Interviewer: Siena Iwasaki Milbauer
Heritage is often talked about like it is something historical, rooted in the past. But while heritage may be born from the events of yesterday, our heritages are living, breathing things that have a huge impact on our here and now.
That’s why as part of our Asian Heritage Month celebrations, we’ve been talking with Minnesota-based Asian activists and organizers about what their heritage means to them, and how it influences and inspires their work.
Today, we share a conversation we had with Tri Minh Vo (he/she/they). Tri is the Digital Organizer at The SEAD Project and previously worked with Green Card Voices. His work often focuses on creating storytelling platforms for Asian diasporic folks, and she is especially experienced when it comes to using podcasting as a tool for empowerment and expression. Tri spoke with us about this work, and about their own complex relationship with their heritage and the whole idea of “Asian Heritage Month.”
Please introduce yourself!
I am Tri, he/she/they pronouns. I live in the Twin Cities, and I grew up in Eagan, Minnesota. For a while, I described myself as a jungle Asian punk or something of that nature, because I’m very aligned with this thing called punk music and the ethos that comes with that. And I’ll keep it there.
Please describe your heritage, whatever that means to you
Ethnically, I’m Vietnamese. And that comes with a lot of things that don’t get talked about on the surface. Being Vietnamese in the United States includes for a lot of people having strained relationships with your parents, and also having barriers to the history that you are possessed by in some ways; that you own but are very much possessed and haunted by.
So my heritage has informed my 21st century self to be very fraught. I used to not have much of a relationship with Vietnam outside of being resentful that I had to learn about it at all. But now, I understand that the reason I have such a fraught relationship with Vietnam is because an imperialist country [the US] wanted to make profits and wanted to push off a country [communist China] that had other ideologies. And as I become more articulate and able to enunciate what I’m curious about, the more I’m able to learn. Currently, it’s a very intellectual exploration [of my heritage]. Because my ability to have a relationship with my country, my ethnic land, is so wrapped up in alarm bells. So the best I can do is have an intellectual relationship right now so that maybe I can ask better questions, with the right people, and then have a much more personable relationship in the future.
Can you share a bit about your organizing work and what that looks like?
I’m a digital organizer, that’s my title with The SEAD Project. And what that means is that I’m an organizer in the digital streets. I’m using different digital channels in order to interact with people, to get people on board with whatever the agenda is, political or cultural or otherwise.
And I also love podcasts. I made some podcast series with Green Card Voices called “Love your Asian Neighbors” and “Beyond Allyship.” I also have this podcast that I made this year called, abbreviated, “GLAMMUMP.” But unabbreviated, it’s “Generic Leftist APIDA Music and Media in the Upper Midwest Podcast.” In the podcast, I’m trying to have a platform for things we [APIDA, Asian Pacific Islander Desi Americans] don’t get to have access to, like underground music and alternative music and media. And where we can talk about these things freely without feeling like we’re being absorbed into whiteness necessarily, whatever that means.
How does your heritage influence and/or motivate your work?
I think my agenda, if I went straight for the heart of it, is getting Southeast Asians to understand the relationship to capitalism that is global, and the idea of exploitation of people for the sake of profit. This brainy rhetoric isn’t necessarily a part of the vernacular of Southeast Asian people, but it underlies things like a police state or corporations telling us that in order to be a valuable human beings we have to consume XYZ brand or XYZ lifestyle marker. So I think the organizing that I am emerging into and trying to build for myself is that of political and economic education.
Also, with every organization I work with, The SEAD Project or Green Card Voices, they are dealing with diaspora and first-person storytelling. [What I love about podcasts] is that we can be candid on podcasts, we can be ourselves: talk about our family and the things we eat, and in the next minute talk about capitalism or military regimes or evictions or strikes. I need that for representing the people I want to represent, so that we aren’t giving you an essay about why we should get to live, which seems to be what a lot of things are for minoritized people. And so that passion and that drive to create platforms for such conversations is imbued in all my work.
What does Asian Heritage Month mean to you?
What this month means to me is that I am in America, and we were given a month. I’ve been apportioned a time to be critically reflective about my ethnicity, but that’s all I get. And that makes me mad.
What I want is to not be defined by a month, and to encourage others to also continue to craft their own identities, their own histories, and their postures towards emancipation from oppressive structures beyond a month.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
You hear a lot of older people say that “the youth are our future!” And I think beyond the platitude energy of that, it’s true. That phrase, when said in its full illuminatory essence, is like us youth don’t have as much to lose as the adults so we can be more bold and full throated. Because we have not yet been clamped down totally by societal and capitalist structures. So that’s what that phrase means to me, and I want all Asian diasporic folks and youth to be able to lean fully into that.
Learn more about Tri and their work:
GLAMMUMP – Generic Leftist APIDA Music and Media in the Upper Midwest Podcast. FB page at facebook.com/glammump. Contact tri.m.vo4@gmail.com or glammump@gmail.com.
The SEAD Project – Email tri@theseadproject.org with any interest in SEAD’s programming, volunteering, or donating.
Green Card Voices – Green Card Voices, the Podcast – Tri produced and hosted the #LoveYourAsianNeighbors series and helped produce the Beyond Allyship series.