“Becoming Ghost” with Cathy Linh Che
Book cover of Becoming Ghost (2025) by Cathy Linh Che. Courtesy of Simon & Schuster and the author.
In her upcoming poetry collection Becoming Ghost, Cathy Linh Che speaks to the dead. Inspired by her parents’ experience as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 war epic Apocalypse Now, the award-winning Vietnamese American poet grapples with the public memory and mythology of the Vietnam War and how her family were placed in the margins of their own narratives.
Becoming Ghost is the culmination of years of Che’s research on the making of the critically acclaimed film in addition to her reflections on her parents’ oral storytelling of their experience as refugees and film subjects. Becoming Ghost also accompanies a short film, We Were the Scenery (2025), where Che, producer and writer, spotlights her parents as refugees-then-extras in Apocalypse Now. Becoming Ghost offers Che’s more personal reflections on her parents’ experience, including the unfinished emotional processing of neglect and disownment that still lingers today.
Che spoke with IMPULSE to discuss her new collection, as well as American myths, culture making, and deciding which art form is honest to the narrative that surrounds the Vietnam War.
Lisa Kwon: What does filmmaking offer you that poetry doesn’t?
Cathy Linh Che: In the film We Were the Scenery, my parents speak Vietnamese, and it is their direct transcript and direct testimony that drives the entirety of the film. Filmmaking allows me to step out of the way of my parents’ stories. I am not a poetic translator—I am more fully a listener in film than I am in my own poetry.
LK: What does it mean to put your parents and your ancestors at the forefront of their own story?
CLC: The specific stories I was asking my parents to tell to the camera were stories I’ve heard my whole life. They were very familiar to me, but it allowed me to focus more on the ways that they speak about each other and with each other in order to tell a story together. It was a beautiful honor, because my understanding of my parents grew from this—it became clear how much they love each other and that they know each other so well.
I saw the act of communal storytelling as a way of watching their love unfold. My parents came to this country when they were adults and already married, and sometimes within the Vietnamese or Asian diaspora, we often see our parents’ ways of showing affection to each other as being lacking or deficient compared to Western or US contemporary ways of showing affection: hugs, kisses, public displays of affection. Growing up, I noted that they didn’t do PDA, but in the film, when looking through the lens of how they talk about one another or to one another or with one another, it was very clear that there is a whole lifetime of respect, care, joy, and love.
LK: How do you make sure you treat them respectfully as main characters while also staying true to how painful it might have been to unpack familial wounds or your own personal grieving?
CLC: I really didn’t want the film to be about me and my relationship to my parents. The film offers a narrative that is not centered on my own familial wounds. The book is really centered on that and on what it means to tell my family’s story when my father is no longer speaking to me. That event of being disowned and being told “you’re no longer my daughter” was extremely painful. Poetry offered a space to work that out on the page and think about ways to honor my own voice, but also to honor my father’s experience, my mother’s experience, and my grandmother’s experience.
The attempt at reconciling could not happen in real life, so it had to happen on the page. Because it's not a full reconciliation; it’s like there’s a mathematical limit that you're always getting closer toward but never achieve. In the book, it is that attempt that really moves me and matters. My story and my pain can exist alongside what my father must have felt to to look at me and feel betrayed.
LK: What does your family think about your practice today?
CLC: I don’t think that they have any particular thoughts about my practice. My mother knows that I am a writer and we have a good open relationship, so we chat about it.
My dad understands what he can of my poetry. There’s a poem in the book that reflects back his understanding of my way of writing. He once told me, “you have this poetic way of putting things, but that’s not real. To you, a bomb is a metaphor, but that’s not a metaphor. That’s something real.” I put that in there because I felt the sting of that critique, but also the undeniable truth of that critique from his vantage point.
I think that they understand my writing from the places where they are, so there are moments when I move toward showing them my work or reading out loud to them, but I don’t feel extremely comfortable just constantly trying to bridge that gap. I feel we have a way of family life that I'm accustomed to, and that’s what I kind of step into. Anytime I go home, I step into the world that they have built. I am not sure what they would do with my book; it was built out of love for my family and love for myself, but I didn't write it with them in mind as my direct audience because they know these stories and the feelings that I have about them. There’s not a lot of space for us to broach, unfortunately. So there’s a lot of space of silence within my household about our conflicts.
Cathy Linh Che. Photograph by Jess X. Snow, courtesy of the author.
LK: What were some feelings that arose about the way America creates myths or shapes the public memory of the war as you researched the making of Apocalypse Now?
