November Feature: Chrysanthemum Tran
- blueshiftjournal
- Nov 27, 2016
- 18 min read
We are proud to have Chrysanthemum Tran as our featured artist of November!
Chrysanthemum Tran is an emerging queer and transfeminine Vietnamese American poet and teaching artist in Providence by way of Oklahoma City. In 2016, they became the first trans woman finalist of the Women of the World Poetry Slam. A three-time semifinalist at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, Chrysanthemum won “Best Poet” and “Best Poem” in 2016, and “Pushing the Art Forward” in 2015. A 2016 Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam champion and Pink Door Fellow, Chrysanthemum is a two-time member of the Providence national slam team and coaches the Providence youth slam team.
You can find Chrysanthemum on Twitter and Instagram at @chrystran, or at their website, chrysanthemumtran.com.
Our features editor Nicholas Nichols spoke with Chrysanthemum a few weeks ago. Read below what they said.
You’re originally from Oklahoma – what was it like growing up there?
I moved to Providence, Rhode Island over three year ago for school, and although I’m not in college currently, I haven’t moved since. For the first eighteen years of my life in Oklahoma, I always dreamed of moving out. The opportunities there aren’t abundant by any means. I didn’t really have the most amazing public school education, and there, homophobia and transphobia is wildly rampant with incredible amounts of racism – both interpersonal and systemic. Moving to Providence was a huge shock because now, I was finally in close proximity to the big cities.
Can you speak on your political activism while attending Brown University?
I think when I was a first year student, I was exposed to the histories of third world organizing – people who fought for decolonization and liberation for Black and brown communities. That was my first month in, after leaving Oklahoma, where I was able to finally learn all of this methodical framework, about how to think critically about activism. But my first experience with organizing was in October, so I was very much still a baby. Commissioner Ray Kelly, of the infamous stop-and-frisk policy, was invited to speak on Brown’s campus. There was a group of other Black and brown organizers who did not want the university to provide a platform for him to speak.
There have been a lot of discussions about college campuses and free speech, and that’s a tired conversation for me. Should everyone get a platform to speak? I’m not interested in going there. My direct answer is, I think no one needs to hear Ray Kelly speak. I don’t think he needs to be given an honorarium from a wealthy family to speak. And I’m not interested in hearing people who are actively interested in harming Black and brown communities. Although he’s based in New York, members of the Providence Police Department were seated in the first two to three rows of the auditorium, eager to hear him talk about policing.
Of course, that was only my first year. Last year was a very peculiar kind of time, I think, for campus organizing, and that was especially true for a lot of the Black organizing done. For example, we can look to the organizing at Mizzou’s Concerned Student 1950 and the University of Capetown’s #RhodesMustFall, and how that spread rapidly across other universities and colleges.
Brown University, every five to ten years, releases a diversity and inclusion plan – big, lofty words. We were organizing at a time when we could renegotiate what that plan was going to look like. We requested very specific things to shape how this particular diversity and inclusion action plan was going to play out during this critical time. I’m not very engaged anymore, because I’m not on campus. It was exhausting and messy, and honestly I experienced a lot of burnout from that.
How has being a photographer affected your work?
Both of my parents are refugees from Vietnam, and they both have very few photos from the time when they were living before migration. In fact, most of the photos I’ve ever seen of them young have been them after immigrating to America as refugees. But interestingly enough, my father was a freelance photographer. He learned how to develop film – and I think this was through the 80s and 90s, so everything was analog. And my mother currently works for a company in Oklahoma that photoshops all of the photos that are taken at the mall, for glamor shots, for colleges and schools, whenever you get a nice photo done. In two very specific ways, I’ve always been thinking about photography.
My father taught me how to take photos, if only to record family history. At family gatherings, he’d be like “here, come take photos of everyone.” It’d be very mundane. We would be eating, we’d be singing karaoke, and he wanted to record all of these images.
I think a lot about images and photography, if only because I’ve often been unhappy with the way that I have looked. When I was 15 to 18, I spent a lot of time with photography, and did a lot of self-portraits. That was my first dedication to an art form. I spent a lot of time learning how to be technically proficient at photography.
