An Amateur Stuck With Poland

nocny_handel_na_jarmarku_europa_25-10-2005_fot_rafal_milach_forum-0429742702.jpg, default, Night trading at the Europa Fair at the 10th Anniversary Stadium, 25/10/2005, photo by Rafał Milach / Forum

#heritage

Towards the end of my studies in Szczecin, in the late 1980s, I signed up for a paid course in German for adults. The classes took place in one of the classrooms of a gymnasium located near my dormitory. A poem written on the wall above the blackboard drew my attention:

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To me this land is dearer than others
Neither do I want, nor do I know how to leave here

Author

– ‘Mój pogrzeb’ by Władysław Broniewski

These lines are so patriotic and enlightening – I thought to myself. Is it a warning for me and other participants in the course? Szczecin, only 80 kilometres from West Berlin, an ideal destination not only for the Vietnamese. (Only two Poles in recent Polish history chose to travel in a completely different direction to seek political asylum. One was the judge Tomasz Szmydt, who fled to Belarus in May 2024. The other was Marcin Romanowski, Sejm representative, who in December 2024 chose Hungary as his destination.) It was a sort of tradition among shipbuilding students from Szczecin and Gdańsk that the last year’s traineeship would take place onboard a ship. And not infrequently our compatriots lighted out to the West before receiving a shipbuilder’s diploma in Poland. That’s why I was cooking up something too, just in case.

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Student strike in Kraków, photo: IPN

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But the winds of change were already blowing quite strongly. In Kraków, students joined the workers’ strike en masse. Then the same happened in Szczecin, too, albeit to a lesser degree.

My compatriot from the department, three years ahead of me, had his internship on a vessel and even reached the port in Houston, but he decided to return to Poland and defend his thesis. He would later become the husband of my colleague from Đàn Chim Việt, Newspaper and Voice of the Vietnamese Democratic Opposition, established and published in Warsaw.

But another friend, who was two years older than I, took a chance and wandered away from the Polish ship moored in the port in Hamburg. Unfortunately, his escape did not succeed as he was apprehended by port guards, and that fact was entered into his student record: a disciplinary penalty. He then tried to finish his studies and defend his graduate thesis as quickly as possible. And after leaving the university, he was caught up in the whirlwind of making money in the newly arisen Polish market economy. Not a year passed, and the Vietnamese students in Poland awarded him the title ‘Trader of the Year’ – a new profession, which a few years before would have been referred to as profiteer under the centrally planned economy.

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Port of Szczecin, photo: Wikipedia

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After receiving such an important title in the reality of a free economy, he went to visit his home village in North Vietnam. There, he married a local beauty fifteen years his junior and managed to bring her to Poland forthwith.

In the years that followed, he ‘reoriented himself’, as he would say, to tackle the difficult times of capitalism and became a restaurant owner. He settled in a town in southern Poland, far from the sea and ships. There, he ran the nicest and largest restaurant in town, right on the market square. Capitalism, especially at the beginning, set its own rules. In the 1990s, gangsters began collecting protection money from restaurant owners. My friend did not escape this fate. However, he installed bullet-proof windows, locked the entrance, sat inside behind the door and only let in customers when he was sure they weren’t criminals.

His passive, persistent opposition paid off. He triumphantly got through the hardest, wildest – not only economic – periods of the Republic of Poland. Because he cared for the authenticity, atmosphere and genuineness of those past years, the director of the movie Jak zostałem gangsterem. Historia prawdziwa (How I Became a Gangster: A True Story) let me play the small role of a Vietnamese businessman. Not for old time’s sake but without having to go to a casting call. There’s quite a demand for Vietnamese or Asian extras and bit players in independent Poland. I had joined an acting agency beforehand, hence my extra-short episode on the silver screen. On the construction site that was the set, my job was to visit apartments with a suitcase full of cash. I forestalled a nouveau-riche Polish gangster and bought the best apartment. I might have been a mere amateur as far as Polish cinematography was concerned, but in that movie I did not play myself but my compatriot. Obviously, the director didn’t know the life story of my Vietnamese friend from university. But he was the one who, at the beginning of the Polish political-economic transformation, bought not only an apartment but an entire restaurant and patiently waged war against gangsters without the need for any Kuchenne rewolucje (Kitchen Nightmares).

The world is coming to an end! The Polish United Workers’ Party is no more!

