Finding home in poetry and presence
In this episode, Ashley Yeh ('24 cohort) and Max Du ('24 cohort) speak with Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng ('22 cohort) about movement, belonging, and the search for stillness in a fast-paced world. Drawing on Buddhist philosophy, Quyên embraces the idea of finding home in transition and uncertainty. Quyên also shares her experiences attending Stanford as an undergrad and grad student and what it was like to move to the United States from Vietnam.
Guest
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng (2022 cohort), from Hanoi, Vietnam, is pursuing a PhD in art history at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. She received a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University. Working bilingually in English and Vietnamese on modern and contemporary art, Quyên is inspired by cultural and linguistic practices that generate non-elitist spaces of generosity, play, and communion.
Her writings have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Columbia Journal, The Margins, and various anthologies. Her publications include Masked Force (Sàn Art, 2022), the pamphlet-catalog to the exhibition of Võ An Khánh’s wartime photographs that she curated in 2020, and a forthcoming English translation of Chronicles of a Village, a novel by the Vietnamese author Nguyễn Thanh Hiền. She has received awards and fellowships from the Institute for Comparative Modernities, the Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation, and Words Without Borders in partnership with the Academy of American Poets, among other honors.
Hosts
Max Du (2024 cohort) was raised in Manlius, New York, and is pursuing a PhD in computer science at Stanford School of Engineering. He graduated from Stanford with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and minors in creative writing and psychology. Max is interested in making robots that learn rapidly and robustly by leveraging diverse past data, exploring with innate curiosity, and recovering elegantly from mistakes.
Ashley Yeh (2024 cohort) from Hsinchu, Taiwan, is pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine. She graduated from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), with a bachelor’s degree in biology. Using her cross-disciplinary knowledge, Ashley aims to understand the neural circuits involved in behavior and their implications in neurological disorders while also working with clinicians to improve treatment outcomes for patients suffering from these disorders.
Imagine A World's theme music was composed and recorded by Taylor Goss. The podcast was originally conceived and led by Briana Mullen (2020 cohort), Taylor Goss (2021 cohort), and Willie Thompson, along with Daniel Gajardo (2020 cohort) and Jordan Conger (2020 cohort).
Special thanks to Rachel Desch (2023 cohort), Tanajia Moye-Green (2024 cohort), Ryan Wang (2024 cohort), Anson Zhou (2024 cohort), and Elle Rae Tumpalan, KHS marketing and events assistant.
Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
Max Du:
When you write poems that have good rhythm, or when you read poems that have good rhythm, how does that make you feel?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Home. It makes me feel at home with myself, like at one with myself.
My name is Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng. I'm a writer, a translator, and occasionally an art curator. I'm a part of the 2022 Knight-Hennessy cohort, and I'm in my third year of my PhD program in art history. I imagine a world where poetry is not a luxury. As Audre Lorde put it, it's a world where we are attuned to and even a little bit in love with the light, the rhythm, the vibration, the breath, the dream that's always running around us, through us, as us.
Sydney Hunt:
Welcome to the Imagine A World podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars. We are here to give you a glimpse into the Knight-Hennessy Scholar community of graduate students spanning all seven Stanford schools, including business, education, engineering, humanities, law, medicine, and sustainability. In each episode, we talk with scholars about the world they imagine and what they are doing to bring it to life.
Max Du:
Hi, everyone. This is Imagine A World. I am your co-host, Max.
Ashley Yeh:
And I'm your other co-host, Ashley.
Max Du:
And we are here with Quyên, an art history PhD. And stay tuned. We've got a lot of cool stuff to talk about.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I was born in a small hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam. My mom had to undergo a C-section, because I refused to come out into the world. I went to public schools near my neighborhood where I grew up, and I was always good at studying, which pleased my parents, and which got me into a good university. I went to Stanford as an undergrad on a scholarship. Four years later, I graduated with a degree in art history and comparative literature. So not just one useless major, but two in my parents' opinion. So that's strained our relationship a little bit. But they have forgiven me, and we love each other again now.
After graduation, I worked four or five years in contemporary art and poetry in Vietnam, which was a beautiful experience. I learned so much. Though towards the end of that period in my work at a really great gallery in Saigon, I was feeling like I was doing more administrative things than heart-moving, soul-stirring work, and I was also missing the feeling of swimming in words and books and libraries and my own imagination. So I applied to graduate school. And so here I am back at Stanford as a PhD candidate this time. So it's been a wild circular ride around the world and back.
So here's an extract from a poem I wrote called To Translate Into the Moon. I'll read a little bit from the English version first, and then a little bit from the Vietnamese. "Vapors of a century flowed up goldly from the river running across the land. A land without land, a land without end. Self-hidden fairies keep singing in a tongue no human speaks. All this breath of night, all this air of dream. Calling out to nobody, as it rises from no ground. It has no center. A nothing that stares into a nothing. A revelation so empty, it is immense as illusions, drowning as dews, foamy as shadows, sudden as lightning, delirious as eyeballs, phantom as magic."
