Thanhhà Lại: Hi, good morning. My name is Thanhhà Lại and I'm the author of Butterfly Yellow. Butterfly Yellow is absolutely the favorite novel I've written and it's been a 30 year process. I used to be a journalist at the Orange County Register where more overseas Vietnamese live than anywhere else on earth, so I got to interview just a lot of Vietnamese. Every time I would interview a person, all I got were the happy stories, like I went to Berkeley or my children went to Berkeley. We're doctors. I'm like, "Well, those are all great." But I knew there was something underneath percolating. There was a percolating sadness underneath all that that no one was willing to talk about, and who can blame them. As I started researching and talking to people more in depth, some people went through just absolute horror to get here and they would be among the boat people. Now this is not to say that every boat person encountered Thai pirates in the Gulf of Thailand. That is not true. But certainly thousands did. We don't hear about them because the people who actually experienced it do not want to talk about it and it's okay. I understand. I've gotten it through journalism accounts, I've gotten it through nonfiction, but I've never gotten it through fiction. Then I tried for the longest time to write a journalism piece about it. But with journalism, you're going to have to put a real face and a real name to a story and splash it on the front page and it's too personal a story to do that. So I just kind of had it on the back of my mind and I'm a slow writer. It takes me forever to really cement a character in my head.

I wanted to write a story about the recovery process, not what happened on the boat itself, although I will definitely talk about that. But how do you come back to yourself after having gone through this? I have no doubt that Hằng the main character will reclaim herself and she will be all right. But we're talking decades and I'm just starting to hint at her healing process, and helping her along the way, and although he has no idea what he's doing or that he's even a helper is not even a real cowboy, but a cowboy wannabe and his name is Leroy, and it's their dynamic that centers the story. I was more interested in the human interaction than the human horrors behind a person's character.

So I have a character who learned English through grammar books. This is postwar Vietnam. She was not going to conversational English classes with native speakers, the way the Vietnamese are doing in present day. She learned it on the sly in the dark by candlelight from her father's old English grammar books. So who was there to pronounce these words for her? Nobody. The internet wasn't around. This is 1981. So she looked at these English words and she just kind of made up the pronunciation according to her Vietnamese brain, which I get because I have a Vietnamese brain too. For my first year in the United States, I would look at words and would just make up the pronunciation. Of course, no one understood me, but I was just so happy. I was like, "Oh, yeah, I know how to do it." Like sophisticated, I would say so-fi-fi-cat-ed Who would understand me? It doesn't matter. I was like, "I get it."

So I understand her brain and I wanted to put it in there just for realism. There is no way Hằng, in 1981, after living in postwar Vietnam, learning English by herself would come to the United States and suddenly be able to converse in fluent English in the way that English speakers think of fluency. It would just be silly. Also, I wanted to play with language. I love language and I wanted to show you the process of English acquisition, how you go about acquiring another language. First, you are able to read it. Okay, I can read French. Then you may even be able to scramble up a few sentences in writing because you can take your time and make sure you get the convoluted verb tenses right and all that goes into a sentence.

But then when you go outdoors and you try to pronounce this sentence that you made, it's just another world altogether. No one's going to understand you. Then hearing comes last. Once you can understand a language, just the way fast native speakers speak it then by then you're fluent. So then I wanted to show Hằng that she can read English for sure, because she's been reading that article for National Geographic and she can probably write in it fairly well, but she cannot speak it, and hearing it, she's going to hear 50% maybe. You know what? It's okay. The girl still survived. You don't have to understand 100% in order to somehow navigate your way through Amarillo to a ranch to find your brother.

I just wanted to show how resourceful she is and just how spunky. She's not scared. She had her cousin write a few phrases on note cards for her and she's flashing it around Texas so she can get to her brother, and I got that from my mother. When my mother visited me in New York City, I wrote my address, it was on West 90th, for her down on a card and she would flash it at every cab driver. She doesn't speak English and they all brought her home. And a $20 worked ... it's an international language ... She would just give them a $20 and everybody was happy. So there are ways to get around without being 100% fluent and I just wanted to show how resourceful people have to be when they are in a setting where their native language is not prevalent.

