5 Questions with Vivian Pham
Vivian Pham is a writer, closet poet, amateur skateboarder, university student and hopeful dropout if any of the aforementioned ventures take flight.
Her debut novel The Coconut Children was published this March by Penguin Random House.
She is currently writing a screenplay with her sister, Kim.
No.1
How did The Coconut Children come about?
The Coconut Children is the consequence of a whole lot of things! Among them, a year-long novella project at the Story Factory, a childhood of renting movies from Video Ezy every weekend to watch with my dad and sister, Kim, an obsession with the cinematic lighting used in the 2010 film Flipped, and a great deal of back-and-forth with Patrick Mangan and Daniel Carrington, whose editorial guidance guided me editorially.
No.2
The book has seen a lot of attention since your manuscript was first looked at, resulting in multiple bids from publishing houses for it to eventually be acquired by Penguin Random House. What does it feel like to experience this much attention for your first novel?
I still feel like I don’t belong. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to have a book published, but felt that what to do, where to go and who to speak to in order to achieve that was all knowledge purposely concealed from me. Now I find myself on the other side of the same barrier—given permission to enter the publishing world, but without any key to let others in. To most people, publishing feels like something that is innately beyond them, something always to remain elusive, like the opera or ballet. I want to help people make the transition I’ve been so lucky to bumble through.
No.3
I read somewhere else that you started writing through fan-fiction, then went on to poetry. What do you see as the connecting thread through these mediums, (and perhaps) eventually culminating in the book?
I think the way I pursued both fan-fiction and poetry writing was characterised by a need to confess, and the struggle of wanting to connect somehow with people I didn’t know. When writing fan-fiction, I was motivated not only by my obsession—fictionalising a relationship with an unnamed member of One Direction seemed to give life to the intangible bond I felt I had with him—but a desire to reach out to other teenage girls who were going through the same thing. Poetry gave me a space to think about my relationship with my family history, and with the history of Vietnam. I remember quite literally thinking that my poems could speak to the dead.
No.4
In another interview, you said, “I wanted to universalise my experience, and not just write about what it means to be Vietnamese or to come from Cabra. Baldwin saw the grey in the black and white.” How do you think you achieved this in The Coconut Children?
I think the question of whether I managed to achieve this in The Coconut Children remains—but I do remember thinking a lot about the way I’d seen people of colour portrayed in books and movies, and finding it strange that many people who wrote African American characters, for example, could only represent that experience in relation to the ‘default’ white American experience. In a way, a black character was only black insofar as another character was white.
This is perhaps why seeing Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight [2016] with its all-black cast was a revelation to me, and why I decided quite early on against writing a book that was solely, or even fundamentally, about racial disparities. Such a book would be concerned with the space in between our suffering, whereas I wanted to make sense of the suffering itself. The only way I could think of making this story universal was to treat each character as though they were each their own universe.
No.5
Do you have any advice for other young writers of colour?
Put up with labels only when they serve you.
Find out more
Buy a copy of Coconut Children from all good independent bookstores. Don’t know which ones will deliver to you? Check out this very good bookshop map by Alan Vaarwerk.