How It All Started...

The Boat People - playGround 2009 Poster

Designed by: David Freedman

Okay, so for the first post...I thought it would be fitting to "blog" about what inspired me to write this story in particular. Bear with me because my memory is a little fuzzy. Back in 2008, it was the night before playGround submissions were due (playGround is a student playwriting festival at York University) and I had no idea what I was going to write. Silly me, I had known when the due date was for only about five weeks and never actually paid any attention to what I was going to write about. GO ME. So in a desperate panic, I took a nap. Don't look at me like that. I NEEDED IT. FFW to when I woke up. So I'm opening my eyes and I just lay there and BBQ myself - it's what my mom says when I lay in bed just turning myself over and over without getting up. Then, like a flash of light, I get an idea. omigosh. Final-freakin-ly. Then I think, really? Should I?

HINT (this is what I was thinking): Why don't I just write about my Dad and when he came over here from Vietnam? He came here on a boat. That's interesting, right? Yeah, it has to be. Refugees, who wouldn't find that interesting? But really... another refugee story. How is that going to be at all interesting? Never mind the amount of research I'd actually need to do for it. UGH.

BACKTRACK: I got this idea because my Mom had told me about my Dad. Yeah. I'm Asian, my family doesn't talk much about the past. However, my Mom loves telling me important things while I'm standing in the kitchen. She said, “Dad came on a boat. I didn’t talk to him for a year. I didn’t know if he was dead or alive.” She went on after that but it’s too fuzzy to remember the exact details. The important thing is there – and I had never known about it.

Back to me: WTF, how did I not know? Why don’t my parents tell me anything? I asked this once and their response, “I didn’t think it was important”. Now that just shocked me even more because really? How could you think this wouldn’t be important to me? Okay, that’s it.

So I sat down at my laptop and started to furiously write. I ended up with a 10-12 page early draft as my submission piece. You know, I didn’t that I could but more like if I was ready to. It’s really hard writing something so personal. Everything that I write, it’s almost always based on truth and embellished to the max but here, I didn’t have to. I didn’t even know if I was ready to share this with anyone else but I had to suck it up since I ended up getting accepted into the festival.

This concludes my first blog ever,

Sylvia Vuong