The Secret Life of Phan Nhiên Hạo
“They don’t know about my secret life,” Phan Nhiên Hạo tells me. We’re standing in front of his office, having slipped into the library through a back door by the loading dock and taken three sets of escalators up to the fourth floor. “Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, but I don’t live for it,” he says searching his coat pockets for his keys, “my life as a poet is just more interesting.” I notice two students sitting opposite of each other at a study table close by. One glances over at us, momentarily, then turns back to her book. Hạo has been updating me about his job as head librarian of the Southeast Asia Collection at Northern Illinois University, including his recent book finding trip to Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia. By “they” I know he has his colleagues immediately in mind.
His colleagues know him simply as Hao Phan. Some of them call him “Howie.” They may know he was born in Vietnam, and immigrated to the US in 1991, lived in California for many years, went to school at UCLA, where he received his BA in American Literature and Culture, then went on to get a Masters in Library Science, and eventually took the position as curator of the Southeast Asia Collection. They probably know that he doesn’t live in the same town as the university, but in one of the even smaller towns nearby, just down the county road. They might know that he has a family too, a wife, a daughter in the first grade whose name means cloud in Vietnamese but is a spring month in English, and a newborn son, if not from talking with him or from others who have talked to him, then at least inferred from the family photos that can be seen in his office when they pass by. They regard him as their colleague, the curator of a remarkable library collection at an otherwise unremarkable school. But why should they know otherwise? For the most part, he keeps his secret life to himself. And even if they knew about it, he conducts his secret life in a language they do not know.
In his secret life, he is known as Phan Nhiên Hạo. Poet, critic, essayist, and travel writer, he is the author of two collections of poems in Vietnamese, Thiên Đường Chuông Giấy [Paradise of Paper Bells] (1998) and Chế Tạo Thơ Ca 99-04 [Manufacturing Poetry 99-04] (2004). Combining surrealist imagery with a deceptively plain-spoken voice, his poetry digs up the psychic debris left in the wake of war and immigration. His poems are shot-through with veiled allusions to personal memories as well larger histories, the two more often than not entangled. His is a nocturnal poetry, by turns dreamlike and nightmarish, quiet and disquieting, ironic and dead serious, sometimes melancholic, often introspective, and ever vigilant. Night is the secret province of Phan Nhiên Hạo’s poetry, and is emblematic of a limited, limiting freedom. What his poems uncover in the night is too glaring for the light of day. They tell the open secrets of Vietnam’s postwar history of loss, imprisonment, displacement, and cultural amnesia.
I’m visiting Hạo on a quiet and foggy Saturday afternoon in January. He lives just two hours south of Madison in northern Illinois, but what is regularly a short drive was made considerably longer by the areas of dense fog that rolled into the region when I drove down in the morning. And more mysterious! In the fog, crumbling barns became passing shipwrecks, groves of trees turned into distant islands, and the fields into a grey sea of nothing, and there I was floating approximately nowhere. How fortunate I felt when I finally piloted my vessel to the Misty Landing where Hạo lives. A little cloud came out to greet me. I remembered to carry a door on my back. Now on this afternoon with nothing to do, Hạo and I sit down and talk about his secret life as a poet.