As I got older, now that I’ve actively sought out the histories of colonization, I view photography as a very daunting technology. My first exposure to the history of Vietnam – and other violences in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War – was through photographs. These would be Western documentarians going into Southeast Asia with cameras and exporting the images of grainy, poorly exposed brown bodies for the consumption of fear in the public eye. So that’s how people got to know Southeast Asia, through these grainy photographs. These are images that won Pulitzer Prizes. They won awards by being invasive.
Can you remember the first poem that made you think, “Yeah, I wanna do that?”
When I was a little baby, when I was in public school in Oklahoma, the shit that changed my life was Maya Angelou. She was my first introduction to poetry that wasn’t written by a cis white man or wasn’t written in inaccessible language.
More critically, the first book of poems that did that was Suji Kwock Kim’s Notes from the Divided Country. There’s a poem called “Occupation” that begins the second part of her book. It’s a concise one-page poem about the legacies of occupation, empire and militarization. Sometimes you just feel it in your bones, in your mouth. Sometimes you shake a little bit. You’re like, that’s the shit that I want. That is truly magical.
I think the second poem was from Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec, which makes me cry a lot. Her poem “As a Consequence of My Brother Stealing All the Lightbulbs.” was the first time where I saw personal narrative and magic fuse so unexpectedly. I wanted to cry and curl up under a bunch of dogs and be held in all the ways my mother never held me – great feelings all around.
Here’s a quote by Annete Messager: “Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.” Do you agree with that?
Perhaps not for all artists, but I know that my own art comes from places of hurt. I’ve only ever written poetry or taken photos because I was hurt. I’ve never thought oh, my life is going so well, I really want to put that to paper right now, and for me, I often have to process my pain rather than my joy. If I think of poetry as thinking out loud, then poetry is what allows me to unearth all my wounds, and lets me try to find some reconciliation among personal and historical pains.
I think the converse of that is that I wish I wrote more about joy. If only because I’m learning how to be happy right now, if only because I’m at a place in my life where I feel like the worst has happened, I’m able to really try and see – is Chrysanthemum really going to make it out of this? – and maybe it’s a little personal, but for the first time in my life I feel like I think I’m going to make it through this period. I think that kind of joy is worth manifestation into art.
What is joy to you?
I’ve been trying to figure that out for months, years. I don’t think about the first 18 years of my life positively, so I wasn’t ever able to latch onto a kind of joy. Knowing that I feel like I’ve gone through a lot of personal struggles that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone else, what I’ve found to be joy is being able to love yourself so much that it is unapologetically selfish and everyone you care about around you is so happy for you to have reached that kind of love, and they love you even more for that.
But it wasn’t until I got kicked out of college that I was like, “Okay, girl, you need to fix your mental health because you just can’t let this go unacknowledged.” And what I crave is open, honest communication and meaningful relationships with everyone in my life, and I felt most joyous when I feel I didn’t have to fight for the relationships I had around me, and that there were people who cared about me, not because it was unconditional, because together it’s really beneficial for everyone to be happy for each other. So, you know, me cooking dinner for my friends, calling them up a half hour before and being like, “Y’all want some fried rice? I made a shitload,” that is a certain kind of joy for me. It may be small, but I treasure that kind of joy because I haven’t had that throughout my life. When I do have some of it, I want to cultivate it.
What have you been reading that’s been inspiring you?
I’ve been reading two things off and on. One is a poetry book and another is an academic theory book. My poetry side is reading Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones. I’m reading it again because the first time I read it, it didn’t really strike me the way I think it deserved because I was reading it at work. But now, I’m really getting to meditate with it, meditate and breathe in each page.
But the other book I’m reading right now is Jose Esteban Munoz’s academic book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. He’s a late queer Cuban American theorist who wrote about queer people of color. In this book, he talks about “disidentification” – negotiating how queer people of color can transform mainstream media for their own purposes. It helps me understand how I, as an Asian American queer trans woman, can like Lady Gaga. I can recognize her faults but not have her faults hinder me from enjoying a couple bops on her new album.
Can you describe the feeling of competing at the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam and being the first transfeminine poet to reach final stage?
