Yarning: A Vietnamese/Australian/Indigenous way to speak/share/belong

Kim Huynh

This is a reflection on how a migrant organisation that I belong to has adopted Indigenous yarning to tell truths, share experiences and heal wounds. The Vietnamese Australian Forum (VAF) was established in 2021 by two south-western Sydney-based lawyers Tu Le and Than Nguyen.¹ They sought to form a national body to advance community leadership and identity made up of mostly 1.5- and second-generation Vietnamese migrants—that is, the children of the first-generation refugees. VAF holds informal monthly meetings to organise online and in-person events about culture, politics and other issues of interest to its members who include artists, councillors, community organisers and lawyers. I joined VAF in late 2021, seeking to make a greater contribution to public life and to connect with other Vietnamese Australians. Given my experience as a lecturer and radio presenter, I became the primary forum facilitator.

Since its inception, VAF has endeavoured to respectfully engage with Indigenous people and culture. This engagement has been led by several members who work with Indigenous colleagues promoting diversity and inclusion. In 2023, VAF began developing a bilingual Acknowledgement of Country toolkit that could be used at community events and discussed a program to combat racism against Indigenous people among Vietnamese Australians. By that time, I had begun incorporating elements of Indigenous knowledge and issues into my teaching, research and broadcasting. In March 2023, VAF became one of the first of over 120 multicultural organisations to sign the joint resolution in support of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. It was in this context that we turned to yarning as a way to promote understanding and healing among Vietnamese Australians.

Yarning means different things to different people. While British yarning is associated with spinning improbable tales, Australian yarning has evolved into casual chitchat, often accompanied by a cuppa or a brew. For many Indigenous people in Australia, yarning is a way to transfer culture and develop knowledge. It fosters respectful relationships among yarners and with country, which can be understood as a place that is woven together with its living creatures and belief systems.² For Lynore Geia, Barbara Hayes and Kim Usher, yarning is collective and dynamic: ‘The stories remain in our conscious state like a thread hanging, waiting to be picked up again, to be continued, reconstructed, reinforced and once again embedded in our ontology.’³ The stories are created by many and interpreted by all. Yarning can be informal and family oriented or conducted according to strict principles and protocols.⁴ It has been harnessed to facilitate community spirit, entrepreneurship, creativity, critical thinking, communication skills, resilience and for therapy.

My and VAF’s first foray into public yarning involved an online forum that coincided with the forty-eighth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. The forum was entitled ‘Losing: The Legacy of 30 April’. The two guest speakers, Sheila Pham and Vivian Pham, were authors, artists and public intellectuals who had written about the ongoing and intergenerational effects of the war and displacement on the Vietnamese diaspora.

For me, it was a rare and valuable chance to be still and take stock of what it means to be a Vietnamese Australian. We discussed how, after the traumatic rupture of escaping Vietnam, our parents struggled to build a new foundation for our lives in Australia. Some of our parents revealed little about what and who they had lost, while others spoke openly and often. We explored how, as their children, we carried the weight of their sacrifices and had inherited not only their strength but also their suffering. The discussion was open and at times easy going like so many Aussie yarns. We mimicked young people in Vietnam who call timeout from the constant bustle of their lives to chem gio (shoot the breeze). It was thus by design, happenstance and instinct that we fused together Aussie and Vietnamese modes of conversing with four interrelated Indigenous components of yarning.

1. We began to listen deeply

Dadirri or deep listening is a form of meditation as expressed in the language of the Ngan’gikurunggkurr people in the Northern Territory, and which has corresponding practices among Indigenous groups across Australia.⁵ It requires being silent and still, with a view to forging what is within us together with what is around us. Deep listening cultivates a sense of belonging with the sentient landscape. For Margaret Hughes and Stuart Barlo, mutual respect and regeneration flows from, ‘seeing Country as a living teaching breathing being that has stuff for us, in return for what we bring to it’.⁶ The value of deep listening is evident in ANU researcher Jilda Andrews’s description of how Country yarns back as she makes her way home:

