living in Ho Chi Minh City for a year and a half now, and this is your third trip back since your left Vietnam in 1975. On a personal level, how is Ho Chi Minh City different from where you lived in the U.S. and do you consider this city home?
Linh Dinh: Yes, this is more home than Philadelphia. I don’t have to apologize for being here. I might get harassed on the street, but I know that this is my city. In the States, I always felt apologetic. I always felt like I was walking through someone’s living room to go to the bathroom. I always felt like I was a squatter. Maybe that was a very extreme attitude. I hope most Asian Americans and immigrants don’t feel the same way I do because that is a very uncomfortable way to live. Maybe that’s just my hypersensitivity, but in Philadelphia, people were always asking me, “Where you’re from?” It’s such a standard question when they see you. When people say “Where are you from?” what they really mean is, “What are you doing here?” Here, they might ask the same question but I don’t care. At the same time, Ho Chi Minh City isn’t quite home either. When I walk down the street people know immediately that I’m not a regular citizen. They think I’m Taiwanese, or at the least a Viet Kieu, an overseas Vietnamese. They can tell immediately, there’s no hiding it.
My first reasonably mature political writing was a 2001 review of Apocalypse Now Redux in The Guardian, then came a 2009 piece in the New York Times, “Get Together, Slim Down.” This was arranged by my Jewish publisher, Dan Simon. Dan also had me on a 2004 panel in NYC with Susan Sontag and Carolyn Forché. Had I gone along with the program, I would undoubtedly be married to a buxom Jew and teaching at Yeshiva University. All of my burps and farts would be broadcast live on Radio Tel Aviv and Radio Haifa.
Instead, I started providing commentaries for Iran’s Press TV! Though paid almost nothing, I did this for five years. I also appeared for free several times on Russia Today’s debate program, Cross Talk. With a stream of articles on Common Dreams and CounterPunch, I committed numerous heresies against progressive orthodoxy, so I lost that audience. Unz Review became my only outlet until its Jewjab stance exposed it as just another limited hangout. Having dissed Obama, Trump, Hillary and Bernie Sanders, I’m not a fit anywhere, but thankfully, there’s SubStack, but who knows how long that will last?
With Press TV, I was on many YouTube videos, but all those have been scrubbed. My Cross Talk debates are also gone.
My last interview on American soil was in NYC with Chris Hedges. This Pulitzer Prize winner at the New York Times had become untouchable in “the land of the free,” so had to carry on at Russia Today. In 2022, RT America was deplatformed. Hedges is now just a YouTuber and SubStacker.
I’ve transcribed this 2017 conversation before it’s flushed away. Nothing has been added. A few meaningless “you know” or “I mean” were deleted. Interviewing me, Hedges had nothing to gain, so again, I thank him. My takes on 9/11 and the Bin Laden “assassination” would have annoyed many Hedges fans, but we didn’t go there. There was so much else to discuss.
On the day of the show, I was wandering around Atlanta with my friend, Ian. Since we looked like bums, a charity van stopped to give us nearly inedible food. Back in Philly, I heard it never came on, so maybe it’s canceled, I thought. Must have tripped on some treif.
Turned out is was merely delayed, so I got to watch it at Friendly with my people. Since none was an academic or intellectual, they didn’t put up with any bullshit. Attentive throughout, they broke into applause when it was over.
Chris Hedges: Welcome to On Contact. Today we discuss the irrevocable decline of the American Empire with poet and author Linh Dinh.
Linh Dinh: We are really the poorest country on earth, and people refuse to see that. We’re only surviving, we’re only looking good because of our military might, because we are an empire. But this farce cannot go on forever.
Hedges: When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history, we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism, ask, Why were we asleep? Why did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist? Why did we allow the corporate state to strip away the rights of poor people of color and force them to live in terror in many police states? Why did we permit corporations to de-industrialize our nation and thrust the working class into poverty? Why did we swallow the absurdity of neoliberal ideology that told us the dictates of the marketplace and Wall Street should govern every aspect of our society? Why did the press and the academy stand mute as money replaced the vote and lobbyists authored our laws? Why did they render the poor and the working poor invisible? RT correspondent Anya Parampil looks at the plight of over half the country living in poverty.