[foreign language 00:04:24]
And for those who don't read Vietnamese, what I just did is that I just read some words from the Vietnamese sort of interruptedly so it was almost as if I read the English as, "Vapors of a century. Land without land. Air of dream. Nobody rises. No center. Drowning as dews. Phantom as magic."
Max Du:
Beautiful. So when you have the pauses in the Vietnamese, you're trying to segment them based on the English language version?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
More like my own rhythm, more like improvisationally and what feels right at the time. So every time I read a poem, it is read differently, so it gives me the feeling that it's a fresh new text, which is also an old text. Yeah. So there's no calculation or measure. If I do my reading again now, it would be differently phrased.
Max Du:
Every time you interpret, every time you read it, it's a living poem.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah, I want the poetry to mirror how we are. I think it's the foundation of change that's important to me when I think about poetry, but it's not stable.
Ashley Yeh:
Have you always been interested in poetry?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I would say it's a form of literature that I was interested in when I was younger, mostly because I thought it was shorter than the prose-y stuff-
Max Du:
Classic.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah, that I had to read in the school. And so there's something about, again, rhythm, some interest in breath, and something almost nomadic about poetry, because it's shorter, it has rhythm, it has repetition that I was drawn to it from a very young age. But of course, when I was a kid, I didn't know that there are these sort of formal elements that draw me to poetry. But as I grow older and think about it, yeah, there's some constitution in the language of poetry that I think is interesting. It's almost like music, but it's textual.
Max Du:
There's an attention to every single word, every single placement in order of language.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yes. Yeah. An extreme carefulness and mindfulness and also mindlessness, the combination of being... You're almost like you're forgetting time when you're composing poetry, but you're also so attentive to the language. So you're both. That's why I said I think you're both so mindful of the language, but also, it feels like a mindless process as well, at least to me.
Max Du:
It's almost like you have to let go of it a little bit. If you think too hard about poetry... Because I took this poetry class as part of my creative writing minor at Stanford. And there was a lot of times when I was trying to compose poetry where I was just thinking too hard like, "Oh, I have to create the right image. I have to do whatever it is." But just letting go. And this makes me wonder about, what was the first poem you wrote? Can you remember?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Oh, wow. It's hard to sort of pin down a first, because I think I wrote a lot of bad poetry when I was in college.
Max Du:
That counts.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I think that counts. And I think it's only because we have the stuff we call the bad poetry that we have stuff later we think it's a little bit better. But I love this idea that you brought up about letting go. I'm still learning to let go when I write poetry. It's really hard because it's in the art about controlling language. So you have to come in with some kind of control, although I don't like the word because it's so opposite to letting go. And I feel like philosophically, emotionally, somatically, I'm more about letting go, more about release than actually contraction and keeping things in and keeping things perfectly crafted. I am the sort of writer who doesn't love to talk about craft, because I love to talk about improvisation. I don't think there are formulas that we should follow when we talk about literature and art. So yeah, that was just a thought when you said let go. And the first poem, I cannot pin down.
Max Du:
That's completely okay. I feel like we just have a little bit of a fever dream of earlier works, and you kind of mentioned that you would think of them to be bad, and I'm very curious about why do you think that your earlier works were bad in your perspective?
Ashley Yeh:
What makes good poetry and bad poetry?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah. That's a great question. And I think I'm also learning to let go of the good, bad distinction. I think as human beings, and even as artists or poets, we're often trained to think of... We have to sort of distinguish and judge and assess things as bad or not complete or unfinished or not well-crafted, as opposed to good or somehow attractive or perfect or good-looking. Things that work and things that don't.
But again, I think returning to my sort of original love of poetry for its rhythm, then I guess as long as a piece of poetry feels rhythmically true, and to me, I would imperfectly call it good, but I don't mean it to be sort of more perfect than other poetry. It just means that, at this point, this is the poetry that is most true and most honest and most aligned with my rhythm.
I guess the stuff that I make that I think of as bad now, maybe they feel a little bit too rigid or not true in terms of rhythm. I'm trying to craft something that's maybe too controlled or too perfected and not reflecting maybe the sort of messier and more chaotic breath or rhythm that I have. So yeah, it's more like an attunement. Maybe I think of poetry is attuned or not attuned to me.
Max Du:
When you write poems that have good rhythm, or when you read poems that have good rhythm, how does that make you feel?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Home. It makes me feel at home with myself, at one with myself. And I guess you know this feeling, especially at Stanford where we're so busy most of the time and we're asked to move so much more quickly than we might prefer to move. It feels like, well, at least to me, I feel a little bit alienated from my rhythm, alienated from my body. So when I write poetry, when I read poetry by other people, which is I want to say something I prefer to do, it's almost like, "Oh, yeah." I'm reminded of my rhythm of my earth, which is the body, and I feel at home. So it's crazy that just the sonic atmosphere of a poem can do that, at least in my body. I find it quite magical that way, when you're returned to your rhythm.
