“The stories that are spun out, in the to-be-taken-in narrative, usually you find out they’re not true. We latch on. We don’t see anything else — and there’s much else to see.” ~ Lady Borton

I was 8 years old in 1969 when my aunt, Lady Borton, volunteered to do relief work with the American Friends Service Committee in Viêt Nam.

Lady has spent many years since living and working in Hanoi, continuing to collect stories and history — trying to make sense of the era, the place, the people — before the stories are lost to time or erasure.

She wrote me, “Because I don’t know and don’t assume I know, I ask odd questions.”

I wanted to lean into this wonderful “Not Knowing” strategy of hers, a curiosity practice, to be sure!

We talked about challenging shared family and cultural narratives, pronouns and 20 Questions in a cultural context, a photographer’s way of seeing, not asking as a diplomatic strategy, seeing source documents with fresh eyes, the importance of collecting stories before they are gone — and the surprising advantages of being the circus come to town.

“This is nature of interviews: if you’re collecting stories, you go back. You go back because people retell them and other pieces come in place.”

Listen to Ep. 322: Not Knowing, with Lady Borton

Lady Borton’s 1984 book Sensing the Enemy: An American Woman Among the Boat People of Vietnam chronicles that exodus and her role as health administrator on Pulau Bidong, the largest refugee camp in Malaysia for Vietnamese Boat People. In 1996 she published After Sorrow: An American Among the Vietnamese. Sensing the Enemy is about people who left Vietnam; After Sorrow shares the stories of those who stayed. Lady has written extensively about women in Viêt Nam, and compiled The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present, the only bilingual anthology of Vietnamese women’s poetry, ancient to modern times. She is at work on another book.

This March, in honor of International Women’s Day, I asked Lady to share some of her experiences and insights for a special day of programming at KPFA. Listen here.

If you enjoyed this knowing and not knowing conversation, try these C2BC Classics: Curiosity & the Gift of Uncertainty, with Maggie Jackson; Curiosity & Wisdom, with Igor Grossmann; Curious About Our Roots, with Wilma Jones; Oral History, with Valeria Gelman and A Double Take on Lynching, with Susan Strasser & Marcia E. Cole.

Lady is pictured with her long-time colleague and friend Le Hoai Phuong.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Lakeside Path” by Duck Lake, via Blue Dot Sessions.

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