Being the first trans woman finalist of the Women of the World Poetry Slam still feels unreal. I had gone from Providence to Brooklyn with Charlotte Abotsi and Franny Choi, and we really held each other. One, it was fun to be with my sisters. But two, I would like to say that I think they were really happy for me, and that was like a strange, empathetic sisterhood I have never experienced.
When I think about that poetry slam, I don’t think about finals stage. I think about why I was able to get there at all, and it was through my sisterhood with Charlotte and Franny, who had first coached me when I represented Providence in the National Poetry Slam in 2015. The first time I’d ever gone to a poetry slam ever was actually when I saw them both compete for the Providence spot to represent in the Women of the World Poetry Slam a few years back. So it all came full circle. I felt lucky. I was amazed that my stories could be legible to an audience who were mostly adjusted to hearing cis women, and I’m grateful for everyone who helped me get there.
I’m also thankful for Paul Tran, my blood sister by choice. They coached me and my other beloved sister, Gabrielle Smith, and we were both able to perform on finals stage. I’m forever grateful for the impact of women of color and femmes of color in my life.
What is family to you?
I don’t have access to the family I was born into anymore, really because I am a trans woman, because I transitioned and am out. I was outed to my family. That’s something I’ve been very public about. In light of that, I’m so thankful for the people who saw me going through a rough time and were like, “Girl, are you okay?” And it was okay for me to be like, “No, I’m not.”
I’ve cultivated a really firm community of people: Black and brown people, queer and trans people… People often tell me, you have so many sisters, you call everyone a sister. And I’m like, they’re all my blood sisters – blood sisters by choice. We may have not come from the same womb, but I would bleed for you.
There’s a strange memory I have with Charlotte Abotsi. We were walking through my neighborhood. There was this white cis dude, naked, in front of a window, pleasuring himself. It was late, we were supposed to eat our Tex-Mex food. But I felt responsible to tell the family in the household that this dude was peering into their window, doing this act. But it was like, are a cis Black woman and an Asian trans woman really about to go confront this man? Luckily he ran away from us, but we were ready to get justice even though we shouldn’t have. But sisterhood means that we would bleed for each other.
I’m thankful for that kind of relationship and sisterhood, if only because it means, in situations like this, there are people who would knuck and buck with me. I would always knuck and buck for my sisters.
Who is a part of your literary family tree?
I think I’m lucky that I’ve had direct mentorship from writers who cared deeply about poetics and were really interested in cultivating my sense of poetic thinking. I was lucky to be mentored by Paul Tran and Franny Choi, both as young, contemporary Asian American poets who are very much invested in re-innovating queer Asian American femme poetics. I owe a lot to Black and brown femme and woman poets who I’ve learned tremendously from, like Rachel McKibbens. There are also other Vietnamese American poets, like Ocean Vuong and Cathy Linh Che, who are doing the damn work right now. I haven’t met them but I have read them closely, if only to know what is the current state of Vietnamese American poetics. I also look up to Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, a trans woman poet who touches on a kind of queer grief and sadness that colors a lot of my day-to-day life.
In your poem ‘Cognates,’ you meditate on colonization, but more specifically the colonization of language and its cultural & psychological effects. Where has your fight to decolonize the spaces you inhabit – even in your own body – taken you?
I think in owning a Southeast Asian diasporic transfeminine body, I’ve really had to think critically about desire and attraction. What does it mean for my body to be desirable? There are people out there who desire the quintessential Southeast Asian ladyboy body. A part of me really wants me to undergo medical transitioning but I’m not necessarily succumbing to a Western-idealized version of what a woman should be. I’m very much proud and comfortable in being a trans woman, in owning a trans woman’s body. I don’t want to be a white woman. I don’t want to be a cis woman. It’s so hard because the inclination is to gravitate toward bodies like that, but I don’t think womanhood belongs to white cis women. I can craft out a kind of womanhood for me that isn’t entirely dictated by white cis celebrities.
In terms of decolonization, it is really easy for me to try to want to romanticize what Vietnamese queer and trans identities were before empire, before colonization. That is lost to me right now. I don’t have the words in my first language of Vietnamese for non-binary or queer or transfeminine, and I’m okay with that. How my family thinks about Vietnam is rooted in the 70s when they fled the country, and the words that they have access to are rooted to that period of time.