Ashley Yeh:
Do you find that there's specific times you're drawn to write poetry? Is it like maybe when you're stressed in life, do you feel like it helps you release some of that?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I'm still trying to figure out why I write poetry, because there are some poets who wake up at eight and they work until five PM. They're almost like... They're very disciplined about their practice. I'm not like that. So most of my poetry have been produced unexpectedly. And usually... Actually, I think you're right. I think intuitively, you probably felt that I am the type to just write when I have a lot in me where things are sort of bursting out of me, they're emotions or waves of thought that are crying out to be released into poetry. They return me to a rhythm of calm that I prefer to have. But usually, yeah, I think stress is kind of common, a common condition of many of us these days.
Max Du:
So you write when you feel like there's a lot of pressure in the world and you want to release that pressure through your writing?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah, pressure inside, pressure outside, for sure. There's a sense of compression. And to return to a sense of balance or harmony, I think the compression has to be released somehow.
Max Du:
And that's what you're talking about like when you write good poetry, it feels like you're going home.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I think so, yeah, being released back to a space and a rhythm and a time of more quiet.
Max Du:
Where's home for you?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I think geographically, well, my homeland is Hanoi in Vietnam. It's a city in the north of Vietnam. But I think your question can be thought of philosophically or poetically, and I'm increasingly thinking of home as here, some vibration or some breath deep in the body that I'm not always aware of most of the time. But again, with poetry or with friends that vibe or resonate with me, that sense of home becomes clear again. So yeah, home is with me wherever I go, because it is me. It is my breath and my voice. I wonder if you have thoughts on your homes.
Max Du:
Yeah, I feel like the question of where home is, is such a weirdly philosophical one too. It's like there's a geographic one, and we can definitely talk about in a second, but there is that sort of where do you feel most moored? And it could be with someone else, it could be a location, it could be a state of mind. You know?
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah. There could be multiple homes.
Max Du:
Absolutely.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah.
Max Du:
Absolutely.
Ashley Yeh:
Multiple different types at the same time.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah.
Max Du:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
Different kinds.
Max Du:
Especially with people who are in college. I hear a lot, and for myself too, it feels like we're in this weird homeless state where we grew up in some place, we're shipped off across the country or whatever, across the world in some cases, and yet we live in this dorm. And it feels like you have to fit your possessions into three suitcases.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah.
Max Du:
So it's like where is home? It's like we're nomads, you know?
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah. And then over time, you make your friends, you start to know the area, you start to feel more comfortable, and then that becomes a new home.
Max Du:
Absolutely.
Ashley Yeh:
And then you're uprooted again, and then you do that process all over again.
Max Du:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah, I think when people ask where home is for me, I think it's a very complicated answer. Even geographically. I mean, I grew up in Taiwan, but then I went to high school here, and then I also went to college. So it's all of them are home in some way, and I go back to them for different... They feel different, all of them, but they're all home too.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah. Multiple homes. I love that. And also, the sense of feeling homelessness. I feel like my dream is to feel at home in homelessness, I would say. Because as you said, Ashley, we're living in a world where I feel like moving is such a familiar condition. So it's hard. I think we're in for a lot of suffering if we're just attached to one home. But I'm influenced by a lot of Buddhist philosophy, and it's interesting that they Buddhist frame the term for joining the Buddhist path as going forth, but it also... [foreign language 00:15:44] It means basically you're exiting the home. So you're entering into the condition of homelessness, but not to join suffering, but to be almost away from suffering. Because when you learn to be at home in homelessness, then everywhere is your home. So maybe that could be a very beautiful condition. I'm definitely not at that level.
Ashley Yeh:
I mean, I'm not.
Max Du:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
That's what I was going to ask, because I-
Max Du:
What are your tricks?
Ashley Yeh:
I definitely don't. Yeah. I think every time I move, I am not a type of person who enjoys change or deals with it well by any means. So I think whenever I move to a new place, I always feel very uprooted, and it just doesn't feel... I miss my old home, and I wish I could just enjoy the whole homelessness state of mind and just feel that. But I'm not there yet. So if anyone has advice, let me know.
Max Du:
Yeah. But there is this beauty in being in this liminal space of, "I don't know where I'm going. I know where I came from, but I'm just in this transition area." And I feel like, at least for me, and a lot of people, it's like there's an uncomfortable nature about being in the unknown. But from what you're saying, this Buddhist philosophy is accepting and embracing this nothingness as your home.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah. I think the journey towards the familiarity or an embrace of the unknown, I think it's not just exclusive to Buddhist thought. I think anybody with a deep religious, a spiritual practice, I think they would probably agree with you, that there was something quite beautiful, difficult, surely, but beautiful about being okay with being in between, being in the middle of an unknown space, and being all right with that in the body and also in the mind. Yeah. Because there's so much that we don't know that actually are the forces that run our lives.
Max Du:
Yeah. And having faith in something better coming or having faith that this journey is meaningful.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
For sure. Yeah. That the journey is it. At least for me, there's no sort of enlightenment or nirvana, or even God, way 200 miles down the line. It's in the journey. It's here. So yeah. Yeah. But that's probably the work of a lifetime to be okay with that.
