An Interview With Tri Vo
This spotlight interview is with Tri Vo. A strong member of the Twin Cities Southeast Asian community, as well as a puppeteer and theater maker, Tri has been leaning heavily into his main passion, music. He spoke with Cedar Commissions program manager, Robert Lehmann, about his Vietnamese punk roots; the shifting scope of his project; and taking up space to be himself in front of a crowd while encouraging audiences to embrace their own messiness.
WARNING: Explicit language; reader advised.
You can listen to Tri Vo live Saturday, February 10th during our Cedar Commissions concert.
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All photos by Drew Arrieta
How would you describe your roots?
Tri Vo: I am on paper, Vietnamese. My ethnicity is that of the Kinh people. There are different ethnicities in Vietnam, and the Kinh are the majority. There's also the ethnic group, the Hoa, which is ethnic Chinese people, among other ethnicities. I'm not entirely sure which part of Vietnam my parents came from. I’ve heard small bits, here and there, and that’s something I want to do more of. That's the ethnic side, coming from Ho Chi Minh City, also known as Saigon.
We came here through my paternal grandfather, being a military officer in the South. And he was imprisoned and then he was released in 1989 as the Cold War ended. There's the Homecoming Act that allowed former POW to be released and chain migration occurred that allowed their families to come here as their family, so we came as part of that wave of immigrants and refugees. I don't have that refugee-immediate background, but I'm a part of the very common South Vietnamese diaspora in the US. That informs a lot of the ways I think about my politics and what kind of things I reckon with, roots-wise.
Music-wise, I grew up in Minnesota, and in elementary/middle school, I had my friends who were these nerdy white guys in leafy suburban Eagan, Minnesota, south of the Cities. I listened to nice old pop-punk music, mostly Green Day, a little Sum 41, and that became my roots. The kind of music that allowed me to jump around, feel all this suburban anxiety, but also that adolescent angst about things.
Tell us about yourself as an artist.
I took guitar, piano lessons for a bit, from third grade for a while. From eight years old to eighteen, I never took it that seriously – it was just a thing to do weekly as a habit and did some guitar lessons. I did the thing where my mom specifically, signed me up for musical things to do, because that's the Asian thing to do. Well, that's often the any parent thing to get your kids into music stuff. However, I don't think they were as serious of Asian parents about it in terms of discipline.
My energy made itself more available to punk rock music because I didn't have parents breathing down my throat, saying, “You gotta play Bach. You gotta do violin. You gotta get the things to get into the schools.” And so my artistry allowed me to be yelling and screaming, and my artistry came from there, and came from my political instinct.
Being young and not having many political role models, I had this instinct of thinking “something's not right.” High school, there was the whole race thing that I was trying to figure out, but there's also this feeling, “What am I learning here? What am I being prepared for?” I see all these Asians who are gearing towards becoming something that now I would call – I'm trying not to be derogatory or condescending about it – but just like furniture? Like nice high functioning furniture – they’re there and they do their purpose, but they aren’t actively taking up or disrupting space. And if anybody wants to email me about it, they can.
I'm not blaming Asians, ourselves. I'm blaming the socialization that we are put under to go in a certain direction. And I was in this, and now my artistry is more about personality and attitude than it is about necessarily musical and technical excellence. I'm drawn to punk because it's a very diplomatic genre, so to speak. It's one where you can play two chords, maybe three, maybe more, and make a song out of talking about the shit in your life, or the shit you see in the world, and things you think are unfair. There's a big gradient between unfair as in, “Mom that's so unfair,” to unjust as in, “The governments suck, man!” And there's that whole range with punk music that I instinctually could appreciate.
Mind you, I didn't have the words to describe these things at the time. Before punk was an intellectual thing, I just felt, “I get to jump around and feel good, and this is fun.” This is the fun thing I can have in my life when other parts seemed more stale and suburban. My artistry is informed by wanting to feel within my body without feeling like I need to be in my brain all the time. But at the same time, I'm allowed that with punk if I wanted to, whereas other kinds of music, it feels like it's all about the technical excellence.
Can you tell us about your Cedar Commission's work?
“Nhạc Punk Vàng – ‘Yellow/Gold Punk Music’.“ Courtesy of Tri Vo’s YouTube Channel.
