The couple who own the local Vietnamese market stay in the shop from open to close, six days a week. “I’m working like a dog,” Nguyệt said to my husband as we checked out. “You mean like a water buffalo,” my husband corrected. “Yes.” Nguyệt smiled at me from behind the counter. “We say a…
When my husband was in middle school, he tried to get the neighborhood boys to help him catch toads to make toad soup. The other kids were scared to touch toads because they thought they would get warts. I heard that myth growing up, too. But in Vietnamese the word for warts even has toad…
When I asked my kids about the scariest place they know, they said it was in the middle of the street in Saigon. And watching them cross the street at night in downtown Saigon was one of the most surreal experiences in my life. Read about our adventure “Crossing the Street in Saigon” in The Rush Magazine.
Here are some Vietnamese sayings and colloquialisms I’ve picked up through the years from my husband and his family: Criticisms Talking to you is like water pouring on taro leaves. (Nước đổ lá môn.) Going in one ear and out the other. Nothing sticks. Chicken head, duck butt. Something that is trying to be something it’s not.…
While waiting to get into a popular phở restaurant in San Jose, my daughter tried to read the sign taped to the window. “Dad, what does that say?” she asked. “It’s a help wanted sign,” he said. My daughter studied the sign to see if she recognized any words. “What does cần mean?” “Need. It says they need a…
When we went to visit my in-laws, my brother-in-law offered us some of his coffee. It wasn’t ordinary coffee, it was Instant Weasel Coffee. Instant Weasel Coffee seems like an oxymoron since weasel coffee (or civet coffee) is made from coffee beans that have gone through the digestive track of a small cat-like animal called the civet.…
My poem “Smoking a Pot of Gold” was a finalist in Asian Cha‘s “Addiction” Poetry Contest. You can read the poem and the judge’s thoughtful commentary in issue 33 of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal here. I talk about my poem and the inspiration behind it on Cha’s blog.
An excerpt from Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands appears this month in The Missing Slate, an international arts and literary journal dedicated to upholding free speech around the world: UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER: APRIL 30, 1975 “I’d like to find out where the one-way ticket goes, though. China has Taiwan and Korea has South Korea. Where will we go?…
On March 12, AAUW Fallbrook held their annual joint lunch meeting with AAUW Temecula at Pala Mesa Resort. Author Michelle Robin La captivated the room with a presentation on her first book, “Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands: A Boy from the Mekong Delta.” Read the rest of the article here.
“I don’t like the Vietnamese term for the Internet,” Lượng said one night at dinner. During my husband’s childhood in Vietnam, there was no Internet, so it’s only been on recent trips back that he’s heard the Vietnamese word for it. “They don’t say Internet?” I asked. Vietnamese-American’s sprinkle English words like Internet into conversations…
“Well, they’re not really plums,” my husband, Lượng, said about the fruit that grew on the trees in the back of his house in the Mekong Delta. When he got to America, another Vietnamese immigrant had called them “plums,” and Lượng didn’t know any other English name. An Internet search on their Vietnamese name, “mận“, brought up…
Fun to see our family’s trip to Vietnam in this article on heritage travel: “Luong La’s family fled the communist regime in Vietnam in 1979. Now a father of three living in Santa Barbara, California, he and his wife decided they wanted to spend one of their family vacations bringing the kids back to his…
I’m thrilled to have my essay “Just One Box to Define My Child” in Brain, Child Magazine’s Cultural Diversity blog series: Which box should I check when my child fits into more than one category? White like me or Asian like her dad? Read more here
Susan Miles Gulbransen’s interview with me for her Beyond Books column in Noozhawk covers the story behind why I wrote “Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands,” including what it was like for my husband’s family to tell me their story. …Michelle Robin La faced the usual dilemmas and obstacles common among writers but also some unusual…
My creative nonfiction piece “Flickering Little Lights” appears in the September 2015 issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Cha is an award-winning English online literary journal based in Hong Kong. “Fireflies are called flickering lights (đom đóm) in Vietnamese. As a child in the Mekong Delta, my husband saw them darting around the …” Read the rest here.…
Author Michelle Robin La talks with host Fred Klein about her first book Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands. The book is a memoir based on her husband’s life growing up in war-torn Vietnam. Literary Gumbo: Michelle Robin La from Literary Gumbo on Vimeo.
