Truong Tran, “How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir”

A new book by Truong Tran, “How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir” (City Lights), brings to mind a strange duo: memories of the movie, Inception, and recent articles about lone-star ticks. The 2010 film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a thief able to invade victims’ subconscious and steal information. He flips the game and attempts to permanently implant, not extract, an idea in his target’s brain. The tick-related troubles, especially this particular pest, are scaling up and spreading. Embedding themselves and feeding on human hosts, scores of researchers and reporters are clamoring about alpha-gal syndrome, along with their worries about Lyme disease and questions about other conditions such as dementia that might be related to tick infestations.

How does invasive implantation relate to an American poet who, in an interview, claims his identity as an Asian, an immigrant, a queer Brown man writing in the English language? The answer is found in the book’s essays, which chronicle Tran’s lifetime during which tiny tick-size statements—that he is “small in comparison,” or “just a poet,”—have burrowed under his skin and periodically erupt in festering wounds. The embedded memories rankle Tran’s subconscious and emerge as anger, shame, a desire to belong, and uncertainty about feeling safe. Each thought or memory is an inception point from which the only chance of reaching a conclusion is to write it out, to make art in words and other means.

Tran, 57, came to the United States from Saigon with his family in 1975. He grew up in a primarily immigrant community of Asians and Mexicans in San Jose. During his early school years, he was diagnosed as a person with dyslexia; a context in which his professional immersion in the world of words seems ironic. Attending the University of California, Santa Cruz and completing post-graduate work at San Francisco State University, Tran was often on the receiving end of racist treatment, an unasked-for outing, denigrating comments about poetry, othering, anti-immigrant bias, and silencing. In addition to being a published poet and writer (his previous book; 2021’s “Book of the Other”), Tran is an English professor at Northeastern University in Oakland.

How to Exi(s)t is divided into seven sections: On Writing, On Art, On Breathing, On Teaching, On Imagination and Memory, On Family, On the Book That Came Before. Separated from the “On,” the chapter headings summarize a composite self-portrait. The words describe the collage Truong has become: the shapes he takes or resists, the beats he listens to, the energies that drive his compulsion to write essay accompanied by pain and anger, but also stories spinning with dizzying joy, humor, imagination, and hope.

Tran writes in his memoir, “I have written myself out of silence and back into existence,” a sentence like many others that in a few words contains a universe of his ideas. Another sentence: “I want some readers to experience the desire to unread this book.” He is certain he does not want his memoir to be“inadvertent entertainment,” or viewed as “heart-breaking, heart-wrenching, or generous.” His story is a lived experience. How to Exi(s)t is not a book of prefabricated emotions or a one-size, performative product for sale. On the page and in conversation, Tran chases the meaning of memories, relationships, and connections to the living world. In this way, Tran opens up a complex dialogue within himself and with his readers. The conversation includes anger, conflict, questions, imagination, and connection.

“I’ve been grappling with this notion of anger my entire writing career,” Tran says. “I can easily be pegged or labeled as the Angry Asian guy. It becomes the all-encompassing container. I wanted to write through and beyond anger, but also to hold space for it. As someone who’s queer, Brown, living in this time, I have to allow anger to enter to facilitate my movement.”

He remembers friends once sending him a tweet attempting to show him a moment of enlightenment by sharing another writer’s comment that he had never written a single page out of anger, writing only out of a place of care.

“I can’t imagine not allowing anger to exist in my consciousness and writing. But in this book, I will be honest with you. I was also trying to move beyond it. I want to believe I’m capable of experiencing joy, celebration, and love. Love of the other, myself, my community. I wanted to devote space and energy to that effort.”

In an essay about his godson, Tran writes, “I still want to belong to a world that is still wanting to be better than what it was and what it is.” He looks to his godson, a young person full of hope, love of comic books and superheroes, to counter the hopelessness lodged in his consciousness. “He reminds me of my own exuberance. I want a better future for him, for my students. Am I able to love myself in the same way? I do, but I’ve also lived through a life of struggle and overcoming and trying to put down the weight of shame of others. I was ashamed of being gay for a long time, but it wasn’t mine. It was the world putting that on me.”

Utilizing language to get to the truth, Tran knows that words can also be like enemies; wielded by authoritarians to oppress, diminish, and express cruelty. He is not “just a poet,” he is a person with thoughts and emotions full of unresolved complexities. His mind is a repository of possibilities, but when racism or other denigration occurs, he believes a person carries that burden for a lifetime. Putting it down is a constant process of trying to shed the weight.

Tran describes the memoir as documentation of his existence written in response to possible and real erasure. “As an immigrant, the validity of my being is being questioned. Citizenship papers, birth certificates, certifications of ownership are being put on me. All for what purpose and why is it now being invoked? Because I have a voice and I’m choosing to assert it? That’s it. Somehow that voice feels threatening for the “other.” I say, if you are uncomfortable, try sitting in that moment. I’ve been sitting with the discomfort of otherness my whole life.”

Tran writes first drafts “in a flurry.” When editing, the construction is methodical. Shorter essays are designed to create pauses, to leave readers to decide for themselves where they stand. “A big part of writing is taking back an idea. I don’t believe I have to divulge everything. My privacy is paramount,” he says. Often, offering less tells more. He recalls a scene in the movie A River Runs Through It. “We discover the younger brother has passed away, the victim of violence. It is just said in passing, never shown. I remember how powerful that was.”

As he begins to make appearances and interacts directly with readers, Tran holds onto one hope. A piece of art he made that a woman responded to during an Open Studio event he says will never be complete until she returns to claim it. “I’ve been asked to sell it, but will not. It’s art based on a photographic image of her grandfather, she told me during the Open Studio. Giving it to her would complete the narrative and tell me the story has arrived at an ending.”

Truong Tran launches “How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir” at 2 p.m. Oct. 18 at City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco; RSVP here.