By Tam Nguyen, Nguoi Viet
No matter where we live, we all have a commonality: finding a way to support our families.
How that is done in Vietnam is explained in “It’s A Living: work and life in Vietnam today.” Working with a trio of students who conducted more than 100 interviews for residents of Vietnam and also Vietnamese living outside the country, editor Gerard Sasges compiled the stories of everyone from shoe shiners to CEOs into a recently released anthology. The collection took about two years to put together and includes the stories of about 70 working Vietnamese.
The book reveals the Vietnamese as a group of people leveraging whatever assets they have, not just to survive, but to make a better life for themselves and their families.
The project hit close to home for Sasges, who told a group of about 50 who gathered Saturday at the book launch at the VAALA Cultural Center in Santa Ana that he did a collection of jobs before becoming a teacher in Singapore. His most disliked job? Working as an assemblyman at a furniture manufacturer.
Gerard Sasges answers questions posed by the audience.
Sasges, who teaches at the National University of Singapore and writes about Vietnam, said the book was a tribute to the Vietnamese people. He said he made sure that each piece in the collection created a dialogue to capture the audience.
The most touching interview is the one that most affects the individual reader, he said.
“I don’t have a favorite interview but for the readers, they will have their own favorites by the interview that touches them the most,” he said.
The interviews were part of a class project, called kiem anh, which means in Vietnamese to look for food or forage. He tasked the students with interviewing workers to learn their stories. They took translators along on their missions.
Tracy Nguyen, Peter Le and Loc Le, left to right, who conducted the interviews for the book, are joined by editor Gerard Sasges and Ysa Le, executive director of VAALA.
Even with the translators, language presented a problem at times.
“The first three interviews were the most challenging for me because I don’t know how to speak Vietnamese but I understand it. So when I heard my question being translated, it was not the question that I had asked so I had to repeat it several times to get it right,” said Loc Le, one of the students who took part. “Another challenge was we were not allowed to record the conversation, so I had to jot it down as fast as I could, trying to translate the Vietnamese into English.”
Peter Le said he learned that interview subjects differed in their levels of openness.
“Some would tell us a lot, and some would tell us not so much,” he said.
The book is available on amazon.com.
