The Body That Listens
Noise is the sticky buzz to which most images of my childhood cling. I’ll walk past a pair of gossiping Viet aunties, and suddenly I’m in the kitchen with my Ma Hai and mum. They’re arguing over the latest family drama—faces contorted in melodramatic animation like in a telenovela. I stand quietly in the kitchen, placing each hand-wrapped spring roll into hot spitting oil which puckers its skin before removing it once the colour is golden brown. Or I’ll hear the heartfelt wail of one of Khanh Ly’s ballads and feel the cool night breeze of the tropics dry the sweat on the backs of my knees. The night of my cousin’s wedding, my family rented a karaoke machine, sitting it out the front of their house with the footpath as a makeshift stage. Relatives who fancied themselves crooners or divas stepped up to the microphone and had their drunken moment. I laid wide awake and sweaty in my bed upstairs, their warbled voices drifting skywards with the breeze.
‘Earworms’, ‘headaches’, ‘parasites’: noise is often characterised as an offensive and corrosive force. Noise is the nemesis of silence—the annoying myna bird breaking the quiet morning air. It’s almost always loud, something that ‘pollutes’ the domestic and the private spheres. Noise pollution is a hotly contested issue in highly populated cities such as Sydney. Residents bemoan the sonic stench of clanging construction work, or the boozy blare of bars and live music venues. Noise, as sound theorist Marie Thompson argues in Productive Parasites: Thinking of Noise as Affect, is often placed in moral opposition to silence. This division represents ‘a dichotomy between the past and present, natural and cultural, relaxing and disturbing, and fundamentally, good and bad’.
At its utmost extreme, noise is a literal weapon. In war zones, sonic boom air raids are used by military operations to enact mass destruction without ammunition. Flying at mind-bending speeds (almost one-and-a-half times faster than the speed of sound), fighter planes dip so close to the ground that they break the sound barrier, delivering a deafening boom. Over the course of just five days in September 2005, the Israeli Air Force dropped twenty-nine sonic bombs on Palestinian civilians. Nosebleeds, infertility, hypertension, insomnia and fatigue are just a few of the ills caused by these invisible blasts.
But noise doesn’t always need to be thought of as destructive. Thinking of noise as affect, Thompson argues it can be seen as ‘a verb rather than a noun’. Detaching from human-imposed moral judgements which brand noise as either good or bad, Thompson suggests seeing noise as a ‘process of interruption that induces a change.’ Like my gossiping mother and aunty, noise spawns affect, causing memories to stir deep within my gut. No doubt, noise can be a headache, or even a weapon. But it can also be refracted—turned back on its head and used as a tool of resistance.
Mum loves to talk. In the same way certain albums become embedded in memory, Vietnamese is the baseline for much of what I remember from childhood. Mostly, she talks over the phone, but when she’s with friends in real life, they lean in close and hold hands like co-conspirators. This closeness was always baffling to me—they would speak loudly anyway, thus breaking any seal of secrecy created by their caving bodies. Now, I suspect this physical proximity to be less about privacy and more about a pressing need to communicate outside the bounds of language—to push past the epidermal and towards the molecular. Mum and her sister (or friend, or brother, or cousin), talk simultaneously, somehow absorbing what the other says whilst spouting their own hurried words: a conversational kind of circular breathing.
“Language as sign system may well belong to the mind, but language as pure sound belongs to the body.”
The body remembers. Steeped in a brew of gossip and chatter, my body swells larger with each syllable. Sound pierces skin and moves into the gut—embodied affect passed down from generation to generation. I still struggle sometimes to sleep without background noise. As an anxious child with insomniac tendencies, I found great comfort in being lulled asleep by my mother’s voice. Lying awake at night, the animated syllables of her telephone chatter kept me tethered to reality. Terrified of the dark, of the collapse of our fifty-storey apartment block, or a greedy building fire, hearing her often felt like the only thing stopping me from being swallowed whole by the night.
Today, a staccato Saù (six: my mother’s nickname, as the sixth-born child) feels like a pang, a sonic tie to my mother pulled taut no matter how far away I am from her. Language as sign system may well belong to the mind, but language as pure sound belongs to the body. It burrows under the skin, seeding amongst sinew, fat and muscle; sine waves converted into affect by way of the flesh. ‘Touch is less literal than we might assume,’ writes Natasha Young in Real Life Mag, ‘and personal contact not always a matter of physical contact.’ Touch, in this sense, can be more than the literal embodiment of skin-on-skin contact. A voice message from a long-distance partner can feel more like touch than the cold handshake of a co-worker, an ache behind the eyes after hours of texting producing an affective ache for a beloved who’s oceans away. The nasal upward tone of Saù, which I heard thousands of times as a child, always meant Mum was nearby, or about to be. Every time I hear the word now, I feel her arrival as a pang of expectation within my body.
Talk is the primary medium of kinship in Vietnamese culture. Gossip, chatter and chit-chat: talk is sonic padding for the humdrum of daily life. Last year, I returned to Vietnam with my little cousin. Puttering at a standstill in road intersections, pairs or trios of motorcyclists would shout across the abyss of petrol fumes and crowded lanes. In Hoi An, we’d get up early every morning and cycle to a street vendor selling chè mè đen, sweet black sesame soup. The lady who ran the stall would only be there between six to eleven am, during which she’d exclusively brew and sell the soup. We’d order a steaming hot bowl or two, crouching beside her on tiny plastic stools. Two of her best friends were there every day, not as workers, but simply as company. Unlike Australia, behaviour like this in Vietnam isn’t considered to be unprofessional or poor customer service, as the boundaries between work and play are less defined.
