Hi there! My name is Steven Duong, I’m from San Diego,
California, and I’m a volunteer here at the Maru Research Center. I’m a recent graduate
of Grinnell College (English and American Studies) and I’ve been in Kande for about
a month so far, helping with the Maru’s monitoring projects on the lake and the
nearby fishing village, as well conducting part of my own year-long project as
a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. This writing project, titled “Freshwater Fish and
the Poetry of Containment,” will take me to four different countries, Malawi
included, that happen to be the countries of origin of four freshwater aquarium
fish I kept in my fish tank growing up. I am working on both fiction and poetry
manuscripts that explore the idea of containment and movement across borders,
in every sense of those words, using the fish tank and its four glass walls as
a sort of working metaphor. Maybe a bit head-in-the-clouds in a pretentious
literary way, sure, but the project and its framework have given me a unique way
to understand the people and places I’ve met so far in context with my own
life.
The funny thing is, though I have no
background in the sciences, I’ve found that so many other aspects of my
learning and my experiences and identities have helped me here. As Justin likes
to say, 50% of the Maru’s mission is about the science—conservation, research,
understanding the living things swimming around in the water—and half is about
the place—Kande, its people, its food, its values, its languages, its cultural
imaginations. You can apply the scientific methodologies learned here anywhere,
but it’s being here that makes the experience unique. And that’s what
I’ve found.
Most of my interactions begins with me
greeting people enthusiastically in their own language, and then going on to
explain the actual details of my work here, both with the Maru and with my
writing. I’ve made genuine connections with such curious and interesting and
wonderful people. I went to Chintheche with Alfred, a young man I met at the
fishing village who is attending college at Livingstonia University—we bonded
over our very different but also surprisingly similar college experiences, and
he invited me to a service at his church, where I was introduced to the whole
community there. I met Chudi, a beach vendor and aspiring mechanic, and helped
him load firewood onto his friend’s massive truck to bring it back home to cook
dinner for his family. Just yesterday, I ran into Ruben and some older men from
the village at the local bar, and had a fascinating conversation about family
values and religion and English literature in Malawi.
Perhaps most significantly, im Mzuzu, I had
some of my preconceived notions tested in an interaction with some men on the
street. While I was walking toward a shop, three auto-parts shop owners
drinking on the side of the road yelled “ni hao” and “China” at me, having
decided I was Chinese. I stopped and greeted them, clarifying that I was actually
learning Chitonga. Then, I gave them a smiley “mwatandala uli.” They were
enthusiastic to hear I was taking the effort to pick up one of the local
languages, though they were Tombuka, and we ended up sitting together there and
talking for more than an hour about language and culture in Malawi. I told them
that I was actually an American, and my parents were Vietnamese, and that while
I know they meant no harm, it gets a little jarring to hear people yell at you randomly
in Chinese when you don’t speak it. I told them that if they had come to
America and I saw them and greeted them in Swahili just because they looked
African to me, they might not have taken it well. The guys totally understood
where I was coming from, offered me some of their brandy as a peace offering,
and we hung out all afternoon. I ended up learning so much about the lives of
these guys, Sam and Joseph and Duncan. They told me I had to include them in my
book and send it to them if I ever got it published. We’ll see if that happens.
Ultimately, I’ve come to learn, over the past
few weeks, that the identities and experiences that define me—my race, my
ethnicity, my social status, my upbringing in the states, my college
education—both contain me and free me. The way I appear and the fact that I
studied English and not biology, for example, have limited me in some ways. My
appearance restricts the way many Malawians view me to an initial stereotype,
and my lack of a science background makes it harder to pick up certain concepts
and methodologies necessary to do work at the Maru. However, if I had a
different set of identities, if I wasn’t a special kind of umusungu, if I
didn’t get ni-hao’d randomly on the street, I wouldn’t be challenged to the
point where I put myself into situations where I was able to come to a greater
understanding of the people around me. If I was already well-versed in
scientific fieldwork, I wouldn’t have put the extra effort into the learning
I’m doing here, and I wouldn’t have stepped out of my comfort zone enough to
grow as a student and a writer.
Walls can keep us trapped, but they also
encourage us to improvise, to make do, to bend the rules as far as we can. This
is what the stanza structure of a sonnet does, or the walls of a fish tank, or
the shores of a lake, or the borders of a nation, or the barriers of a language.
If you have a handful of Chitonga phrases and your friend has a limited English
vocabulary, you work around it, using hand signals, comparisons, and other
workarounds. If the mbuna rockfish of Lake Malawi weren’t isolated to their
underwater rock patches, which they seldom stray from, the lake would not be
nearly as biodiverse, and Kande Island wouldn’t have its own endemic species,
the Pseudotropheus elongatus variety I love and look out for every time I dive.
If Shakespeare said “screw the sonnet” and decided to write thousand line poems
without any rhyme or meter or structure, they probably would have been
interesting, but they also probably would have sucked.
To cut a long-winded blog post slightly
shorter, let me say this. Though the cichlids of Lake Malawi are endlessly
fascinating to me, as an aquarist and a writer and a lover of wildlife, it is the
people I meet that I am learning the most from. The relationships I am building
with people demonstrate and model and reinvent the ideas I want to write about
more so than anything else. Maybe this is a little anthropocentric but the
stories of these fish matter to me because they are tied to the stories of
people. This is what metaphor is—taking two very different things and bringing
them together, forcing them to have conversation with one another until they
are one, synonymous and inseparable. I know I’m maybe an unconventional intern
for a science research center like this, but I really do see both science and
art as tools for building bridges and making connections, and I hope to
continue that work for the next month I’m here in Kande. If you’re interested
in reading my writing or following my project more closely, here’s my website:
stevenduongwrites.com.
A word from our new volunteer Steven!