If you were going to ask an American from the 60s and 70s what words they would be using for what we now call transgender or transfeminine, they would be using words like transvestite and drag queens. Many people who we would consider to be trans women self-identified with terms that feel now outdated. When I think about how my parents have never really taught me the words for queerness, that isn’t to say Vietnam now doesn’t have words for that. I’m sure that there are, but I don’t have access to those words. I also live in an English-speaking country, and so what I find useful is to cultivate a kind of out space for myself, using English as best as I can.
Do you speak Vietnamese?
Vietnamese was my first language, but I’ve forgotten most of it by now by going to a public school. Both of my parents speak English well because they immigrated to America young. The other day, I tried to do Rosetta Stone Vietnamese, and everything was so formalized. I didn’t learn the language like that. I learned how to talk grandparents. I learned how to speak in a very casual, community-focused way. I’m not used to asking people, “How do I send letter mail to send delegates across the ocean?” That sentence to me is very academic and professional. I also learned a mixture of how to use Vietnamese and English at the same time. Whenever I do call my father, we go back and forth between the two languages very easily. Part of me thinks about that as trying to hold onto whatever we have left of our diasporic histories. But in losing most of my family, I don’t have opportunities to use a language as much as I would like.
What is femininity to you – what is womanhood?
I think I’m no expert on either femininity or womanhood, but I think both are very dangerous magics. Women and femmes have often been the most vilified people in their own respective communities for so long, and there’s a reason for that. It’s easy to understand what woman is. It’s rooted in a gendered thinking that is obvious to people now. People understand what woman is. People have a harder time holding onto what femininity and femme is. I’ve seen a lot of progressive political language trying to use the language of femmes instead of women, but not all women are femmes. There are butch women, there are butch cis women, there are feminine trans men.
I think femininity refers to a kind of energy, a set of ways that we understand ourselves. It is an internalizing and externalizing energy. I think it’s about the choices you really try to make about how are you going to connect with others. Femininity is unnerving. Femmephobia exists. The hatred, the fear of things feminine are why cis white gay men in the larger “LGBT” community don’t really give a fuck about Black and brown trans women and trans femmes. Femmephobia has already run rampant in the intracommunal relations of gay men, and it makes sense why white gay corporations don’t give a fuck about trans women and trans femmes. Femininity undermines power, and that makes people nervous. Which is good.
Do you feel there is safe space in poetry for a queer/transfeminine/Vietnamese American person?
I would like to think that I’m only in this space now because past Asian American and queer and trans writers have cultivated a space. The only other queer trans femme Vietnamese poets I can think of right now are Alex-Quan Pham and Paul Tran, and there’s a reason why we’re all in the same temporal situation. It was because of the work that was done before us that we’re allowed to be here now. Black women have time and time again carved out spaces for everyone else, and in that exploitation of labor, and in my own experience, Black women and femmes in my life have boosted me up to feel like I can do poetry.
Maybe my presence in poetry, albeit very minimal and young right now, will give way to someone else. Maybe that’s conceited of me. I’m a young 21-year-old millennial poet. I have a Twitter presence that is very messy. I Instagram myself a lot. And I have videos of myself online. If people want to reach out to me, there are ways of doing that. And so I have had other Black and brown trans poets, who are much younger than I am right now, even younger than 21, who have told me how touched they have been, and I’m like, “You don’t need to gas me up. I’m truly just a potato who is privileged enough to have access to platforms.”
Is it a safe space? No, definitely not safe by any means. I’ve gotten a number of death threats since I became visible. I’m gotten death threats out the wazoo. But I don’t live life because it’s safe. I value safety; I want to be safe. But I’m not in poetry because I want to feel safe. I want to do poetry because it is a bit dangerous and daunting. It brings me eye-to-eye with hurt, but it also bring me eye-to-eye with healing and reconciliation and love. If my presence can extend that to other transfeminine writers, cool.
What advice would you give to a young Chrysanthemum?