I just want to emphasize that I focused on humor a lot. It's because I find it extraordinarily fun and important when you're writing about refugees, and let's face it, refugees are not happy stories. It's built-in sadness. You don't run away from your country on a little boat to a new place because you thought it would be fun. You do it out of necessity, out of survival, and survival stories, at least the one I've encountered, tend to be really dire and really serious and it's like the character may be heroic but in this way that makes you just almost tired by the end of the story because they've gone through so much. I wanted to bring in humor because I myself grew up in a war and I came here as a refugee and my father indeed is still missing in action since I was one. But you know what I remember about Vietnam and from growing up? I just remember laughing. I come from a very funny family apparently. I mean the sadness is still there and I don't think just because you laugh your way through your childhood means that you are in denial or you've forgotten that your father's missing in action. It's just a way of coping. So I wanted all my novels I write to cope through humor rather than tears, right? Because you're going to have tearful moments anyway. They're built in. I can't get rid of them. Trust me. I've tried to get rid of all the tearful moments and I can't because you need them too. But you know what? Hằng is a real human being. She's fully dimensional. So of course she's going to find humor and fun in this dire situation she's in and I want you to read it and also have fun.

Well, I'm going to start on page 40 which is when Hằng first reveals that she does indeed talk because before this she was just pretending that all she does is pass out cards and then I'm going to go into Leroy's point of view and I really played with voice. In Hằng's voice, you get one style which is more poetic, almost in a prose poem format, and then Leroy is just straight up Texan wannabe. He's not even real Texan, so I hope that Texans will forgive me. All right, here we go.

He offers her a stick. She blinks in confusion. What kind of a cowboy is he? The ones on screen squared their jaws on dried beef and mounds of beans. Once Clint Eastwood sliced a papaya with a rusty knife, but never was there a hint of celery.

He chomps on another stick. "Love these things. They sure keep me regular." She knows the word "regular", but its use here puzzles her. Not much about him makes sense. Before she can censor herself, she releases an English question re-engineered within a Vietnamese pronunciation key,

"Du ri-eo cao-bồi?"

Leroy's mouth hangs open, half-chomped celery for all the world to see. "Good God almighty. You can talk," he whoops. What she said came out all mangled, but one thing he's got is a good set of ears. "Why you asking if I'm a real cowboy?" 'Course I am, just look at me." She blinks at him, "Thóc sì-lâu, bờ-li-sì."

"Talk what? Slow? Did you say 'please'?" He whistles. "A sly one, huh? Never would have taken you on if I knew you could fend for yourself. This is a blessing, for sure. Soon as we get to that precious address, that'll be the last you see of me, got it?" She taps his shirt pocket.

"Gô chu pho dê-rô phai me-sì-quýt."

He takes out the index card. Ten dollars spent."It says here 405 Mesquite Street. Yeah, what I thought."

She points to a word, "Sây à-ghen."

"Say again? Mesquite."

"Nót me-sì-quýt?"

How'd you get from 'mesquite' to that?"

"Sây à-ghen." She taps.

"Mesquite, mesquite. This here is it." He points to the twisty, bone-dry tree they're under, snaps off a branch while avoiding hellish thorns. Why some people think it's fun to gather and pound the seeds into flour he'll never know. When the Comanches and the sellers did it, they had no grocery stores.

She holds the branch like it's a gift, massages the delicate tear-shaped leaflets between her fingers, shakes a seed pod. "Mớt-sì-kít?"

"Better, but easy on the S." He sighs. "Don't tell me I've got to run some kind of pronunciation lesson now."

"Sây à-ghen."

"Mesquite, mesquite, mesquite, let's move it on out before I miss my chance of kissing up to Bruce Ford."