Ashley Yeh:
That's so beautiful. To just be able to live in the present and not want for anything more, not have a motive for what you're doing and just enjoy existing is a feeling that I have chased all of my life. And I think it's something that a lot of people forget here, specifically, as you were mentioning earlier. It's hard. Because I feel like people move so fast that it's hard to just be present in the moment and just have that, have existence be enough.
Max Du:
Yeah. Are there moments outside of poetry that make you feel particularly at home?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
When I slow down, it's very related to what Ashley just said, when I'm not pulled away from myself so violently by the fast pace of things... And I was watching, before we started this conversation, it was quite beautiful looking at you two, preparing for the conversation, because, Max, you were trying to change the battery of this recorder. You were trying to set up all the right technical environment for us to start this conversation. But I think the way that you did it was so calm, both of you, and you were still listening to one another as you spoke.
And I think that's also one way of being at home with oneself, which is to somehow just be attentive to everything within and around us all the time. Again, it's really hard to make it a practice from moment to moment, which is I think what true Buddhists do. I'm not a true Buddhist, so I forget all the time. So I do sort of get stressed out by little things during the day. But I think the moment that I remember to slow all the way down and to really listen to my own inner voice and other people's voices, I think that's a beautiful way of going home.
Max Du:
Has that happened recently?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I think it's happening now as the three of us are talking in this room. It's quite rare. And it's quite beautiful when it happens at Stanford, where, again, we have so many resources and so many brilliant minds, and yet, everyone is sort of rushed and hasty and stressed out all the time, which is I think a deep shame.
So every time I think just two or three people, it doesn't need to be a crowd, sit down together and have a chat in a slow rhythmic manner, or even if you just sit in silence together, I think it's very beautiful. It's a very beautiful space to be. And even if we do it by ourselves, I think it could be cool too. There's so much within one body already, so you can just gather with yourself in your room. That could also be a way of going home.
Max Du:
It goes to the idea of letting go again. As we were trying to replace the batteries and the batteries didn't work, it was sort of breathe in, breathe out, and move on and find more batteries. You don't have to be anxious about it. The world's not ending.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah.
Max Du:
It's just your idea of slowing down and finding beauty in everything that is around us.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah, I try to. Although, it's hard. Again, there's something about Stanford, which is this epicenter of the technological world of advancement that we're living in, that makes presence very, very hard.
Ashley Yeh:
Do you feel like in other places, like in Vietnam, Hanoi, the pace was different? Is that where you're taking a lot of this philosophy from as well?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
These days, yeah, I think I'm finding more slowness and more calm when I'm in Vietnam. But it's funny, because if you live in Vietnam, especially in the city, which I do, I was born Hanoi, but now I live in Saigon, so in the south of Vietnam, and both Hanoi and Saigon are increasingly busier and busier every day. They're the centers of Vietnam, so people go there for jobs and opportunities. So traffic's terrible. It's really dusty, it's heavily polluted. But because I have my own space, my own studio in Vietnam and I'm not sort of having it to go to classes all the time or teaching all the responsibilities that we have at Stanford, so I do live almost like a free spirit. And I feel like that's a part of it. My calendar in Vietnam is very, very empty.
Ashley Yeh:
That's beautiful.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah. It's so multicolored-
Ashley Yeh:
That's amazing.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
... when I'm at Stanford, but it's just empty when I'm in Vietnam.
Ashley Yeh:
That sounds like a dream to me right now.
Max Du:
That's the life. Absolutely. So can you describe the studio back in Vietnam? What does that look like?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Well, the studio is within the apartment that I have with my partner. And my partner created this garden within our space, so my workspace is sort of next to a small but verdant garden that we tend every day together. There's not much in the studio. It's mostly just books. Both my partner and I are quite nerdy and book lovers, so it's just plants and books in the space, which I think it's very conducive to my work. I think poetry, in a way, it is a garden. It is a library for me. So I live in that.
Max Du:
There's a garden inside the apartment?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
It's a domestic garden, but it's also close to the windows and the balcony, so there's natural light coming in, but there are also plants that are okay with living inside. And it's amazing. It's amazing to see them grow so strongly and vibrantly.
Max Du:
So that studio is different than your childhood home?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yes, because that's a studio in Saigon. My childhood home in Hanoi is no longer ours, because my parents also moved to Saigon lately, so they had to sell our whole old house in Hanoi to afford a new space in Saigon. So I miss it a lot. It was also a house with a big garden. My mom's also a big gardener. So yeah, it's probably the one thing that I miss most about that house, that it's just the routine of watching my mother. Every day, she would clean the rice that we eat every day and save the water that you clean the rice with, because it's the water that holds the nutrition of the rice, and then walk around the garden and feeding each plant quite carefully, making sure that we don't overwater or underwater. Yeah. And it was in a quiet neighborhood in Hanoi, not too central, but not too far out. And it was close to all of the schools that I went to throughout my childhood and teenage years in Vietnam.
Max Du:
You were just surrounded by these plants and nature and quietness, even growing up?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I think so. I didn't realize that until you asked me, but you're right. There's something, yeah, about almost a seclusion among plants that I love and I was lucky enough to grow up with. I'm curious about how you would describe your childhood homes.