The restroom in the restaurant we stopped at in Little Saigon had everything you might need, including fresh roses and false eyelashes. I took a photo to show my husband. The multipack of false eyelashes hanging in a clear bag on the wall reminded him that a Vietnamese phrase for flirting is đá lông nheo…
My husband and I were interviewing his mother about her search for her missing sister’s final resting place. Talk of a sister tied to a post by the Việt Cộng and left to drown in the rising tide carries a heaviness, but Má’s eyes lit up at being able to tell her story. To be heard.…
Erin Graffy de Garcia reviewed Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands in her “State Street Spin” column in the Montecito Journal. Here are some excerpts: “…an exquisitely researched and finely tuned memoir…” “Michelle has an uncanny gift for seeing the world right through the eyes of a bright kid….Her narrative never tries to ‘sound’ like a child, she…
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a defining event in Vietnamese history and an appropriate year for the release of Michelle Robin La’s Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands: A Boy from the Mekong Delta.” —Natalie Ochsner, Santa Barbara Seasons Magazine Read the full article here.
When I see the blue and white wrappers peeking out from the basket behind the rice cooker, I think it might be some Chinese White Rabbit candy. Not that my husband buys milk candy. He sees me looking. “That’s what medicine balls are like,” he says. Medicine balls like the ones the Chinese doctor used…
(This excerpt from Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands is a first-place winner in the Southern California Genealogical Society’s 2014 GENEii Family History Writing Awards and appears in the 2015 Summer edition of The Searcher) After dinner, Má decides who’s coming to the countryside in the morning. I try to go whenever I can. I’d rather swim and fish all day…
Ever since my husband first started telling me the stories of his childhood in Vietnam, he talked about cheap trees. When his family flees to Ship Island (Cồn Tàu) after the Tết Offensive: “Má points to an island in front of us that’s surrounded by cheap trees. The trees look like they’re growing out of the…
The Santa Barbara News-Press Books section featured Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands in “Finally free: New book details Santa Barbara man’s childhood in Vietnam during and after the war” on 17 April 2015. Alternately hopeful and sometimes heartbreaking, Michelle Robin La’s comprehensive 487-page debut is based on her husband’s childhood in his native country during and after the Vietnam War.…
While sad at times and occasionally horrific, overall the story is one of resilience and inspiration and adds to a growing counter-narrative of Vietnamese-Americans as courageous survivors, not victims. –Sharon Simonson, SV1World.com reviewing Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands. Read the full article here.
Thanks to Chris Galvin Nguyen for nominating me for the “Very Inspiring Blogger Award.” The award is a way for bloggers to share other websites they admire. I’m honored to be thought of by Chris who writes about living in Vietnam and shares her incredible photography on her blog. Here are the guidelines for accepting the award and nominating…
Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands: A Boy from the Mekong Delta is the true story of a boy growing up in the midst of the Vietnam War and his struggle for freedom after the Communist takeover. Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands is available at Amazon in print and Kindle versions, as an iBook, on Google Play, and…
When I was looking through old photo albums for pictures of my husband’s family in Vietnam, I found a collection of stamps. I could tell from the yellow flag with three red stripes on them that the stamps were from South Vietnam. Most were stuck on a piece of black cardboard, but some where placed…
When I took Spanish, I was startled to learn that a knock on the door was toc toc and dogs barked guau guau. How could sounds be different in another language? Weren’t onomatopoeia supposed to represent how we actually heard them? But once I accepted that everything sounds different in another language I was enchanted. Upon meeting…
Here are 5 interesting facts about Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands: A Boy from the Mekong Delta. 1. The islands in the Mekong Delta where my husband grew up are Ship Island (Cồn Tàu) and New Dragon Island (Tân Long). Next door was Phoenix Island where the Coconut Monk had his elaborate pagoda. 2. He watched Bonanza…
As a nonfiction writer, my process is different from most. While other writers wait for their muse to show up, I already have a story. I just have to get it down, and I can’t make things up. Thanks to Charlotte Ashlock for inviting me to join the Writing Process Blog Tour where writers describe how they work. You can…
I thought a date carved in granite would be right, but my husband said the date of his grandfather’s death on the gravestone was wrong. “I remember it was a hot day in 1972,” Luong said even though the grave lists Grandfather’s death as 14 January 1971. “You can’t be sure,” he said. “It could have…
On the 29th of April 1975, helicopters evacuated people from the roof of the U.S. Embassy before the fall of Saigon. Twelve-year-old Luong La stood on a dock on the bank of the Mekong River and watched the entire Navy go out to the ocean that day. Here’s his story of the days leading to South…
Mướp squash grew over the water coconut leaf roof of the hut my husband’s family fled to during the Tết Offensive. Because he was small enough not to crash through the leaf roof, Lượng could sit up among the mướp squash watching the U.S. planes and helicopters retaliate by attacking a Việt Cộng base in…
I wouldn’t have thought Mr. Fermented Soybean to be a common name, but two of my husband’s neighbors were called this. At one point both of the Mr. Fermented Soybeans or someone in their families probably made or sold the dish that earned them this nickname. Both neighbors are in my book, so to make…
