By Ayva Strauss
Phuc Tran’s website introduces him as a “writer, educator, classicist, and tattooer,” and in his visit to Isaac’s Auditorium as part of the Seavey Visiting Writers Series, he commented on all of these identities with candor and humor. Tran’s memoir is wittily titled “Sigh, Gone,” a nod to Saigon, Vietnam, the city he was born in and then fled with his family in 1975. The book was released in April of 2020, and it tells the story of his upbringing as the oldest brother in the only Vietnamese family in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Each chapter reframes a piece of the author’s youth through the themes of a Western piece that influenced him. One of the chapters he read aloud to the mostly student-audience dared to think of adolescence as the equivalent to awaking as a repulsive cockroach, as in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” He earnestly and hilariously points out that when you are a teenager, with a pimpled face and a fragile, changing sense of self, you suddenly feel a sense of comradery with Kafka’s monster: suddenly, you are a bug, and “your family is a bunch of assholes,” as Tran says. The evident humor in Tran’s writing is a product of his earnesty: he’s telling it how it is, or how it was when he was seventeen.
After reading three chapters from Sigh, Gone, Tran opened up about the winding creative process and frustrating practical process that led to his memoir. It began in 2012, when Tran was living in New York City, having earned a bachelor’s degree in classics and literature (“How did no one talk me out of that?” he quips on his website) and then a master’s degree at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was working as a high school Latin teacher by day and a tattoo artist by night. A friend of his connected him with an agent that was looking for candidates to give Tedx Talks. Like most of his creative pursuits, Tran went into the meeting presenting his raw, ambitious ideas, without the kind of restrictive self-editing that can come from being attached to a particular outcome. The idea he pitched turned into a Tedx Talk called “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive,” which, like Tran’s other work, seamlessly and interestingly ties together seemingly unrelated ideas. His talk went on to be featured on NPR’s “Ted Radio Hour.” This was his first time speaking publicly about any of his personal experiences as a refugee, and four years later, he would be offered the chance to do this in a more long-term way, when a literary agent asked if he would want to write a memoir. He penned “Sigh, Gone” while still tattooing, teaching, and parenting two young children: “I’ve never been good at staying in one lane—ask my wife about my driving,” he jokes when describing himself. Since the memoir was released, Tran has broadened his relationship with writing by authoring scripts for HBO and then a children’s book centered around Cranky, the ill-tempered crane, scheduled to come out in 2024. Tran’s openness and thoughtfulness extended to the q&a portion of his visit, in which questions about moments omitted from the book and being fired over Zoom bubbled to the top of a captive audience.
On paper, Phuc Tran’s career could look like a series of sporadic shifts from one field to another, the kind of all-over-the-place list that a teenager produces when asked for his dream job. But Tran’s long list of professions doesn’t feel random or naive at all; it feels like a creative person moving wherever their passion takes them and refusing to follow a career path that bends to conventional, capitalistic logic. Today, the author lives in Maine with his family, operating Tsunami Tattoo, where according to his website, he is “deeply grateful to be following this brambly path to its unknown destination.”
