вЂњ Chuyб»‡n TГ¬nhвЂќ is a Vietnamese cover of French composer Frances LaiвЂ™s вЂњLove Story (Where Do I Begin?),вЂќ more commonly known as the theme song to the 1970 film Love Story. In telling a story (one of many) from this playlist, I am telling a story of my family in the diaspora, the extended family that is the diaspora, and me.ДЇrom Our Sponsors PhбєЎm Duy, вЂњChuyб»‡n TГ¬nhвЂќ

Being born in the swing space of this first generation, I was the one watching and listening, not singing. Writing about looking and listening is my way of decoding what I witnessed, giving shape and story to the emotional life of a nation in a new world. Coincidentally, each song represents a decade in the first-generation post-exile, and their stories reveal something about unwieldy circuits of travel, cultural transitions, and finding an expression of Vietnamese Americanness through spectatorship and song. This music was brought to me вЂњby heart.вЂќД«elow is a sampling of three songs pulled from this playlist. Music needs minds and media to carry it, but it doesnвЂ™t need bags. What made music even more salient was that Vietnamese refugees fled with very few possessions my own family left with just a few suitcases between them. In diaspora, this music became a kind of anthem in the most amplified sense: to play it was to perform memory, assert an exilic identity, and keep South Vietnam alive. In a reunified Vietnam, South Vietnamese cultural artifacts (especially musical ones) were banned in an effort to align national sentiment with national ideology. When Saigon fell in 1975, the nation of South Vietnam and its citizens could only exist as diaspora. I think of certain songs, for the Vietnamese in exile, as thresholds between the end of one world and the beginning of another. Whatever the reason, these songs all brought forth memories, as if aural soundscapes were oral histories telling the story of home.

Maybe thatвЂ™s because complexities in musical language are hard to translate across cultures and generations, so I met my family in the in-between, or perhaps, after centuries of colonialism, Vietnamese culture has always been hybrid, or maybe IвЂ™m only capable of loving what IвЂ™m able to comprehend. There are songs by Vietnamese (and Vietnamese American) artists, covers of French and American songs, and American pop music. I was born in the United States in the 1980s: While the playlist is a sonic representation of my Viet memory, I should note that many of the songs included are not what one might consider Vietnamese at all. Listening to the playlist again and again became a practice of memory, each song a time machine for the body, a vehicle that would bring me back and anchor me in myself. Two years ago, I began compiling a YouTube playlist I titled вЂњ Viet Memory.вЂќ I was in a period of extreme homesickness and the songs I chose activated the most intimate textures of my deepest archive, which gave me feelings of being at home or being Vietnamese at a moment when I felt otherwise unmoored.

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