Storytelling event highlights Asian American culture

Growing up in her Vietnamese community in Westminster, Emily Diem Tran remembers her mom enlisting her and her siblings in an assembly line to help make sticky rice cakes during the Lunar New Year celebration. Later, in a committed exploration and embrace of her culture, she’d learn a bit of history related to Bánh Chung and Bánh Tét, the names of those sticky rice cakes.

“I never knew why there were two different shapes,” she says of the cakes that come in either a large cylinder shape or a large square shape. “From what I’ve learned, it stems from war and convenience from a king who wanted to make a longer, skinnier one for carrying.”

Tran is a community organizer with Viet Vote San Diego, a group of Vietnamese activists and organizers working to share resources to educate and engage their community in voting and civic engagement. As part of their effort to build a stronger community voice, leadership, and relationships, they are presenting “Sharing Our Roots: Healing through Asianamerican Storytelling” from 6 to 9 p.m. Monday at the Mingei International Museum, in partnership with Karen Organization of San Diego (focused on ethnic minority groups from Myanmar, also known as Burma, who are living in San Diego), Asian Solidarity Collective, and Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans. The event will include videos of people from different Asian ethnic groups sharing stories about their own identities, as well as cultural folklore, along with various foods, and a panel discussion. It was during the post-production process of editing the videos that she learned about some of the history behind Bánh Chung and Bánh Tét. That process of being able to connect a childhood memory with the culture of food that her family brought with them as refugees after the Vietnam War, helps strengthen the sense of pride in who she is and where her family comes from.

Tran is also a nurse who does advocacy work in aging and disability groups and credits Viet Vote San Diego as being a place where she was able to be herself as a self-described second-generation, Vietnamese American, queeridentifying millennial with tattoos and a specific set of values and political viewpoints. She took some time to talk about the “Sharing Our Roots” event and the need for intergenerational and crosscultural healing that can be found in the sharing of stories. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdutlisa-deaderick-staff.html.)

Q:

Where did the idea for “Sharing Our Roots” come from? What was the inspiration?

A:

Personally, I believe in oral preservation and, coming in as an aging advocate, I realized the intergenerational aspect is very much needed. Given my upbringing and realizing that I spent a good two decades intentionally not wanting to learn about my culture and intentionally pushing that aside, this particular event hit home to me because I want to learn about my own culture, I want to learn about origin stories, I want to hear about other people’s origin stories and folklore. I feel like, living here in America, we’re only learning about the things that are given to us through grade school; once we become adults, we’re just kind of in this hamster wheel of life, just working and making ends meet. These are rare moments and it’s a privilege to be able to slow down enough to say, ‘Hey, you know what? I want to learn about the origin story of the Bánh Chung and Bánh Tét,’ which is one of the stories we’re going to be premiering on Monday. I’m familiar with specific types of Vietnamese foods, but to understand that there is an origin story as to why these things were so important to the culture is what means so much to me. I hope that when we can preserve these types of oral stories, it starts an almost ripple effect that, maybe in the future, we can have more stories about other points of origin, other folklore from other communities, because we all should be able to preserve them, learn them, and embrace them.

Q:

Can you talk about how you see storytelling as healing, both personally and culturally?

A:

With technology, the intention was to do this preservation of oral stories in a digital way because it’s not only healing in the sense of being able to teach younger generations, but also hold space for older generations to share their lived experiences, their understanding. It’s reciprocated in both directions because I feel when we can learn from others, then we can also be more empathetic, more compassionate to one another, whether it’s within the same community or across cultures to other communities. It’s realizing we can all learn from each other, and we all share that common thread — we have families who immigrated and/or sought refuge here in the states, and they all come from different backgrounds with different stories. Ultimately, my hope is that by hearing these cultural stories and these cultural identities that have been shared by community members, we’re able to learn more from their pains and their growth, as well as being able to relate to them. I’ve been working on this behind the scenes and there are a couple of different identity stories that definitely resonate with me. At the end of the day, I feel like what is most healing is us appreciating each other as being human and that we have these human moments of being messy, of not really making the right choices when we’re really young, or learning that someone’s mom came here and had the lived experience of running from country to country and realizing that they all carry their own pain. I think that’s what resonates with me the most, is realizing that we can share these moments and learn from it.

Emily Diem Tran