For Dao Nguyen Strom, identity is no simple concept. Raised in the California countryside, Strom was originally born in Vietnam—a country she escaped as a baby and returned to as a 23-year old graduate student in creative writing. “Even just landing, I felt a very palpable sense of sorrow,” Strom recalls. “It was a realization that even what I couldn’t remember I was collectively a part of.” Now an multidisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon, Strom uses three “voices”—written, sung, and visual—to navigate her varying personal and collective identities.
Strom was born in 1973, in Saigon, Vietnam, where her mother held a reputation for being part of a group of women writers modernizing the literary scene. She also worked as a publisher for an independent newspaper called Sóng Thần, or “tidal wave.” This publication aimed at exposing government corruption. In 1975, with the Fall of Saigon and the North Vietnamese Communist takeover of South Vietnam, Strom’s mother understood she would face persecution under the Communist regime. As a result, she fled from Vietnam with Strom and her older brother on April 29, 1975 when Strom was only two years old.
The family arrived in Camp Pendleton in San Diego, before relocating to Camp Weimar, also known as “Hope Village,” in Sacramento. There, Strom’s mother wrote an article regarding their experiences for the Sacramento Bee, which caught the attention of a Danish-American immigrant who’d been in the United States since the 1950s. The two began a correspondence and very quickly decided to get married. “It was a sudden beginning for our family life,” Strom reflects with a small laugh. However, this didn’t come without its challenges. “He was a forty-two-year-old bachelor taking on this refugee family — he had no idea about the cultural differences he would encounter.”
Early on, Strom’s father asked the family to stop speaking Vietnamese. At the time, it seemed the most efficient path toward assimilation; however, the decision played—and still plays—a role in Strom’s sense of disconnect from her Vietnamese identity. Moreover, her parents never considered the prospect of returning to either of their home countries. Her mother would have been imprisoned by the now-communist government; her books were banned and censored after 1975. Her stepfather, on the other hand, didn’t provide clear reasons for not returning to Denmark. “My parents raised us with the idea that severing from the past was the way to move forward,” Strom explains. “I think for them that was a survival tactic.”
A few years after living in Sacramento, the family relocated to the Sierra Nevada foothills, where they became one of the only Asian families in the area. Reflecting on her school years, Strom doesn’t recall any explicit moments of racism, but overall felt withdrawn from her community. It was because of these circumstances that Strom turned to writing. Her mother supported this new creative outlet. “She gave us permission to spend time pursuing art,” Strom recalls. “It was always a refuge from everything else.”
Strom was seventeen years old when she left rural Sierra Nevada for San Francisco State University, where she studied filmmaking. She describes her college years as a “formative” experience, introducing her to the diversity of city life and allowing her to explore her interests as an artist. After graduating, she and her friends moved to New York, where she found part-time work and applied for MFA programs.
A year later, Strom began attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the nation’s most prestigious creative writing programs, where she found herself in yet another community in which she existed on the periphery. Not only was she one of the only Asian students, but many of her peers came from upper class backgrounds. Moreover, Strom found herself resisting the practices and traditions being taught. “You might hear the stereotypes about Iowa as a writing program, that it’s very western,” Strom says, citing writers like Raymond Carver. She began exploring hybrid forms of art, interweaving her coinciding passions for writing and music.
During the summer after her first year at Iowa, Strom received a fellowship that enabled her to travel to Vietnam. Over the course of six weeks, Strom visited extended family and friends who welcomed her warmly. At the end of the trip she visited her birth father, who for many years she’d thought had died in the war. “I really didn’t know what to expect,” she says. “I came into the house and he was sitting in the back, in the garden. I went out and he said my name and held my hand. I was the return of something he [thought he] was never gonna see again.”
After that summer, Strom began writing about Vietnam and her identity more seriously. “I think that was, in many ways, where my writing began,” she states. “I realized that return is not simple, it’s not a redemptive experience. I wrote a story about returning in my first book, and have been wrestling with the same material ever since.”
Since earning her MFA, Strom has published multiple books of fiction, poetry, and other hybrid works. She has been involved in organizations including the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and is the co-founder of She Who Has No Masters, a collective of womxn and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. Presently, Strom is fusing Vietnamese mythology into American folk music. “I think there’s a tendency in American stories to want a hero or closure in a story,” she observes. “Those are a lot of the thematic motifs I’m trying to play against.”
Strom has also made an effort to bring her values for engaging with the past to her role as a mother. “My hope is that [my son] doesn’t have to carry the same trauma as me, which I think is what my mom was trying to do too,” Strom reflects. “I took him back to Vietnam, and he’s also gotten to meet his grandfather. I didn’t get to meet my grandparents, so that was something I wanted to give him, something I wanted to put closure on.”
Ultimately, Strom is passionate about innovating multidisciplinary modes of creating, making space in the artistic canon for nontraditional experiences and identities like her own.