Max Du:
Do you want to go?
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah, yeah. My childhood home was Shenzhou, Taiwan in Science Park. So it's the Silicon Valley of Taiwan, basically. It's a mid-sized city. The air always smelled like gasoline or the smoke that come from cars. I don't even know what to call that. Fume, car fumes.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah. Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
The air was car fumes. I remember, I would walk to school with my mom, and sometimes she said that she would have black fumes in her nose. Because it was just a lot of smoke. There was a lot. It's the mopeds and the cars. And I think a lot of that noise is still something that I remember. It's going through my ears right now, like the noise of the mopeds and the cars and the hustle and bustle of the city. Yeah. I loved it. I loved it.
And I think in college, I went to Santa Barbara, which is very naturey. It's very different from Shenzhou, Taiwan. Not a city, just like the ocean. And I lived on the ocean, and I think being around that nature all the time completely changed my entire outlook. I think before that I was always a little bit more always on the go, doing stuff. And I think the first time I was able to slow down was there. Because it was just like I would just be going on a walk and looking out into the world, and I was like, "Nothing else matters beyond this point."
And I think I lived like that for four years, and it was the most beautiful time of my life. I felt so grounded, and all the stress I felt from the day instantly went away as soon as I took a walk. And it was just so easy to just be like, "We live in this world. We all live in this world. We're all just existing, just trying our best to live our little lives and be happy."
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Wow.
Ashley Yeh:
And it was just very different from my childhood. I love both, but there's a different perspective I think I took from both.
Max Du:
Yeah. There's so much of looking at the ocean and feeling insignificant.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah.
Max Du:
Whatever, sure, if you fail the test, whatever. In the grand scheme of things, we're just-
Ashley Yeh:
In the grand scheme of things, the waves are crashing. We're just looking out into the sunset. And that's going to happen every single day. And it's beautiful.
Max Du:
Absolutely. Did you go surfing?
Ashley Yeh:
I tried. I went surfing a lot. I'm not the best surfer, but I did go surfing a lot. I went paddleboarding, sailing.
Max Du:
Incredible.
Ashley Yeh:
It's like, you have to do it when you're in Santa Barbara.
Max Du:
Yeah. It's Santa Barbara.
Ashley Yeh:
And I think it was so easy to disconnect. I mean, I do neuroscience stuff, so I would be doing that in the day, stressed about it for whatever reason. And then sunset came around, and I was like, "Let me just go paddleboarding." And then instantly, I forgot. It was so easy to just forget what stress I had in the day and just enjoy the water, touch the water, jump in the water, just enjoy. And that is a feeling I'm still trying to get back, because I mean, I just started here. And I mean, obviously, the ocean isn't right here.
Max Du:
For the non-US or non-California listeners, can you describe where Santa Barbara is?
Ashley Yeh:
Santa Barbara is two hours north of LA. Yes, it's a little beach town. It's similar to San Diego, but much smaller. There is one street, it's called State Street, which has all the shops and stuff. And then everything else is kind of just mostly residential suburban. And UCSB is on the on cliffs, on the beach. So on the way to class, I would be walking pretty much on the beach. And then in lab, our view was the ocean. So sometimes before I went into lab, there would be these benches overseeing the ocean. And before I went to the lab, I would just sit in the bench and just look at it for a little bit. And then I realized the other people in my lab also did that, because I would see them there too and be like, "Oh, so we're all just... Before we go to lab, after we go to lab."
Max Du:
We all have that need to look at the ocean.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah. It was a beautiful way to ground myself in everything, every moment of my life. It was constantly like, "I'm going to do this. If it doesn't work out, it's okay."
Max Du:
That's the thing I noticed about the three of us. We all have this desire to slow down, this desire to reconnect with things outside of our lives. Look at the ocean, look at the plants. And that's really beautiful.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
What about you, Max? I know you also have a huge thing for oceans.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah. Let's hear it.
Max Du:
Oh my goodness. It's so funny, because it's almost the opposite of you, actually. I grew up in this small village of 4,000 people up in upstate New York. So if you imagine New York City, you drive around three or four, not miles, three or four hours north, and then you go west until you hit the Great Lakes, you bounce back a little bit. That's Syracuse. It's central New York. I grew up in this small village called Manlius, 4,000 people, 95% white people. Nothing really happened there. We had swans, we had we one shack called Sno Top where you had ice cream. And my whole world was just the neighborhood kids. We'd go out, and we'd do, I don't know, ghost in the graveyard, which is a yard game. And it was a pretty small world for me.
And it reminded me of... Let me set the scene there. Because I was in this small village, I was in this pretty new housing development, so there was new houses, but then you could walk for half a minute and you would get right onto a soybean farm. You'd get right onto... Well, you'd actually get onto a road, and the road led to a Mormon church. But you would just have these really random, deserted stuff, old barns. There was a horse farm just a couple miles north. It was just very peaceful.
