Imagine if each of us, upon encountering a new music, questioned, first, not the music, but our own ears.

The Vietnamese folksinger Pham Duy appeared on Pete Seeger’s short-lived music television program, Rainbow Quest, in 1966. He was brought there by two American musicians, Steve Addiss and Bill Crofut, who had traveled to Southeast Asia seeking music. Sometimes white men come on earnest missions of cultural exchange; sometimes they come for other reasons.

On the program Pham Duy spoke about the old Vietnamese folk songs, many of which were about harvests and rice fields and courtship, and how “today in Viet Nam there are many songs talking about war.” He sang samples of each kind of song, including one “protest song” he explained could be sung as a lament or as a rallying cry.

Magnanimously, the white men acknowledged the politics of their time, with Bill Crofut commenting: “I wish we had more politics who could look at countries’ problems through the best of their expressions, their music, their art, their literature, because it leads to such a greater understanding of things.” To which Steve Addiss replied: “Yes, it’s so much in the news today–Vietnam–and yet we don’t know really very much about the country and the people.”

The men took their turns at playing the dan tranh, a Vietnamese folk instrument whose tuning reorders the notes of the pentatonic scale, playing even the bends and twists between the common (Western) intervals. It was this slippage between the notes that at first soured the ears of the white men. But they laughed about it, graciously, self-effacingly, declaring, “First time I heard the musicians play this I thought: they’re awfully good, but why don’t they get into tune? Then I realized it was my ear that was out of tune.”

This video was sent to me, forty-some years after its origin, by my birth father, who perhaps, upon hearing my own endeavors at (some derivative of) a “folk” music, wished me to know something about that genre’s roots in my own birth culture. My father, a writer of the pre-1975 South Vietnam era, counted Pham Duy as among his colleagues.

I extracted sound samples from the Pham Duy Rainbow Quest episode, and placed them in the song that appears here. This became part of a song-cycle, East/West, which I began writing in 2008 and finished in 2015. Part of the length of that process, for me, might be attributed to a sense of myself wandering, being drawn, to both aesthetic and personal degrees, into a terrain I had no map for, could cite no single context or guidelines to follow or fit my confluences into, a hinterland of sorts; the way that waves constantly erode and rewrite the shape of a shoreline, was how this writing process—of image, text, and music—felt to me in those 7 years. Some of that process even took place in somewhat geographical isolation: for two years I lived on the outskirts of Juneau, Alaska in a little guest house on a property above Gastineau Channel, where I spent insulated days homeschooling my son and teaching online writing classes to students whose voices and faces I would never see or hear.

There is so much remoteness that seeds the fields.

Communiqués came through to me in this time frame, a few crucial ones, glimmers from the past seeping into fissures and silences and absences, that sometimes weren’t even visible, until I saw the artifact surface there calling attention to the space it abided in. My father’s sharing of this video link was one of those items.

The photographs here are from the same project and period, images gathered on a return trip to Vietnam, in 2014, for which I carried a set of wings around to different locations to take photographs. For me the winged figure is an inhabitation of several possibilities of ‘(dis)placements’ relating to elements of Vietnamese folk mythology and I’m reluctant to narrate [her] meaning or lineage exactly. She might be a daughter returning; she might be a ghost remaining; she might be just landing or leaving or perpetually grounded. Intentionally, I sought out textures over historic markers, and placed only my own body in the gaze of the camera.

Versions of these photographs appear in two hybrid-literary books, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People and You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else. The song-cycle of East/West can be heard here.

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All photos and music by Dao Strom.

Dao Strom is a writer, artist, and musician whose work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (Ajar Press, 2018), an experimental memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People + the music album East/West (2015), and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003). Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Precipice Fund, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, and others. She is the editor of diaCRITICS and co-founder of the arts collective She Who Has No Master(s). Follow her on Twitter at @herandthesea.

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Read Lauren Kershner’s interview with Dao Strom online here at Cascadia Magazine.