CLC: On a basic level, I was angry and offended to see the screenplay say things like “PRIMEVAL SWAMP—this could be the jungle of a million years ago” to describe a place in the 1960s. That sounds completely outrageous—this idea that any place is so timeless or backwards in history revealed an imagination that felt impoverished. It indicated this idea that the people are backwards because they’re in a jungle. It creates this prop of a country and facile, foreign people, rather than ones with their own history, needs, desires, humors, humanity, and fullness. There was a distinct feeling of anger and exploitation that arose [in me].
At the same time, my parents don’t feel like they were exploited—they feel very practical about it all. Their mentality reflects my broader understanding of myth-making: it continues to flatten people and justify war—even in Apocalypse Now, which was meant to be a critique of war and what it does to people. As I am angry at this, I’m also taking a lot of space in the manuscript to think about my compromised intermediary role, the power that I have in it, and my complicity. The poetry book stays in a space of questioning my role in doing this interpretation work of recasting and reliving my family’s stories as a tableau for people to consume and learn more about Vietnamese people. The book raises questions about that, which are not necessarily fully resolved.
LK: Who is more responsible in this American myth-making: the actor or the director? Who do you think constructs our memories of the Vietnam War?
CLC: With Apocalypse Now in particular, it was co-written by Francis Ford Coppola, who had a strong hand in making the film—from the imagery and casting to the financing and ownership. Also, because it was this living process where the script was being rewritten as it was being shot, the people who were living the experience had this desire to add scenes. So I think that it is primarily the writer and director of the film [that makes the memories], but the characters and actors also have a way of contributing to what that story is. Part of the essential thesis of my book and the film is to reverse who is doing the writing, who is doing the storytelling, and who is being centered.
In my case, it is a question of power and agency around recreating the stories that my parents have told me over and over again, but I'm translating it into English to present it to a broader audience as a way of adding to or intervening in the memory of Vietnam and the war. Apocalypse Now, which is such a huge film in terms of the public memory of the Vietnam War, has another set of voices, which are Vietnamese people themselves. My hope is that my parents have something to offer that is very intimate, familial, and funny, and it might be even surprising. It is also technically newer—there’s some new information for me and for others in there.
LK: As you continue to write, do you feel some larger responsibility to reverse the American-centric archive of the war?
CLC: My interest is in restoring the Vietnamese voices. My interest is in doing anti-erasure work. But my interest is also in critique. I think about what it means to be a literary writer first, inheriting a tradition of anti-communist, post-Cold War writers’ workshops shaped by the CIA which have proliferated across the country. The mode that I was taught was specifically geared toward making sure that we value craft over political message, to devalue political writing as raw and uncrafted, and to situate the greatest dramatic thrust within the individual or even in the individual family. I don’t have these critiques on the surface of the book or the film, but it's something I think about.
If we write in America as people born in America, there is a tradition of portraying the empire as a means of soft power and elevating the individual over the communal. That is something that I still haven’t worked through; I’m currently thinking about it as I’m writing the poems that follow this collection. There are nascent thoughts around what it means to actually do revolutionary work, especially in light of the ongoing US-funded Israeli-led genocide in Palestine.
LK: What continues to drive you to write poems?
CLC: I’m primarily a poet at heart, even when I’m working on a film or a children's book. My primary orientation is toward poetry—it always seems like the clearest language I could encounter. It gave language to my feelings in a way that penetrated more deeply than prose, fiction, or essay did.
June Jordan’s definition of poetry is having the greatest impact with the least number of words. That type of compression and concision felt like something that I just gravitated toward naturally. Now, as a writer, I feel that poetry allows me a portal into my intuitive self. Part of this book is me talking to the dead, talking through voices that are no longer alive. More recently, I said that it can feel like a seance. It’s drawing energy from something outside of myself in order to put something down on the page, or to express something that is bigger than myself, or hidden from myself, or otherworldly.
I think that poetry is the place where I best wrestle with larger questions about anger, empire, revolution, and love. It’s a place that, more so than other art forms, really allows me the swift switch between one feeling to another, or simultaneous realities, or time. It moves very quickly because of that compression. That sense of movement helps me to feel the presence of the past, future, and present all commingling, as well as the presence of our mundane existence side by side with great violence, beauty, and destruction. It mimics my experience of being a person more powerfully than in other art forms.
Becoming Ghost by Cathy Linh Che will be released on April 29, 2025.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Edited by Jubilee Park
