“Punk American, H*ck Yeah!!”

Tri Vo

Eagan, Minnesota | Vietnamese | She/Her/Hers & He/Him/His

Billie Joe Armstrong is a musician who clocks in at 5’ 7” tall. He is recognizable for wearing a tousled mop for his dusty black hair — lazily stretching out from Armstrong’s head as though it were a small sun — coated by set in layers of soft black onyx. Tri Minh Vo, the person writing this piece, is also 5’ 7” with hair set by the glaze of black onyx.

Armstrong played a key role in ushering me as a Vietnamese 1.5 generation immigrant into the American life through one of America’s more notorious subcultures: punk — or punk rock music. Like black onyx, a stone said to transform negative energy and prevent the drain of internal energy, punk wasn’t merely a form of expression through sound. It was a way for the oldest immigrant child of three, who came from a country devastated only decades earlier by a war that has come to define both the country of Vietnam and its diaspora populations, to begin kindling the rage that he would need to be able to transform into nonviolent forms. Not only by telling his story, but more largely the story of the children of devastation who grow up at risk of blind assimilation into commodity utopias. 

America is that utopia. And punk — through its ideal core as anti-imperialist and action-oriented lifeways against oppressive systems — is the light through which the falsehoods of any utopia maintained by power and violence would be exposed; and slowly, with great and collective persistence: disintegrated.

Are you tired of hearing about high stakes political ideologies yet? Tri has a track record of verbalizing her grand schemes to strangers, while forgetting that human beings tend to introduce themselves with less serious things like hobbies and interests first. 

Tri has a troubled relationship with her identity. Tri goes by she/her pronouns, and yet presents as a male who can go by he/him pronouns. Jeff Rosenstock and John Darnielle’s music helped her stay buoyed through different stages of her adult life. She has made more meaningful relationships in the past half year since graduating from college, in May, 2018, than when she was in college. Tri wants changes within institutions. Tri wants changes outside of institutions. Tri wonders how she can help various groups in the Twin Cities overcome the forces of segregation that keeps these groups from liberating themselves in coalition, rather than apart from each other.

Tri only remembers that she is Vietnamese when others begin to assume another place that she is possibly from. Tri only remembers an upbringing in Eagan, Minnesota, and an education entrenched in St. Paul. Tri wants to make music. Tri is trying out improv at HUGE theater and is doing stand up to practice finding catharsis in laughter in addition to rage.

Tri is a Punk American. She is 5’ 7” tall with hair like black onyx. She will transform who she is inside so that she may have the right power to transform the world outside.