It can be quite tempting as an outsider to romanticise this provincial day-to-day, snuffing out a far more complex reality. Yes, I’m Vietnamese and often dismissed as ‘other’ or Asian by peers, but I’m also white and Australian. This racial ambiguity grants me certain privileges others don’t have. In writing this, I can only really speak to my own experiences, where language and sound have been key to my evolving understanding of being mixed. Moving away from these fantastical narratives, it’s important to see that daily life is still entangled within broader matrices of power. In Vietnam, the spaces in which talk is and isn’t permissible are still sharply delineated according to gender. Coffee shops exist largely as the domain of men, while the private and domestic spheres are primarily the reserve for women.
It’s this omnipresence of talk—of noise—that has influenced how public space is occupied in Vietnam, especially in its cities. In her book Sidewalk City, Annette Miae Kim argues that in Ho Chi Minh City, sidewalks are essential to the construction of a Vietnamese public. In Western traditions, public space is modelled after the Ancient Greek agora: forums, plazas, parks and town squares. But these conceptions might not be fitting when it comes to examining land use outside of the West. In Vietnam, Miae Kim points out, ‘the home is not the ultimate private sphere when the state owns all land and government policies extend into family planning practices and the household division of labour.’ Footpaths in Vietnam are the stuff of daily life—its substance rather than its in-between. Sidewalks may be designed as passageways but are more often used as endpoints in and of themselves. Coffee shops hoard precious footpath real estate with their tiny plastic stools. Unaccustomed to these clustered footpaths, I’d stumble over chairs or run into huddles of old ladies knitting together. These are places to gather, to kill time, to talk and be joyful. Design, we can see, is not always congruent with use. Designed by the French, Ho Chi Minh’s footpaths may have been imagined as arterial channels, but its people have found their own ways to work space. Civic space, then, is less a prescribed physicality, and more an invention, made real by the bodies that occupy it.
Within this kind of civic architecture, talk is native. Bring this into an Australian public, and it’s foreign. Following the 1975 communist victory, Vietnamese in the hundreds of thousands sought refuge in Australia. Prior to 1975, fewer than 2,000 Vietnamese people lived in Australia. Suddenly, they seemed to be everywhere. Hypervisible, their Vietnameseness was cast in stark relief against the sheer whiteness of 1970s Australia. Noise produced by these incoming foreigners was suddenly parasitic—an infection gnawing on the delicate tissue of white Australia. Congregating in the suburbs, speaking their own languages, eating their own foods, non-English speakers became branded with accusations of failing to assimilate. Their foreign chatter made audible the fear that Australia was in danger of ‘being swamped by Asians’, as Senator Pauline Hanson infamously said in her 1996 maiden speech to parliament.
Thirteen years after the speech, and I’m twelve years old on the T2 train out to Cabramatta with my mum and uncle. They’re chattering between themselves in Vietnamese. I’m only half listening—their chatter is a melodious slurry of tones I struggle to keep up with. I’m the only one who seems to notice the withering looks directed towards them. Passing Newtown station, an older lady looks our way and hisses as if to shush them. Another white lady gets up abruptly, pushing her young son on to the next carriage. She audibly sighs as she breezes past us. Unlike the streets of Saigon, this chatter is incongruous with the fabric of Australian public space. As Ross Gay writes in The Paris Review:
The shushing, perhaps, reminds how threatening to the order our bodies are in nonproductive, nonconsumptive delight. The moment of laughter not only makes consumption impossible (you might choke), but if the laugh is hard enough, if the shit talk is just right, food or drink might fly from your mouth, if not—and this hurts—your nose. And if your body is supposed to be one of the consumables, if it has been, if it is, one of the consumables around which so many ideas of production and consumption have been structured in this country, well, there you go.
Gossiping away, they are suspended in this ‘moment of unproductive delight.’ Fuck you, their gleeful chatter seems to suggest. Shushing, tutting, the pursing of lips: those who scold them snitches in plain clothing.
My mother’s obliviousness to the urgent rush of bodies in public spaces, particularly footpaths, is an irritating character quirk. But it is also indicative of the discord between how public spaces are designed and how bodies move within them. Loitering, fucking off, killing time—Australian cities by design discourage a use of public space that is not generative of anything beyond pure pleasure. From inception, urban design in Australian cities was a means for the colonial government to assert dominance and suppress rebellion. Parks and open spaces were cordoned off by large wrought iron fences, the remnants of which remain today in the form of bluestone footings. Piazzas or town squares were deliberately left out (after all, you need a place to gather if you’re going to have a mass uprising). Today, a few have been clumsily added. Others, like Federation Square in Melbourne, are considered public squares but really just serve as conduits for commercial or cultural activity. Superimposed over a public order designed to discourage contestation and negotiation, these are delayed attempts at creating an Australian public, loitering being an alien concept for many Australians. Like the unruly whoosh of a skateboard hurtling through the CBD, Mum’s conversations introduce chaos into the civic order—her version of skate and destroy.
So what becomes of this talk culture? Mum’s incessant chatter, so unwelcome in a hostile colonial Australian order, hasn’t simply disappeared. Rather, it’s morphed, finding itself a new home in the digital world.
“Like the unruly whoosh of a skateboard hurtling through the CBD, Mum’s conversations introduce chaos into the civic order—her version of skate and destroy.”