This drive is a gentle thaw. It’s a story I tell in my head, noticing how the country changes, how it’s named and known, how traversing out of Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, my car tyres blend with the Wiradjuri plains which open up wider and wider until we hit Gamilaraay land, both places of the googar (goanna). Wooded river country emerges sometimes out of the blue, the trees hug the bends of the Macquarie and Castlereagh rivers and become visible from the highway. Pulling into the town of Walgett, now Gamilaraay and Ngemba country, the place where two rivers meet, the place where my parents met, and where some of my family still live, I’m greeted by the familiar face of my uncle and the warmth of a setting sun. It’s like story walks me home.⁷

Like yarning, dadirri is a gift from Indigenous people. However, it can be difficult and daunting for non-Indigenous folk to receive. Can, for instance, second-generation Vietnamese migrants listen deeply given the relatively short time that they have lived in Australia and the fact that some children of refugees struggle to relate to any homeland? In this regard, panellist Vivian Pham points to how her exiled father has a visceral attachment to a Vietnam that, to him, is the ‘most foreign place on this earth, since no place is as foreign as the place you used to call home’, while she comes not from a place or person but from a journey—‘one of survival’.⁸ Similarly, Andre Dao, another Vietnamese Australian author whose work was referred to during the forum, describes his own loss as being like ‘a shadow’ of what his forebears experienced: ‘I did not lose my country. I simply didn’t have one to begin with.’⁹ The upshot for Dao is a profound freedom to connect with places and people, but also a proclivity to view one’s loss and oneself as ‘trivial in the grand scheme of suffering’.¹⁰

Dao’s novel Anam illustrates that the estrangement experienced by Vietnamese migrants and Indigenous people can be transformed into belonging. Anam is Dao’s constructed homeland, a homonym of ‘Annam’, which was the title imposed on Vietnam under Chinese imperialism. It is also derived from ‘anamnesis’, the act of remembering and forgetting. In crafting Anam, Dao pays homage to the creative power of Indigenous author Alexis Wright in Carpenteria.¹¹ For Wright, to belong to country is ‘to belong to time immemorial, to epic story’ and to ‘relationships of responsibility’.¹² Similarly, to belong to Anam is to tap into an ancient Vietnamese storytelling tradition and to realise that our ancestors exist with us, as W. E. H. Stanner put it, ‘everywhen’.¹³ Specifically, Dao’s protagonist realises that his grandmother is in ‘no-place and no-time’:

she lives in the eternal, ever-more-compressed present. All her pasts—thirties Hà Nội, sixties Sài Gòn, eighties Laon, today in Boissy—are now. Her bones have always ground up against each other like mortar against pestle.¹⁴

In the face of colonisation, genocide and assimilation, Indigenous people in Australia lay claim to the oldest continuing culture in the world in part because that culture is continually replenished, remade and renewed. From this ongoing process, Vietnamese Australians who have also accumulated ‘loss upon loss’ have much to relate and learn.¹⁵

2. We gathered round

Indigenous yarns promote equality and mutual respect. While they may be facilitated by one person, there is no formal hierarchy. Seating is typically circular without rows, levels or VIP reservations. The aim is to foster a free-flowing dialogue that does not begin with a commanding capital letter and is not closed off by a definitive full stop.

Creating and then extending the VAF yarning circle, particularly to first-generation Vietnamese Australians who might have little interest in Indigenous affairs and who ascribe to Confucian notions of filial and generational piety, was challenging. Some first-generation Vietnamese Australians believe that only they can legitimately speak of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, given their direct experience and enduring sentiments and memories. I have relatives, for instance, who, despite my decades of research, tell me: ‘You’ll never know what it was like.’¹⁶ There are, moreover, older Vietnamese Australians who refuse to return to Vietnam while it is under Vietnamese Communist Party control and who disdain anyone in the Vietnamese diaspora who has business or professional dealings with it, even comparing them to German Jews associating with Nazi Germany.

