Interview with Genarao Kỳ Lý Smith on “The Land Baron’s Sun”Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Biography, Interviews, Media Archive on 2017-03-19 01:47Z by Steven |
Interview with Genarao Kỳ Lý Smith on “The Land Baron’s Sun”
Interminable Rambling
2015-12-10
Matthew Teutsch, Instructor
Department of English
Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama
Last post, I wrote about Genarao Kỳ Lý Smith’s The Land Baron’s Sun. Today, I am sharing a recent interview I conducted with Smith. In the video above, Smith talks more about his grandfather and reads two poems from The Land Baron’s Sun.
In the acknowledgements of The Land Baron’s Sun, you write about Darrell Bourque telling you that your grandfather’s “story needs to be heard” because it is an important story to everyone. What makes Lý Loc’s story so significant?
Lý Loc came from a privileged life: inherited land from his father who was only known as the land baron (to this day, my mother does not know his name), had seven wives, twenty-seven children, seven houses (1 per wife), mistresses to go with each wife; he was a major commander for the South Vietnamese Army. When the Fall of Saigon occurred, he lost everything to the point of writing my mother a few years later asking for money, food, medicine, and clothes. It is a tragic story that needs to be told. The idea of someone who had it all to living as a pauper is and has always been an intriguing story. Also, had I not known about his seven wives or his privileged lifestyle, his story would have died with my mother. The goal therefore was to resurrect his life, the lives of his wives and their children. The purpose of writing the book was to leave his legacy. I simply did not want him to die…
Read the entire interview here.