And during the pandemic, I basically spent 15 months within a one-mile radius. And what I would do is I would just go into the woods behind my house, and there were these little trails, and I would just sit on the logs, especially during winter, and I would just see the snow fall down. And for me, during the pandemic, it was a very stifling, chaotic time like it was for a lot of people. And just sitting on that log alone, nobody went into the woods back then. I realize now that it was a little bit unsafe, but back then it's just like I was in the woods alone at night. You kind of hear the coyotes, you can see the snow, you can smell the snow. Snow smells smoky. And that's where I call home.
But then I come here to the Bay Area, and it feels like a city to me. It feels like there's a lot of people here. There's a lot more diversity. There's just a lot more things going on. And I just remember in undergrad feeling exactly as you were saying, Quyên, this chaos and wanting to get away. And I just felt like looking at the ocean or even... We're sitting in this room right now, and this room overlooks this little lake here on campus, which is technically just a pit in the ground.
Ashley Yeh:
It's a lake.
Max Du:
It's a lake. But especially during my sophomore year, I would go and just walk around the "lake," in open quotations, and it would ground me. It makes me feel like I'm back at home in some ways. Anytime I'm out in nature, I feel like in some ways I'm back at home. And I spent three months in San Diego this summer, and after work, I would just go to the cliffs and I would look out at the water and I would climb down the sandstone cliffs and it would feel all right again, no matter what was going on in life. But yeah, it was very much like I grew up surrounded by nature. Unlike you, Ashley, you kind of discovered it later. But then I tried to get it into the Bay Area when I was here. You know?
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah, I think it did come to me later and I realized you could live like this.
Max Du:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
And I was like, "I never want to go back."
Max Du:
You don't want to go back.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah.
Max Du:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
I agree. I think here there's a lot of chaos. I feel like my life is very chaotic right now, and I don't want it to be. But it's just like, as you said, the calendar is so... There's so much happening every single day. I'm constantly losing control, I feel like of my life here.
Max Du:
You're always running like, "Oh, God."
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah. From place to place, person to person. Yeah. I don't know how to... I think I need to find the thing that will allow me to... Just the beach. I need to find the version of the beach here.
Max Du:
Find your beach.
Ashley Yeh:
Exactly.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yes.
Ashley Yeh:
Maybe it's the empty lake.
Max Du:
Yeah, maybe it's the empty lake. But I want to talk about Stanford a little bit, because, Quyên, you and I, we both did undergrad here. I'm sure that you experienced a lot of the chaos at Stanford. What was that like? When did you start your undergrad here?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I started in 2012, and I graduated in 2017, so a few years before you entered your freshman year here. But yeah, it probably was equally chaotic as most undergraduate experiences. I think it's not just Stanford, but I think human beings in our youth are quite chaotic, at least in my case. So I don't think I can blame it wholly on the external conditions of Stanford being a very busy campus. But it was also more just me not yet knowing who I really am, a little bit nervous and anxious about being in a new country. I had moved from Vietnam, from Hanoi to Stanford when I was 18, so quite young. So all of that contributed to an exciting, truly very adventurous and thrilling experience of going to college in America, which was my dream for a long time. And also, it was busy and chaotic. I was doing 20 units per quarter so that-
Max Du:
We all do.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
... was not fun.
Ashley Yeh:
Well, kudos to you.
Max Du:
Yeah. No, it's like this, at least we called it duck syndrome. It's almost like when you see a duck on the water, everything's calm, but if you look at its feet, it's just scrabbling away at the water. And it feels like that, at least for my generation on campus, where everyone was like, "Oh, it was so easy for me to do this test or get this assignment done." And it's like, "Oh, it's not too hard, don't worry about it." But everyone's just really struggling, and they're almost putting up this facade of having fun. But I don't know. Was that like that for you back in your Stanford days?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah, I think the ideology of the duck syndrome was there when I was here. It's sort of built into the DNA of this space. It's not great. Because once, again, I think, yeah, there's almost a disconnection between who we're trying to perform as and who we really are, truly, when we're at home. So when that separation happens, it's usually quite painful.
Max Du:
Yeah. Because it feels like we're playing a role of being happy and principled.
Ashley Yeh:
It's very California philosophy, or maybe NorCal. Everyone's happy and having fun, but underneath all of it, they're working their ass off.
Max Du:
Yes. Absolutely. It's very two-faced. And that's the one thing that personally I didn't like about Stanford is that if you're struggling, if you're trying really hard, just make it apparent. Because then it feels like other people who are struggling will also know that people are struggling. It's not just you. I think that's the worst feeling of just being alone like, "I'm not good enough. Everyone else is doing so much better." You know?
Ashley Yeh:
There could be so much community in that-
Max Du:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
... to be able to say we are all tired and working so much. And I feel like something could come from that. But I think here, people refuse to acknowledge that they work so hard. It sends a certain message that, I think, isn't entirely genuine.
Max Du:
But when you look back at undergrad, and then you're a grad student now, are there big differences that your undergrad experience versus your grad experience, even though they're on the same campus?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I think just by virtue of me having grown older, that it's less chaotic now, not that I've eliminated chaos, nor do I want to. I think a little bit of chaos or agitation, actually, it's good for me. It reminds me that, yeah, there is this space, this beach, or this cliff side, or this empty lake that I can go to. So it's nice, actually, to have some contrast.
