It has been almost NINE months since the Humanities Conference in Los Angeles, can you believe it? And YET, there once again is a remnant and reminder of an amazing event that occurred reoccurring in a different form this summer in Delaware.
Let’s discuss the magic of utilizing the book, The Best We Could Do as a focus of our Upward Bound summer session in Georgetown, DE. The beginning pages were a conversation between author Thi Bui and author Viet Than Nguyen. Sound familiar? It should thanks to the Humanities Conference in Los Angeles!
The Capps Lecture below was a magical night of insight into conversations that would come up become, unbeknownst to myself and students almost a year LATER!
The fact that the author, Viet Thanh Nguyen had stated from that lecture he was “Made in America, (born in Vietnam)”, as he experience the status of being a refugee as a young child, held the audience in flux from his insights that night.
The same has occurred this summer as we dived into a life that many cannot imagine from our study of this book, as well as the parallels to being in the “margins” as indicated from the conversation in the beginning pages of this book, compared to the content of this lecture almost a year ago.
The backdrop that Nguyen gave us from this lecture, being the 90’s UCLA, experiencing Berkeley, USC (where he dropped out) and THEN!, then 20 years later writing
There is hope, vision, positivity, and success spelled out in our literary and humanity- based experiences.
Below is an overview that does not do justice to the event that evening in Los Angeles:
https://news.ucsc.edu/2022/humanities-conference-alinder-feature-dw.html
“Nguyen was a Vietnamese refugee who came to America when he was four. In his talk
– the annual Capps Lecture at the NHC – he spoke of art’s unique power to promote
understanding of cultures that readers may know nothing about.
When he was younger, he often idealized the lives of people in far-off New York while
wondering if anyone would ever want to hear the story of an immigrant who grew up in
San Jose – not realizing he would one day have the power to share that story with
millions of people.
-“What I ultimately learned was the importance of the story itself,” Nguyen said.
-“When I was a little boy in the San Jose Public Library, I never read about someone like
me in those books.
The people who were writing these books probably never thought a
Vietnamese refugee boy would read them.”
“Should they have thought about that?” Nguyen continued. “I don’t think so. When I
write my books, I don’t think about whether this book or this story will need to be
translated or interpreted for someone who has no relationship to me or the Vietnamese
people. My obligation is to tell the story with absolute honesty, artistry and truth.
“The story will reach all kinds of people, and I take great inspiration from that,” Nguyen
said.
“As much as we want the story to be about us, we also need stories that
are not about us.”
The night before, November 10, 2022, in Los Angeles, we were treated to a all female Mariachi group on the rooftop and it was amazing. On the roof of the Bonaventure Hotel seeing the LA skyline and taking in this groups talent, magic. It took me back to Mexico that threw me into the stereotypes, realizations, experiences, and culture that only the Humanities can guide you through. We are experiencing the same this summer page by page, and everything ties together to transport us there.
Do not forget to keep checking what the Delaware Humanities are doing next.
July 20 Environmental Justice Toolkit Launch – https://dehumanities.org/event/environmental-justice-toolkit-launch/
July 26th – Preserving War Letters https://dehumanities.org/event/preserving-war-letters-touchstones-of-time-4/
July 31, 2023 – The History of Etiquette- https://dehumanities.org/event/the-history-of-etiquette-2/
PAVEing a Blog 