The Bamboo Boat and the Poet Tản Đà

This specular digital illustration, a piece I commissioned from the indispensable young artist Minh Huynh, is by far THE most important piece hanging in my gallery. 

The digital painting is an illustrated interpretation of one of my favorite poems by my great-great-uncle, the renowned poet Tản Đà - my great-great-grandfather’s brother.  He was one of the pioneers of the New Poetry movement in Vietnam. They were the equivalent to Vietnamese poetry as what the Impressionists were to art, and Tản Đà would be their Claude Monet.  The illustrated poem encapsulates Tản Đà’s optimistic and boundless child-like wonder towards life - an attitude we all can emulate.  Here is my clumsy translation of the poem:

"Sông Cái, Chiếc Thuyền Nan" - Tản Đà, 1926

(The Bamboo Boat)

Thả chiếc thuyền nan bé tẻo heo

(Release the tiny bamboo boat)

Cũng buồm, cũng cột, cũng giây lèo

(With sail, with tie, with rope too)

Nghìn trùng sóng gió ba khoang nứa

(Thousands of wind and waves, three chambers)

Bốn mặt non sông một mái chèo

(Four sides of mountains and rivers, one oar)

Những hẹn nước mây thu mấy độ

(How far away is the promise of water, clouds, and autumn?)

Thử xem giời biển rộng bao nhiêu

(Let’s see how wide the ocean is)

Con đường vô hạn vui chăng tá?

(How infinite the roads, how much joy?)

Mà hỡi giòng sông tiếng nước reo

(But oh river, how the water chimes.)

I intentionally chose Minh Huynh for this project because I knew there is no one else who would be a better fit for the soul of this assignment.  Minh is fascinating Vietnamese-American young artist, poet, philosopher, and cultural enthusiast, whose lineage is rooted in an incredibly complex history of colonialism, much like mine.

Whereas Minh has been on a personal journey to search for the roots that French colonialism stole from her, I have been called to expand the resilient wisdom of the firmly rooted foundation that was left for me from generations of ancestors who have been securing that groundwork, brick-by-brick formed with their own blood and defiant tears. 

As we each were unweaving our own threads from this tangled web of over a century of geopolitical tragedy, we fatefully met at the intersection of ancestral healing, soothed by art and poetry. And we enriched each other's journey in ways that our ancestors would have serendipitously orchestrated themselves....and perhaps they did.