Vietnamese Identity Beyond Vietnam: A Plum Village Conversation

Two hours of conversation recorded in a preserved classroom at Harvard, where a Zen monk, a scholar and a novelist talk about what it means to be Vietnamese in the West now, not in the Vietnam their parents left. Episode 117 of the Plum Village App's podcast The Way Out Is In opens with a guided breath meditation and then moves through hyphenated identity, refugee inheritance, the trap of binary thinking, the practice of joy, the policing of one another's culture and the weight of filial piety. Brother Phap Huu, the scholar Nho Tran and the novelist Ocean Vuong speak as children of refugees and as refugees themselves, and their central move is a refusal: they will not measure Vietnameseness against a fixed homeland, a single language or a purity that never existed. Instead they reach for a third space, and for thinkers who learned to live without origin.

What happens in the room where this conversation begins?

The episode does not start with a thesis. It starts with a bell and a breath. Brother Phap Huu leads a short meditation that asks listeners to notice the inbreath and the outbreath, and then to see the body as something larger than a single self. "I see this body is not mine alone. It is a continuation of my ancestors, my spiritual ancestors, and of this whole planet, the cosmos," he says in the guided practice (from 1:58, Plum Village App, Episode 117, 2026). The phrasing is simple, but it sets the terms for everything that follows. Identity here is a continuation, not a possession.

The conversation then turns to the room itself. Ocean Vuong points out that they are sitting in one of the preserved classrooms of Radcliffe, which was once a women's college, and the history of the space becomes part of the opening. One of the speakers recalls a teaching she has heard from other writers: when you step into a room, bring your ancestors with you and file them in. It is a small domestic image, but it carries the whole episode's method. The people in the room are not only the three who are speaking. They are every person whose labor and loss made the room, and the conversation, possible.

That same speaker notes that the talk began long before the microphones were on, during a few days at Ocean's home in western Massachusetts. They talked about video games, about going to temple as children, about what it meant to be the child of refugees and sometimes a refugee oneself. The episode is presented as a continuation of that earlier conversation, and the looseness shows. It is less a panel than three people who have been thinking about the same questions for a long time and have finally found a room in which to say them out loud.

What does it mean to be a hyphenated Vietnamese?

The word "hyphenated" arrives in the first serious segment of talk (from 8:02), and it names a condition that many listeners will recognize: being Vietnamese-American, Vietnamese-French or Vietnamese-Australian means living in the hyphen, a liminal space that offers both range and friction. One speaker describes the beauty of that in-between and also its limits. The dual condition gives you access to two worlds, but neither fully claims you.

The speakers are especially attentive to a generation that sits between immigrants and the children born into a new country. They use the term "one-and-a-half generation" to describe people who arrived young, or whose parents arrived as refugees and whose own schooling was shaped by a language their families often could not read. One speaker makes a point that lands hard: she is sitting in a university conversation about Vietnamese life, and she knows no one in her family who has ever sat in such a room, except as visitors to her. The inheritance is not just a question of culture but of access, labor and what it costs to be the first.

The episode treats this not as a deficit but as a starting condition. The speakers want to "launch a beautiful imperfect inquiry" into what Vietnamese identity can be outside Vietnam, rather than waiting for a definition handed down by people who never left.

Why reject the binary of East meets West?

The sharpest argument arrives around 14:20. One speaker names a friend, the poet Hua Win, who insists on pronouncing her surname "Win" because "wing" is difficult for her to say, and asks whether she is any less Vietnamese for that. Others in the episode extend the point: some relatives speak no Vietnamese at all. The question is rhetorical, but it exposes a standard that most people in the diaspora have quietly absorbed, the idea that Vietnameseness is measured by proximity to a mainland original.

"Our Vietnamese is not beholden to the mainlands. It is not quote unquote perfect to the mainland." (a speaker in Plum Village App's Episode 117, 2026, around 14:20)

The speakers argue that the framework used to judge diasporic identity was borrowed, and that it comes from Western academic habits: binaries such as black and white, East and West, pure and mixed. They admit that they too have absorbed these binaries, partly because there was no inherited vocabulary for doing otherwise. The Buddhist framing matters here. Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching of interbeing, which the podcast is built to mirror, has no room for a self that is simply one side of a line. The episode's refusal of binary thinking is therefore not only political. It is a doctrinal consistency: if nothing exists on its own, then no culture can be a closed unit either.

