Don't be a stranger

Name
Dr Phuoc-Tan Diep

Place of residence

Norwich

Country of origin

Vietnam

Occupation

Medical Doctor

Phuoc-Tan Diep, 33, came to the United Kingdom aged 3, in 1978, as a Vietnamese boat person. His family were placed in the village of Pelsall in the the West Midlands and were given a lot of help by the local Methodist church. He now works as a doctor at a hospital in Norwich and in his spare time writes poetry.

“We were members of the intellectual elite in Vietnam. My dad was quite rich. When the war started everything was taken away. We were forced into the forest and the brainwashing camps. At that time, my parents had three young children under 3. I have two brothers, one younger and one older. We escaped and went to Hong Kong. From Hong Kong we went to Wolverhampton. We lived in a stately mansion with a Vietnamese family in each room. We were then relocated in the village of Pelsall, an area of Walsall in the West Midlands. There were no other Vietnamese people we knew at all there. People from the local church, Pelsall Methodist Church, helped us a lot. The church paid for us to go on our only family holiday.

I think the Methodist church was a shining light. People from the church were influential in us settling in. It sounds a bit of a cliché, but they were a Godsend. They came and gave us clothes and whatever we needed. We didn’t have anything and it was an empty house. My dad used to play table tennis with some of the men at the church and it provided a social network and some good friends. I think my father found it difficult to integrate generally, due to the language barrier. My mother integrated much better, due to greater language profiency, even helping with English-Vietnamese translations. We had some very good reactions from the people in the village, but unfortunately some very occasional racist ones as well.

I feel very English. I am surprised when I look in the mirror that I am not white. But there is a core inside me which feels like I don’t quite fit as well. In terms of home I feel that my home is where my family is. Family is central to Vietnamese culture. The centre of the culture is family and food. My family is my wife and daughter and it is hard to be far from my parents. I don’t feel like I’m rooted anywhere. We feel quite nomadic really and look to God to send us wherever.

As a teenager I was very introverted and writing poetry, bad poetry, was a way for me to express myself. There were lots of things that I had experienced when I was young that I did not understand. I felt a disturbance. I felt unsettled. I have always felt that it was good to explore some of the hard areas of life. My poetry about Saigon is something that has come about recently. I have a sense of guilt about leaving Vietnam. I am not sure if my dad might feel the same. It is hard to leave a country that you love.”

Phuoc-Tan Diep has written a poem called Migration especially for the Evangelical Alliance’s Don’t be a Stranger campaign. It is a cleave poem which means the poem is three poems in one. Phuoc-Tan comments, “Cleave poetry is a poetic form I invented in 2006 and in the last two months have 'released' it into the internet by starting and editing a poetry webzine called The Cleave. The poem is three poems in one. A vertical left side, a vertical right side and a third (horizontal) poem which is the fusion of the left and right, so you read straight across. Usually the left side is in bold type and the left and right are separated by a hyphen. I usually read the left then the right then the fused poem and this should have a synergistic effect.

“My aim was to invent a new form to embody the concepts of fusion, synergy, co-operation, marriage and The Trinity. One of my major aims is using the form as an analogy of the mystery of how three can be one as in the Trinity. How can God be three persons at once, and also how can Jesus be both God and Man? The webzine is at cleavepoetry.com."

To read more about what cleave poetry is follow this link: cleavepoetry.wordpress.com/what-is-cleave-poetry/

A Cleave Poem: Migration.

                 Swifts and swallows leave - while I grasp for memories like
                                     fruit - remnants of home
                        riddled with holes - my baby cools in my arms
                  dripping fermented juice - the milk from her mouth
                                     sweet - sticks under my fingernails
                      under blushing trees - the guards, with eloquent guns, demand my coat
those that can't leave expect a cold winter - they smirk at my battered sweetbox
                        with its few hopes - inside are smuggled postcards of thatched houses
                              and promises - of English orchards. 

By Phuoc-Tan Diep
Cleavepoetry.com