But yeah, I feel like as a grad student now, I do love to go to the Papua New Guinea garden that's very close to us, the garden of beautiful sculptures. Or the empty lake. I love the emptiness of it. There was this one time when it was filled with water, and it was super gorgeous. But now, it's back to its emptiness. And I think, yeah, there's something profound about that too, that a lake can be empty and still be so fulfilling to us.
Max Du:
Yeah. You can still be a lake without water.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
So true.
Max Du:
But I'm a supporter of chaos. I feel like there's something about that that adds spice into your life, gives you a purpose to go to the ocean.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah. The beauty of life is that it can be chaotic, and then you'll have a reason to ground yourself-
Max Du:
Absolutely.
Ashley Yeh:
... and yeah, go to the beach.
Max Du:
Absolutely.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yes.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah, I just think I love chaos.
Max Du:
Me too.
Ashley Yeh:
I just think chaos needs to have some kind of release right now. It's very little with that.
Max Du:
Many people feel the same.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah.
Max Du:
So I'm interested in your journey to the US. You said you were 18 when you moved from Vietnam to US. That's quite a cultural shock, right. Is it very different cultures? What was that journey like?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I think it's probably not unique compared to other international students who moved to the US. There is a lot of adjustment that we have to do. I remember during freshman year, I was in this program called SLAE. I don't know if SLAE was still around when you were at Stanford.
Max Du:
It's a Structured Liberal Arts Experience is what it's called.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah.
Max Du:
The SLAE kids, oh.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
Is that a Stanford thing?
Max Du:
Yeah, it's a Stanford thing.
Ashley Yeh:
Oh, okay.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah.
Max Du:
They live in different dorms. Is that the case for you?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
We lived in FloMo. Is that not the case anymore?
Max Du:
Yeah. Yeah. Downstairs.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah. So we lived together, and we read really canonical books together in philosophy and literature. I think it's similar to what's called the Great Books program that I think Americans have on the East Coast, a little bit like that. And because my English was a little bit shaky then, so it was a lot of catching up to do in terms of my reading and English, I noticed that in the US, students are encouraged to speak a lot. It's a talking culture.
Whereas, I grew up in a much more silent culture. People in my family are quiet, so we don't... We communicate through food or kind of glances. It is kind of difficult to sort of read my parents sometimes, because they don't really use many words, unless they're angry and then there would be a torrential stream of words.
Max Du:
Yeah, it happens.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
But yeah. So I was also having to adjust to knowing how to speak up and perform a certain sort of eloquence that was demanded of me at Stanford. So yeah, a lot of academic things to get used to. But also, I think somatic, I just had to talk a lot more than I was used to. So that was quite a change.
Max Du:
I can't help but think about that connection with poetry where growing up in a slightly more quiet place, it's almost like each word is more important, versus here, I absolutely agree. People talk a lot. Sometimes people should be talking less.
Ashley Yeh:
Yes. That is so real.
Max Du:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah. I think I've noticed a huge difference in my life. The people here in general, and the entire, all of my life before this, I think I've gotten... I'm actually very introverted, usually. I don't talk as much, but when I do talk there is substance. Or other people, my friends are also the same way. And I think sometimes we would just sit in silence and just be around each other, and that was enough. And I do miss the fact of just being, existing around each other was enough in silence. And here, I can't get a break. Yeah.
Max Du:
That does feel like a pretty difficult thing to overcome, especially coming from a more quieter place and learning to essentially have your voice to speak out in public, right?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah. And it's not just the fact that I came from a quiet home place, but also, I think philosophically and spiritually, I also have a lot of resistance towards language. I love it. It's what I do as a writer, and it's the only thing that I have to communicate with other human beings. But at some point, as you two have said, there's such beauty and power in silence. That when you look at an ocean, you look at the sun sinking away, you look at the trees swaying by the lake, no words are needed. And a lot of the profound things that we feel in the body, words can't express. So yeah, I think that understanding of the limit of language also makes it hard for me to participate in this constant discourse and culture of the American university.
Max Du:
Sometimes you really can't summarize whatever you're experiencing in language. You can try. I feel like that's sometimes for me what poetry is it's trying to inflict a certain special feeling in someone else, this very tight communication channel. But it's still very hard. I really get that resistance to using language to describe everything, because sometimes you can't.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah. And why summarize? Why feel this obligation to summarize? I think we're asked to do it a lot in our assignment, in our Canvas posts, in our presentations. We are asked to give out, let's say, five bullet points so people can sort of take away. But I don't think life can be summarized into bullet points, and I don't think it needs to be taken away. I think it needs to be lived, and sometimes silently.
But again, poets and artists teach us that language can also be used beautifully. And even within Buddhism, which is a philosophy and a religion, also extremely skeptical of language. There are many koans that basically defy logic. And instead of a teacher telling you a lesson or a lecture, he would whack you in the head or say nothing or just laugh or scream. So I find Buddhist rhetoric interesting, because they present many, sometimes quite funny alternative to just speaking a whole lot. Buddhist literature is also very abundant, so they also use many words to talk about the need for no word. So there's also I think that funny need for a balance, similar to what you said about needing both chaos and peace. So I think we also need sometimes a lot of language and then sometimes none at all.
