Photo courtesy of Daostrom.com
Dao Strom
The Vietnamese novelist’s second book pushes beyond grass, tin, and borders
By Donna Blumenfeld
Published: June 26th, 2006 | 1:50pm
Dao Strom is a writer, musician, and mother living in Austin, Texas. Her own mother, also a writer, fled Saigon in 1975 with the 2-year-old Dao, eventually settling in northern California. A former film student and graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Strom is as fascinated with American cultural esoterica as she is with the immigrant experience.
Her acclaimed 2003 debut novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof
I didn't know you were a musician as well as a writer until I googled you — is music one reason you moved to Austin?
That is [the reason], but not so much on purpose. I kind of moved to Austin and then ended up playing music. I always liked the music scene here from times I'd visited before.
What was your introduction to the kind of roots music that you've been playing?
Well, let's see ... I kind of just happened upon it on my own, probably in college, and I just was really drawn to it, the sounds of the voices and the harmonies. I just liked it.
Was it mostly bluegrass?
I liked that stuff, yeah. I mostly liked the old gospel, rural, southern gospel. I love gospel songs, just the themes of them, like exile, longing.
Is writing songs another way for you to tell stories?
Yeah, I think so, different kinds of stories. I also like songs that are about emotion or dwell on describing emotion or capture a moment. They're a bit more narrative and detailed. You don't get as much into psychology with songs.
I was thinking about making music and how writing is really solitary and music is more collaborative. Do you ever feel like making music is a vacation from writing, or vice versa?
They seem to balance each other out. I love the process of making music because it forces me to work with people. Because I can't play every instrument myself, I really have to rely on other people's talents to make things become realized. I like that. Writing is different. It's your own world.
So, was there a point in your life when you decided you were going to be a writer?
It was something I'd always done. My mother was a writer, so I had that influence of her kind of introducing me to the world of writing. I always was kind of a bookworm when I was a kid, and I wrote little stories all the time. I kind of didn't want to be a writer. When I went to college I studied film. But I learned a lot from every medium that I've done.
Do you have a favorite book from childhood that's still on your shelf?
Oh gosh … not that I can think of offhand. One of the first books that I can remember reading was Lord of the Flies, because of the symbolism, and realizing it was literature.
That's such a gruesome book, and yet only kids read it really.
That's like 10th grade English.
Yeah! What are you reading right now?
I'm reading David Mitchell's new book, Black Swan Green. I really liked Cloud Atlas, the book before. I just read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It's really great.
Do you have a routine for writing? Are you sort of a very disciplined, sit down every day, kind of writer?
I try to be. But I have a 7-year-old, so my days are interrupted by a million other things. I also write in the morning, generally. I try to give myself that space.
It seems from what you've told me about your mother being a writer, and your going to film school, that you've got a lot of autobiographical elements in the novels.
(Laughs) You could say that. There are, and I also think fiction is kind of a weird…. There are autobiographical elements and at the same time there aren't. It's all pretty selected for the purposes of fiction. So it's not an accurate portrayal.
In The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys there are so many strong and interesting female characters. Is there one you identify with the most?
Not exactly. Maybe the last character, because she's the oldest. I think at different times in my life I've been all of those women. So that's definitely an influence.
Another really interesting figure in that book is the mother, who's only shown through the thoughts and memories of her children.
I think of her as a transitional kind of woman, where she's really dependent upon men for her well-being and security. I think of the women in the book as all being somewhat like that, but they're kind of making this transition to independence in some way. There's a lot of anger and angst and other emotions tied up in that. I think the mother in that section particularly; she's not totally sympathetic all the time. But I wanted to do this portrait of a woman who struggled and had these circumstances to struggle against. And then I just thought the son was an important viewpoint to take on her. I just wanted a compassionate male viewpoint.
I also wanted to talk to you about how their Vietnamese backgrounds shape these different women and about their relationships with men. Also about how these women are very conscious of how they look to others. Particularly how Mary, in The Gentle Order of Boys and Girls, for example, negotiates the world differently from Leena, the prostitute-turned-Texas housewife.
I don't know if it's a Vietnamese thing, even though they are pretty image-conscious. I'm also fascinated with the prostitute archetype. It's like that idea of using looks and using sexuality to maneuver through the world. I was kind of fascinated by that. The Vietnamese thing is more like: I wanted each of them to have a displaced background, and these are stories and experiences that I know of, so they needed to come from somewhere else. I don't know, maybe at some point I'll stop writing about Vietnamese people. At the same time I didn't want that to be what the stories were about. I wanted them to be about women. I think I'm interested in different parts of American culture. I think being here and playing roots music is a way of trying to get inside something that wasn't accessible to me naturally.
Issue #35
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