It's shifted as things do over time, because at the start of the project, I thought I was going to have protest songs, pop-punk punk, and hardcore punk and have this array and homage to all punk styles. But also mixing in Vietnamese identity, and some puppetry, because puppetry became like a major avenue that allowed me to be on stage a lot more the past few years, even though it wasn't the thing I wanted to do the most, which is music. Even in the past year, I was in this residency at a theater venue called Open Eye Theater and the residency was called Puppet Lab, and I made a show called Nhạc Punk Vàng, which translates loosely to “Yellow or Gold Punk Music.”
And I think my Cedar show is the reimagined musical version of that, because there was a lot of music in that show - the plot was all about music and trying to be a musician and trying to be Vietnamese, with puppetry and theatre. For the Cedar show, I'm going all music. Since I was accepted into the Cedar, I’ve been moving towards framing the show more as me not feeling like I'm obligated to demonstrate why punk is legitimate, or me demonstrating why I am legitimate through the way I demonstrate punk or my portrayal of my Vietnamese-ness as legitimate.
With my show, I will try to demonstrate how much I don't need to give one shit about whatever the fuck perceptions have been ingrained in us – ingrained in the audience and myself to perceive how I'm supposed to deliver something of worth on stage that deals with punk and Viet-ness. I was trapped by that for the past few months – a feeling I'd have to deliver an attempt at portraying punk and Viet-ness in this ethno-historical, ethno-anthropological whatever the f—, whatever the hell, auto, ethnography, autobio—blah, blah, blah.
RL: Like No-No Boy, but viet punk.
That's right. No-No Boy who’s coming in April (which you should totally go see). No-No Boy/Julian Saporiti was a mentor and my two mentor meetings with him, through the Cedar commissions, were a fun and illuminating time. I had mentioned that I was a Black Friday Asian, an Asian that needs to squeeze all the deals out of Black Friday – I needed to get my cash back. I would put all these things into my Amazon cart throughout the year and then I would buy it all at once during Black Friday because that's when the deals are and I have cash back on my Discover card. And he was like, “that's the kind of Asian I want to hear about, I want to hear about the Black Friday Asian. I don't want to hear any more about the stinky lunch story, or the mango poetry story. They're fine, but we need some new life. We need something that gives people confidence that our stories are more distinct than that.” I mean, we have our commonalities, through such stories like the stinky lunch story and mango poetry that are unique to our shared experience, but also we’ve made our own paths in navigating America. There are plenty of perspectives that don't conform to other common narratives about Asian America.
My goal with the show is to try to be more personable, just saying things like, “I like fried eggplants and I like bats.” Don't look at me as a Vietnamese person who's going to just talk about some stupid fucking dumb war, I am a person who likes things and dislikes things. And I want to demonstrate that other people like me also dislike things – that they probably dislike me, and that's cool! I'm glad that other Vietnamese people can disagree with me. I want the audience to maybe disagree with me. I want them to kind of hate me, and be okay with that. It’s a lot of things – I'm trying to allow for those emotions to flow forth through my show through punk music and jumping around and not having to check every single box for what punk, or Vietnamese-ness is.
What's been your process for creating?
I have two outstanding musicians who have been able to work with me consistently the past few months. The first musician is Oscar Un, a Cambodian producer, guitarist, singer, and rapper. And then Toby Ramaswamy, who is a mixed Indian and German drummer in the Twin Cities, very talented, has lots of projects. Every one to two weeks in the past few months I've been jamming with them, getting a feel for things, ad-libbing melodies, trying out what kind of styles I want, and recording some demos. Now, we've brought on board Eric Mayson s a bassist, who is friends with Toby and also a deeply accomplished musician.
On the what-is-this-show-about side, I have my ongoing therapy sessions thinking through things and my day job with this this nonprofit called the Southeast Asian Diaspora Project, more commonly referred to as SEAD. Through that day job I get paid to ask the questions about diaspora that relate to my show. Why and what kind of relationship do we have to our “homelands?” And what relationship should we have to things like expressing ourselves and expressing how we feel about those homelands? And expressing things that have nothing to do with the goddamn homeland, and getting to explore those questions on a platform.