Ashley Yeh:
I think some of those beautiful memorable moments of my life have been me existing in silence, either by myself or with other people, but just silently just existing.
Max Du:
Yeah.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Wow.
Max Du:
And you find yourself chasing them.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah. Yeah, I'm chasing that right now. I haven't had moments like that recently.
Max Du:
Me too. Sometimes you go a long time without having those moments. But when you experience them, you know.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah.
Max Du:
It's like, "This is one of those moments."
Ashley Yeh:
It's not something that you can force or something that you can try to get. It just happens, and you're like, "This, I have to be like this. This is the way."
Max Du:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
And then you get pulled back in. But there are a few moments in my life where I've really just been able to exist and be like, "This is it." And those are the moments I still remember so, so clearly. And sometimes I like to take a picture when it happens, and I remember it forever.
Max Du:
Yeah. That's also about letting go, letting the feelings come through you without needing to describe them, without needing to quantify them, but just letting it happen. So when did you get into Buddhist thoughts? Has that something been with you ever since growing up, or was there a moment where you discovered it?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
It was later. I grew up in a pretty atheistic household. It was probably in college that I was sort of more interested in Buddhist thought, thanks to friends, very important spiritual friends. And also teachers, I consider them, who was on the path before me.
And honestly, I don't think my friends in college, my two important friends, their names are Chen Xinghan and Trent Walker, and they're incredible writers, poets, I would call them, very poetic writers, who were Stanford students who we knew each other through Stanford. And I don't think they really came to me with the idea of introducing me to Buddhism, but because I just was so moved by their kindness and their compassion and their way of moving in the world so gently and generously and spaciously that over time, I was just like, "Hmm, okay. Maybe there is some mysterious beauty to this thing called the teachings of the Buddha." So I was curious about Buddhism by way of them. But it was not because they were trying to convert me or anything. And I'm not sure if I believe in the rhetoric of conversion, but it was almost like snow or rain or wind sort of absorbing into my body over time, their kindness and their way of deeply understanding the world.
Max Du:
And it sounds like this is something that you are still studying and still interested in.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah. I don't think I'll ever stop learning, not just about Buddhism, but about the world and other religious and spiritual practices. Yeah, it's endless, and that's the beauty.
Max Du:
Yeah. I'm curious about your professional journey. You did undergrad at Stanford, and now you're doing your PhD. Can you talk more about what you're doing in your PhD?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I'm doing my PhD in art history. Although, I think of myself primarily as a writer and a translator. But art has also been very important. I didn't grow up with a lot of art. My parents had a huge appreciation for beauty, but we didn't have access to a lot of museums in Vietnam. And my parents didn't study art either, so I didn't grow up thinking a lot about it, really. Literature was more familiar land, because my mom read a lot. She was always talking about Tolstoy and Pushkin and Chekhov. But I got into art history as an undergrad at Stanford. It's been a beautiful journey to try to write or translate art into not too many words, but just the right amount of words. So to me, art history is also very related to writing and to also translation, which is what I do. I translate between Vietnamese and English, literarily mostly.
Ashley Yeh:
What forms of art do you work with the most?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
I study all kinds, really. I do love good old traditional pictures, like paintings and drawings, but I also look at sculptures, installations. I love dance, so performance, performative arts. I also love, again, as with poetry, any artwork that moves me, rhythmically, that gives me a sense of breath. I would love to spend a lot of time with it.
Max Du:
And with translation, it's not as simple as what some people might think it is, right? It's not just the literal meaning. It's more about translating what the art feels like.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Yeah, I think that's probably closer to my philosophy of translation. You're trying to translate the resonance, the vibration, the feeling, not a kind of word-by-word sort of translation. Although, that could also be beautiful, a very technical, loyal translation to the original. But I think I'm more of a translator who translates the feel, which is very hard to translate.
Max Du:
We're running on time. This has been just such an amazing hour with you, just talking about things that are very important, not just academics, but how we live life, how we decide to let go and experience things that defy language. And I think it's something that we all need a reminder of to live. To say it so simply is like you need to remember to live.
Ashley Yeh:
Yeah. You need to remember that it's okay to just exist. We're all just existing in this world.
Max Du:
Yeah.
Ashley Yeh:
And that by itself can be okay. Nothing else has to come.
Max Du:
What an amazing hour. Thank you so much.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng:
Thank you.
Sydney Hunt:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Imagine A World, where we hear from inspiring members of the KHS community who are making significant contributions in their respective fields, challenging the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible as they imagine the world they want to see.
Willie Thompson:
This podcast is sponsored by Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, a multidisciplinary, multicultural graduate fellowship program, providing scholars with financial support to pursue graduate studies at Stanford, while helping equip them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world. Follow us on social media @KnightHennessy and visit our website at kh.stanford.edu to learn more about the program and our community.
