Writer and actress Nhung Dam exchanged Groningen for Amsterdam and has a new novel: ‘I am my own starting point’ | Interview

Nhung Dam wrote the novel Definition of love especially in the night hours, because during the day she lived her other dream as an actress: in the television series Thirties on stage in her solo 3 Million footsteps to Sicily in the relationship drama Love lesson which she wrote together with director Koos Terpstra, and in The Banana Generation of Theater Group Oostpool.

She does indeed do quite a lot, that Nhung Dam (Groningen, 1984), but that is the nature of this beast. That nature also brings risks. “Yes, because after my first book, Thousand Fathers , I got burned out. I ignore that I’m tired, prefer to always put my shoulders under it and then continue. That is dangerous, I now also know, but something in me wants to get the most out of life. When I sit on the couch all evening, it feels to me as if a day has passed without me doing anything.”

‘You don’t just write in between’

It took all in all four years for that new novel to be published. “I simply also have to earn money, but writing is of course not something you just do in between. Although I must admit that I slept very little in the last phase of writing. I was working hardcore, because the book had to be finished and so was I The Banana Generation played, I set the alarm for five in the morning so I could start writing until I had to get on a train to travel to a theater. In the bus back after the performance I would write again and then I would continue at home. My boyfriend even started to worry, because I worked about eighty hours a week.”

She is still standing, because Dam is a driven personality who gets plenty of energy from everything she does. You can also read back everything she does and what concerns her Definition of love . It is not a book by Nhung about Nhung, but anyone who reads it can hardly escape the impression that the story has common ground with this inspired woman. “I am my own starting point and it is the look with which I look at the world and in it the stories tumble over each other. I never had the ambition to write an autobiography, because I want to make art and I do that with elements that occupy me.”

Intensely palpable

Such as her Vietnamese roots, the prevailing power structures in the theatre, discrimination, but also love and her relationship to motherhood. Everything a person can struggle with, Dam has designed in Definition of love . That makes it read like a human life, in which every reader will be able to identify. Even if the subject is further away from her, because Nhung Dam has the gift of expressing her stories in words that are intensely empathetic. “Maybe that’s because I really had to find my own way to find out who I am and where I come from. For this book I was able – thanks to a grant I received – to do research in New Orleans, where there is a fairly large Vietnamese community that, like my parents, fled the Vietnam War. I wanted to find out whether the way I grew up is a unique story or whether it has to do with that war generation. My parents have always made it clear to me that we are guests here in the Netherlands. They always behave that way and do not speak out.”

‘My father is a smart man’

“My father has achieved success with his spring roll stand in Groningen. But as a child it hurt me when the customers acted like my father was stupid. For example, by talking very loudly and slowly when they ordered something, while my father is a smart man. That spring roll stand may not have been his dream at all, as I dreamed of becoming an actress and writer, because as a boat refugee he was busy surviving here in the Netherlands and wanting to make everything better for us, for his children.”

As a child, Dam always had the feeling that she had to walk a step faster than someone else. “I really also focused on Dutch, because my mother – who still has difficulties with the Dutch language – knew that if you do not master the language well, you will not be taken seriously. But I also learned from home that you have to work hard and go to the seam, while it is actually very good if you fail once in a while.”

Protective culture

It also took a long time before she dared to speak up and stand up for herself. “I had left everything in Groningen to become a writer and actress in Amsterdam. Came to Amsterdam in a rawness where I felt very lonely. Coming from such a protective culture, it is also difficult to determine where your limits lie in situations where you have to deal with power structures and discrimination. There is a change going on now, but when I was at the Theater School the hierarchies were very old-fashioned. For example, you learned that you should be happy if you find work in the theater and that it is part of it if you have to cross your own boundaries. You weren’t asked if you were okay with a scene either. If you had to kiss, you did. It is very good that intimacy coaches are now being used, because then there is room for safety and trust and you do not have to cross a border.”

‘Sociability discrimination’

And then the discrimination. “I call it sociability discrimination. At a party I was put with another Vietnamese woman and told: ‘talk to her, because she is also Vietnamese’. How so? Or a comment like ‘you always cook so well’. I feel strange about that, because you are classified under a group. Growing up, I saw very few people on television or in books that represented me. While it’s so important for kids to hear voices they can relate to, to have role models. It felt like I had to fight an entire system on my own.”

But Definition of love is about so much more, because how do you relate to friendships and where are your boundaries? “We never had visitors at home and no friends came over. I have not had an example of how you do that with friendship: how do you ask for help in difficult times, and how do you offer your friendship when the other person is in mourning, for example. In the past was Friends my favorite series, because I also thought it would be so much fun to do all sorts of things together with such a whole group of friends. In fact, just like in Thirties but in reality I am more into the one-on-one friendships and I don’t like large groups around me at all.”

Adjust dreams

Dreaming and constantly adjusting dreams, that is also the life she writes about. “I have been in a relationship for a long time and had a very traditional image of it. I would go through all the steps from getting married to having kids. And then suddenly you’re installing a dating app with bruised dreams. The whole story of getting married and having children is not obvious at all and I had to adjust that too. I now have a boyfriend again and about motherhood I now think: it will come as it comes.”

Except for that dream of becoming an actress and writer. “I keep diaries all my life and at the age of eleven I already wrote that I would later write a book and I also had a whole step-by-step plan for that.”

That step-by-step plan has now brought her to where she is now, because she no longer has to walk on her toes to ‘belong’. She has left that time behind, although her roots are deeply rooted in her. “With every step you take you feel the frying fat dripping off you. I can be hard on myself, but there is also a mild side to Nhung now and I can even give myself a pat on the back every now and then. You have to, otherwise you won’t make it.”