And then bringing that back into the show, I think it's been a slow process because I'm an omnivorous music listener, I listen to a lot of things. I'm trying to take in how to… not to just make it fit this one genre. Or, how do I allow my songs to be fun and not overly pedantic and ornamented. Punk music is often straightforward, but I also want to try some new things, so I'm listening to different music and trying to communicate this to my band. And because they're talented musicians, it’s been fun trying to figure out how to convey, “I want a strong build up here, I want y'all to thread together here, and give a fill here – do your own thing here,” allowing my musicians to bring in their own flavor, because I know despite whatever punk ideal musical expression I want for myself, I'm in collaboration with people and it's going to take different shapes as I bake this musical cake with other people. That’s also been part of the learning process – welcoming the alchemy that comes with working with other people, while still being firm in my vision. I make sure I don't half-ass it and say, “Oh, you do your own thing,” and compromise myself. That's an interesting communication dance, with musicians.
Right. It’s not approaching it as, “We're just going to make whatever we all make” – it’s not that type of looseness. But then it's also not the type of hyper fixation like, Kevin Parker with Tame Impala, or Michael Angelakos with Passion Pit, where they're producing everything down to the last detail and the live show is going to sound exactly like the record.
That's right. I don't think I could do that, because I'm not an expert at either of the other instruments.
How would you say you've grown?
So. God. Damn. Much. Absolutely just like hands down. It took a while because at the start of any residency, I kept thinking, “Oh, I'm here. Oh God, I'm here. I'm here? Am I really here? Am I doing this?? A lot of that just for the first two months.
Now, I know I am here. What does that mean? I’m confronted with questions that come with being here, as in I'm going to do a show and how do I challenge myself? I should feel that pressure for myself to “learn something, kid! Take emotional leaps of discomfort within yourself for what you think punk is or Vietnamese-ness is,” because you're not going to get this incubator in many other parts of my life. If I was in a band touring, there wouldn’t necessarily be this pressure to get bold, in that way.
It’s something that you can bring as an artist, for sure. But it wouldn't necessarily be external pressure of the venue wanting you to dig into this.
With the monetary support of the Jerome Foundation and the legacy of The Cedar Cultural, the Cedar Commissions – it’s like you are entering a lineage, of a program, that is about challenging yourself in a particular way with a built in DNA. That really clicked in the past few months – sadly, I wish I could have felt that pressure more firmly from the beginning of the residency, but here it is now and it's been working its magic. I’m writing things down in my notebook all the time, not treating it gingerly, not being overly precious, as we talked about between you and me – just trying to get out the music, as much as possible, being like, just eat, digest, and get it out. Just make it a routine.
Don’t stop the process. Don't get stuck.
That's right! Allow your body to flow. Just write it down and then move on from the lyrics. Move on from things. Don't get caught up in lyrics. Come back to them. Have music where you don't sing a damn thing. Maybe just say, “Windowsill!” And just let that hang in the air for a bit and feel that out. I've been trying to do a little bit more playing. Playing leads to whatever genius moments you have, so long as you're not needing everything to be unbreakable, unshatterable, unforgettable. Things should be able to be broken; you're able to make things that can be forgotten.
I’ve been going to Northeast a lot to Toby's house every one to two weeks to jam with him and Oscar, making some demos, listening to those demos again, feeling pumped by them, and then feeling like I'm probably not going to use all of these. But the spirit behind it, is going to be that I am challenging myself, and to make the audience really be in a relationship with me in a way that flips the script.
Because the thing that I would hate the most is for me to feel like some kind of NPR headline where it's like, all the meta tags, right? “Vietnamese. Punk. Minnesota,” like all those little things that’'ll catch the eyes of certain hipsters and alternative people who will feel, “Oh, wow, this is such like a trendy interesting thing.” That would be something I would hate. How I evolve is about being personal and not becoming some weird, alternative, cultural commodity.
What are you looking forward to sharing with the audience?
Whoooo! I'm excited to get into the pit! If that's okay. I don't know how much I can arrange the area for me being on the ground, with a wireless mic or something. Sometimes I'm on stage – I know there can't be any stage diving, there aren't enough people game for that. I'm going to be channeling my frenetic energy. I'm going to put all my stamina into those 30-40 minutes jumping around, but there will be those soft, extended moments where I'm very, not quite sober, but pensive? Using space and silence more. That's something I do want to use in a punk way.