I actually thought about this question the other weekend. I was walking in New York with a group of Black and brown and trans people, and I had just met most of them, and for the first time, even though I had just met them, I did not have to conceal any part of myself in the same way I had to growing up.
I’m vocal about my experiences with suicide and mental illness because I think it is useful for me to use my hyper-visibility and bring light to Asian American and trans mental health. I wanted to die so much, growing up. I wanted to die because I thought I never would get out of Oklahoma. I wanted to die because I thought I was unlovable. I wanted to die because I did not think this world could imagine a place for me. A number of suicide attempts later, and on this ongoing odyssey of trying to heal myself mentally, I have found that what is most useful for me is a community of people who care about me. So simple, right?
I wish I could tell myself that one day, despite all the hurt, there will be people who will care about you and who you will care about, and that will be enough to tether you to life and to this earth. You may not believe it. Sometimes I don’t believe that I have people who care about me. I don’t know how long I am going to live, but for as long as I am allowed to live, as long as you, Chrysanthemum, are allowed to live, try and enjoy the relationships you cultivate with those around you. They will be the people who remind you to live.
What do you hope your poetry will do for an unsuspecting reader?
I hope it can expand imagination. The racial imagination of this country is very limited by function. We are not supposed to think about other people outside of our own race, and as a manifestation of that, stories about Vietnam are often relegated to the past and are synonymous with the Vietnam War. I am a child of refugees, and the impacts of that war still mark my community. My family has so much PTSD that I’m not sure will ever be resolved.
I also don’t know what it means to be a somewhat hypervisible trans femme. It is like a spectacle at time, like, “Oh, here’s the trans girl doing work talking about trans girl stuff.” I want to move past the point of pity. I don’t want you to pity me for being a trans girl, because I don’t pity myself. I love this. I love this body. I love this mind. I don’t want pity; I want empathy, I want radical sense of support and uplifting, and I want to encourage intimacy.
If you can expand the racial imagination and extend your empathy to trans women, great, but more than anything, I really want people to value intimacy. It’s so easy to be so independent, but it is okay to think with your emotions and to form communities based on how much you care about each other, not just by pain or marginalization. Most of my friends now, by necessity, my chosen family, are Black people and brown people and trans people and queer people and mentally ill people and and femmes, but I think it’s too simplistic to say that I’m only in this chosen family because we’re marginalized.
I think maybe it’s because of our similar or not-so-similar points of marginalization, we have found a care and intimacy for each other, and that is what I would like my poetry to do. I don’t know if it’s there yet, but I would like to work toward that.
What are some of your fear & joys for poetry’s future?
I’m excited to see where it’s going, if only because I’m ignorant of where it is going. Again, my experience is limited, and I think that is a blessing, because there will come a day perhaps hopefully where I am really able to articulate a trajectory of poetry. Hopefully there are no more Michael Derrick Hudsons doing that shit. Hopefully people can stay in their damn lane and poetry will be more widely accepting of uneducated writers without formal access to technique and form.
Those are all idealizations. People write poetry on Instagram and Twitter, and I’m like, “Do your thing.” Poetry doesn’t have to be that deep. I don’t think anything has to be that deep. Nothing is that serious.
What are the future goals for Chrysanthemum?
My number one priority is getting right with God and getting into a good place in my mental health. It’s a little personal, but I feel like this has been a very personal interview. For so long, I was goal-oriented. I was thinking about, I want to get a manuscript, I want to start publishing, I want to attend X, Y, Z conferences and poetry slams. All the while, I was neglecting personal relationships and my academics, and my mental health deteriorated during that. So my priority right now is my mental health.
When I get to a good place with mental health, I want to produce that manuscript finally, I want to read more. I want to write about TV. I think a lot about it, because I'm a child who grew up on TV. I would like to be an essayist and write essays, and I would also like to use photography to think critically about trans visibilities.
I have projects in mind that I want to do, but before I can do any of them, I need to cultivate with the people around me who can help me get there. I’m not going to do all these things by myself. Self-sufficiency is overrated.
I want to be happy. I want everyone to succeed in my life. I want you to succeed. To the end of this day, I will continue gassing my loved ones up in the best way possible because when one person succeeds, that light shines on everyone else.