Holding VAF’s yarning event on 30 April was sensitive because the day is commonly reserved for protest or silence, not discussion. In promoting the event on SBS Vietnamese radio, it was necessary for me to clarify that, by the term ‘losing’, VAF was not referring to thua or that bai, which evokes defeat, but rather mat, which evokes what has been lost or taken. Despite our best efforts to promote and create a respectful environment for discussion, the first-generation Vietnamese who we invited to join the panel discussion all declined.

In preparation for ‘Losing’, and during the forum itself, VAF members not only honoured the suffering and trauma of prior generations, but also acknowledged how that suffering and trauma had been perpetuated by parental anxiety and unresolved grief. We assumed that most of the forum attendees were second-generation Vietnamese but hoped that some of the first generation attended too, along with non-Vietnamese. VAF’s ‘Losing’ forum included participants from around the country and the Asia-Pacific, including Vietnam. We did not moderate contributions, trusting participants to add freely and responsibly via video, audio and the chat function. This they did. However, arguably, the yarning only truly began after the discussion formally closed. Once trust had been established and in the absence of any agenda, some participants stayed online to share their thoughts and experiences.

3. We spoke from the heart

How often do we express ourselves with deep sincerity and consideration for others? In professional gatherings and the public sphere, it is common to witness grandstanding, premeditated performances, calculated silences, formulaic deliveries and bullshit. Speaking from the heart is a natural act made radical by cynicism, competition and bureaucracy. It requires yarners to refrain from judgement and to quell expectations of specific outcomes, not with a view to ignoring faults or pretending that everything is fine, but rather to see, accept and embrace circumstances as they are. Broadcaster and Wiradjuri man Stan Grant exemplifies the skill and strength required to speak from the heart. He points out that moral, spiritual and empirical rewards come in the form of: ‘Truths. Hard truths. Truths not told with hate—truths offered with love. Yes, love … for the Australia we have never been.’¹⁷

Speaking from the heart can help people to articulate vulnerability, which also often requires courage. This can be valuable when it comes to many older Vietnamese refugees who lost a war and a country, who were battered and demeaned in Vietnamese re-education camps and who were stripped again of their status upon arriving in Australia. Author and entrepreneur Cat-Thao Nguyen tells of how her father had been sent to a re-education camp in Vietnam where he was forced to denounce himself as a traitor for hours a day and for years on end:

And now in Australia he was just another mute migrant. Anger, fear, resentment, pity, terror and sadness had rolled over him like waves … My teenage heart was breaking into tiny bits of pulp as he recounted the story. Then he looked at me and said, ‘In this country I have a mouth to eat with but I don’t have a mouth to speak with. You are my voice.’¹⁸

During the ‘Losing’ forum, we reflected upon how some first-generation Vietnamese migrants, who had lost so much of their power and control, insisted that their children should never be weak, disobey or fail. Sheila Pham expressed how, for a long time, she was afraid to reveal to her father that she needed glasses because she was short-sighted. She expressed no resentment towards her father during the forum, but spoke of how, as a parent, she remains wary of any impulse for order and control.

4. We shared stories

A good yarn comprises shared stories. Arguably, this is not as efficient a form of communication as dot-pointed lectures or presentations. In academia, information is often praised for its precision and proprietorial value. The impetus in the media is to ‘get the story’ (hopefully first and exclusively) and then to convey it to as many people as possible. Knowledge cultivated through yarning and storytelling, on the other hand, is not singular, verifiable or easily broadcast. Often yarns meander and go off on tangents.¹⁹ But, by so doing, they encourage listeners to adapt and complete them, thereby adding to their meaning and influence.²⁰

When there is an appreciation of how individual health is shaped by communal wellbeing, sharing stories can help address trauma and alienation.²¹ Seemingly simple storytelling can generate understanding of complex human conditions. On the VAF ‘Losing’ panel, Vivian Pham shared an account of a character in her book who is based on her father and who bucks the stereotype of the once hapless now happily resettled refugee. He never stopped yearning for his boat journey, particularly the freedom, thrill and serenity that he experienced when he was marooned on a nameless island, in the face of a storm. After years in Australia, he still regularly turned his mind to what propelled ‘all that wind’ and ‘all those waves’, embracing the chaos as ‘a kind of perfection’:²²