Punk is really loud and abrasive, and adolescent. A quietness, there's a maturity to that. What is mature punk? What does a mature punk do? And, you know, there are like old heads. There are punks from the eighties. Who are like, what? Forty, fifty? But I think the maturity that I'm speaking to is one of seeing punk from the outside in, of feeling like, “I can't be a part of this lineage of a white-guy-who-can-see-myself-in-The-Clash or other punk bands.” However, there is a maturity that comes with being able to explore as an “outsider.” My punk, my fury, and my agitation comes from being an outsider to the outsider group. And there's an opportunity for me to convey that rage, frustration, and sadness in a way that's more interior? More quiet, with more textures – I want to be understood. There will be the quiet punk stuff. But I will be understood when I speak to these grievances and these frustrations that are full of both rage and mature thoughtfulness. I will make sure I’m laser focused on the things I'm commenting on. So the punk energy will be principled, and still about commenting on the things I feel have kept me outside of this bubble of punk. It's not the bubble of embodiment of being American or Vietnamese or whatever. The rage will be matured.
I did want to ask, just to complicate or just to differentiate. There’s mainstream punk – it feels weird to say that– I guess what people associate punk with, which is so many white dude bands, as we’ve talked about. Or white people bands in general; when some people think of pop punk, they'll think of Paramore, you know? Who are an amazing band. But there is also that legacy of B.I.P.O.C. punks – and what ways does that show up for you? What ways are you thinking about that as part of continuing on that lineage?
TV: I appreciate that question; it’s a big one for me. I'll try to keep it brief here – as a Vietnamese person, I don't come from the legacy of punk as a blues-oriented, blues-informed genre. Punk came from rock, which came from the blues, which is very Black in its origin, but also Hispanic or Latino, Indigenous, mixed with musical expression of descendants of African slaves. Down the historical line, punk turned into being a very Western hemisphere, anglo-spheric lineage. Whereas for me, as a Vietnamese person who's full of rage – what am I to play punk music? What must I honor out of that and what can I honor about myself in participating in that? As a person who is deeply immersed in the politics of punk and the horror of American colonial capitalist systems. I feel I add another layer of being an outsider to the outsider. I am observing from the outside in all these ways being, but I'm not trying to romanticize it. I really want to avoid being all like, “Oh, all the intersections I have.” No; I just want to be Tri, man! And Tri wants to make some fun, bouncy, but also other kinds of music around this genre that he likes. So, yeah, that's what I'm contributing to the legacy of B.I.P.O.C. punk.
What else would you want audiences to know before your show?
I would invite people to ask themselves what their relationship is to messiness? Their relationship to clutter, to uncertainty, to risk. Because, for Asians, especially for refugee displaced peoples, there was nothing but uncertainty in poverty, and that varied between different kinds of refugees of displaced groups, and the trajectory that they went on after. There is a kind of risk built in and struggle and plight. How do we respond to that generationally? Maybe my message to Southeast Asians of legacies of displacement is that you deserve to be messy. You deserve to say your shit. If you're angry, if you're surprised – there are a lot more complicated emotions that you are feeling, and I really invite you to sit down to feel them, and find ways to express those things, because you deserve to express those things, no matter how much you've been socialized to focus on things like being of productive value to somebody else, whether your family, your boss, your company, or whatever part of imperialist society you’re demanded to be in. That’s my invitation to people who quote-unquote “look like me.” Those who have systemically struggled through being displaced.
Especially as we see displacement continuing to be executed in brutal ways on our screens today, what is our relationship to expressing our feelings around displacement and disrupting systems that are incentivized to continue displacement for the sake of the interests of certain people. And then how do we express the feelings and things about our own personal life, besides that? We deserve to be human beings outside of our commentary about things. Outside of the struggles that are imposed on us. So that's my invitation for people to explore both sides of that.
We're watching the thick of displacement happen from afar, I'll say that. The genocide of Palestinians under the the Netanyahu and Biden administrations. I think about whatshisface, Henry Kissinger – I think about all these freakish, statesmen, who can make such sweeping decisions for a whole country of people. Then I wonder what allowed them to take that kind of power? And to be unaccountable once they reach that position, in these systems. That’s something that I think about, with displacement. So many people's lives are ruined by the disputes of powerful men, and the systems that we’re all in.
Catch Tri Vo’s performance of “My Own Worst Frenemy: A Gook Punk Puts His Feelings First” premiering live at The Cedar on Saturday, February 10th as part of the Thirteenth Annual Cedar Commissions.
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The Cedar Commissions is made possible in part by a grant from the Jerome Foundation.