What can Glissant teach about origin and creolization?

The most original move in the conversation is the turn to thinkers from the Caribbean. Around 16:29 the discussion arrives at the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, whose work asks what happens to culture when the people carrying it cannot point back to a specific place of origin. For those who came through the Middle Passage, there was often no village to name. The speakers note that Glissant questions whether the idea of origin is a Western fantasy at all.

He points to the Arawak peoples of the Caribbean, who moved according to seasons and weather and did not treat origin as a pure genesis. He describes colonialism as moving like an arrow: it flies out of a single instrument in one direction and usually lands at death. The speakers borrow this image to describe the refugee and immigrant condition. Their argument is that the refugee's culture is not a pure preservation of a lost original. It is a creolization, a living mixing that keeps moving.

The speakers argue that "there is a creoleization to the refugee, to the immigrant, that culture is not the fantasy of purity or origin." (paraphrasing the discussion in Plum Village App's Episode 117, 2026, around 16:29)

This is the intellectual heart of the episode. If identity is creolized rather than pure, then loss does not disqualify you, and inheritance is not frozen. You are allowed to keep what you carry and to change it. That is not an argument for forgetting. It is an argument for refusing to let a single origin become a court before which every descendant must stand.

How does Buddhism shape the way these speakers think about identity?

The talk on Buddhism and Vietnamese identity (from 25:30) returns repeatedly to a simple claim: the practice gives language for holding continuity without rigidity. The meditation's line about being a continuation is the thread. Buddhism here is not a costume worn to mark heritage. It is the method by which the speakers loosen their grip on a fixed self. That loosening makes space for the third identity they describe, one that is neither simply American nor simply Vietnamese.

The episode also insists that healing is communal. Its discussion of healing and transformation (from 20:24) frames the work as something done among people, not only inside the individual, which is why the speakers keep returning to the room they are sitting in and the family members who were absent from it.

Why does the conversation turn to joy?

Joy is not treated as a reward at the end of the work. The chapter on the relationship to joy in multifold identities (from 51:03) addresses the way people in the diaspora can feel they are not allowed to be happy freely, because joy can look like forgetting, or like betraying what their parents survived. One speaker describes the pull toward restraint. The implication is that joy, practiced deliberately, is part of resisting the logic that every inheritance must be carried as grief.

What are we doing to ourselves when we police each other's Vietnameseness?

One of the most pointed questions in the episode is asked directly (from 1:13:34): what are we doing to ourselves when we police each other's Vietnameseness, or each other's Buddhistness? The speakers are candid that gatekeeping is a wound passed between people who are already hurt. Communities that have been dislocated often guard their identity fiercely, and the guarding can turn into exclusion of cousins who don't speak the language or friends whose names don't sound "right." The episode suggests that this policing is not protection. It is another form of the binary, and it leaves everyone smaller.

What does filial piety mean for those who grew up inside it?

The conversation on power, agency and filial piety (from 1:35:11) is the most personal stretch. Filial piety is often praised from the outside, as a cultural virtue, but the speakers examine what it looks like from inside, for people who were raised by women doing enormous work, and who carry their mothers' stories without having been asked to tell them. The question is not whether to honor parents. It is how to honor them without surrendering one's own agency, and how to tell their histories accurately when they could not always tell them themselves.

The episode closes with a love letter to those who have loved them (from 1:54:57), and with an outro that thanks everyone who helped make the conversation possible. It is an ending that treats gratitude as part of the inheritance, not a sentimental add-on.

Where to go from here

The best way into this episode is to listen to the whole thing, including the meditation at the start, which sets the register for everything else. If you want to go further, start with the three ideas that organize it: the continuation rather than possession of identity, the third space that refuses the East-West binary, and Glissant's notion of creolization as an alternative to origin. Then listen to the segments on joy and on policing identity, and ask yourself where you have been asked to prove your culture, and by whom. The episode is also an invitation to ask the same questions of your own family, in your own room, with your own ancestors filed in.

Episode 117 is part of the podcast series The Way Out Is In, which the Plum Village App co-produces with Global Optimism. Earlier episodes are available on YouTube through the series playlist.