Not like calculus and geometry, but the way a piece of music can sound so perfect it makes you wonder if you’re the one who wrote it, if it came from somewhere inside you.²³

The character’s daughter is in awe of her father who sees storms as ‘misunderstood symphonies’, but she also frets that he will one day ‘find his way back to the ocean, ^,that mythical place he never once stopped believing in’.²⁴

Incorporating yarning into the Vietnamese Australian forums has great potential to foster belief—belief in lost and new homelands and in one another. VAF has begun an ongoing series of conversations with Indigenous people and will incorporate yarning into all its events. If yarning can do so much to promote belonging, solidarity and healing for Vietnamese migrants across generations, imagine what it can do once it is broadly incorporated into art, work, public affairs and how we go about our daily lives.

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1. 1 Vietnamese Australian Forum, ‘Advancing Vietnamese Australian Leadership and Identity’, accessed 2 December 2023, www.vaforum.org.au/.

2. 2 Mareese Terare and Margot Rawsthorne, ‘Country Is Yarning to Me: Worldview, Health and Well-Being Amongst Australian First Nations People’, British Journal of Social Work 50, no. 3 (2020): 946, doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcz072.

3. 3 Lynore K. Geia, Barbara Hayes and Kim Usher, ‘Yarning/Aboriginal Storytelling: Towards an Understanding of an Indigenous Perspective and Its Implications for Research Practice’, Contemporary Nurse 46, no. 1 (December 2013): 15, doi.org/10.5172/conu.2013.46.1.13.

4. 4 Margaret Hughes and Stuart Barlo, ‘Yarning with Country: An Indigenist Research Methodology’, Qualitative Inquiry 27, no. 3–4 (March 1, 2021): 355, doi.org/10.1177/1077800420918889.

5. 5 Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, Rachel A. Groom, Emma L. Schuberg, Judy Atkinson, Caroline Atkinson, Ruth Wallace and Gavin Morris, ‘Dadirri: An Indigenous Place-Based Research Methodology’, AlterNative : An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 18, no. 1 (2022): 94–S3, doi.org/10.1177/11771801221085353.

6. 6 Hughes and Barlo, ‘Yarning with Country’, 356.

7. 7 Jilda Andrews, ‘Country as Storyteller’, Museum (October 2022): 38.

8. 8 Vivian Pham, ‘Speaking to Water’, forthcoming.

9. 9 André Dao, Anam (Docklands: Hamish Hamilton, 2023).

10. 10 Ibid.

11. 11 Ibid., 222.

12. 12 Ibid.

13. 13 W. E. H. Stanner and Robert Manne, The Dreaming & Other Essays (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2011), 99.

14. 14 Dao, Anam, 222.

15. 15 Ibid.

16. 16 Kim Huynh, Where the Sea Takes Us: A Vietnamese Australian Story (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2008).

17. 17 Stan Grant, ‘For Years I’ve Been a Media Target for Racism and Paid a Heavy Price. For Now, I Want No Part of It—I’m Stepping Away’, ABC News, 19 May 2023, www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-19/stan-grant-media-target-racist-abuse-coronation-coverage-enough/102368652.

18. 18 Cat Thao Nguyen, We Are Here (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2015), 189.

19. 19 Dawn Bessarab and Bridget Ng’andu, ‘Yarning about Yarning as a Legitimate Method in Indigenous Research’, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 3, no. 1 (1 January 2010): 39, doi.org/10.5204/ijcis.v3i1.57.

20. 20 Ibid., 41.

21. 21 Terare and Rawsthorne, ‘Country Is Yarning to Me’, 948.

22. 22 Vivian Pham, The Coconut Children (Sydney: Penguin, 2020) 79.

23. 23 Ibid.

24. 24 Ibid.