As in his case, my escape to the West also failed. Or rather, there was no such attempt on my part. One day, while being interviewed for Newsweek, I said that ‘I’m stuck with Poland’. In the late 1990s, when I was completing my studies, the Szczecin University of Technology did not have enough money for students to have internships at sea. Therefore, I did my internship at a shipyard in Szczecin. In the summer of 1988, the president of OPZZ [All-Poland Alliance of Trade Unions], Alfred Miodowicz, visited the shipyard and boarded the ship on which I was an intern. The trade union’s chief was accompanied by a TV crew. To my surprise, I saw myself on Dziennik Telewizyjny [Television Daily] – an information programme broadcast at 7:30pm simultaneously on both (and the only) national television channels in Poland. I didn’t leave for the West, I’m staying in Poland, but I’ve left my mark on history – I thought, although I never bragged about this fact until now. However, the television debate between Alfred Miodowicz, the president of OPZZ, and Lech Wałęsa on the plurality of trade unions took place several months later and without my presence.

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Round Table talks, 1989, photo by Chris Niedenthal / Forum

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After 1988 came the even more turbulent 1989. Following the Round Table and partially free June election, my university roommate, a Korean from the North, hastily left Poland together with his compatriots who had studied in Szczecin. They did not return books borrowed from the library, nor did they settle accounts with the dormitory administration. I never saw them again. Poland became an inappropriate place for them to study shipbuilding and economics. Maybe they were right. When I obtained a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, I became a door-to-door salesman. In the winter of 1991, I’d stand with my teeth chattering on frozen ground in marketplaces, selling embroidered sweatshirts, housecoats and windbreakers brought to Poland from time to time in suitcases by my compatriots.

One day in late January 1990, on Dziennik Telewizyjny, I heard someone say, ‘My fellow comrades, please rise! The banner of the Polish United Workers’ Party is being withdrawn’. That symbolic sentence was uttered in Sala Kongresowa (Congress Hall) of the Palace of Culture and Science by Mieczysław F. Rakowski, the first – and soon to be the last – secretary of that party. In the dorm kitchen I said to Jadwiga, my department compatriot’s girlfriend, ‘The world is coming to an end! The Polish United Workers’ Party is no more!’

Congress Hall, the most beautiful auditorium in Poland, designed in the socialist-realist style, hosted congresses of the party for years. Its 11th congress turned out to be the last. The dissolution of the party was witnessed by viewers all over the country.

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The last congress of the Polish United Workers' Party, 29 January 1990, photo by Krzysztof Wójcik / Forum

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Five years later, I found myself in Congress Hall. This was due to the first ever concert of Vietnamese artists – who had come from the United States. The hall, featuring 2,880 red upholstered seats, was filled to the brim with Vietnamese viewers and performers. Never in their wildest dreams could builders of the Palace of Culture and Science or Polish United Workers’ Party dignitaries have envisioned such an event. In the years that followed, concerts of Vietnamese artists became more frequent, also including performers from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which attested to the financial status of the Vietnamese diaspora in Poland and the power of money in a market economy.

But this was not the end of my adventure with Congress Hall. In the summer of 2010, I co-presided over the ‘rebellion and siege’ of the entire Palace. We entered the building and took Congress Hall by force. We barricaded the interior of the Palace and within two weeks we had reinforced the barriers and built new ones in front of certain halls. We organised meetings, at some of which we had to express our self-criticism. We convened the presidium of the congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), a court case, and even a Round Table.

A rebellion of the masses. A wild, outraged, massive and historic crowd. All that was part of the set for a video installation prepared by the Dutch artist Aernout Mik titled Communitas, that is, collectivity in its transformation phase, a veritable community of chaos.

Was it and is it real and similar to the reality of Poland, Vietnam, China, Syria, Europe, Asia and the world in the past and at the moment?

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You saw it again on yesterday’s news:
Tired people, a raging crowd.
But one detail drew your attention:
A vast ocean of human heads.

Author

– ‘Przeżyj to sam’ by Lombard

A record number of Vietnamese people living in Warsaw participated in that artistic event. At least in that installation, they were not invisible. As a leader of the crowd composed not only of Vietnamese people but also of Poles, I had to go through the casting call supervised by the artist. And on that gigantic set I had the status of an actor, as one of only two Vietnamese people and together with the actors of the Dramatyczny Theatre (Dramatic Theatre). The other Vietnamese actor was my friend and contemporary, who studied at the Warsaw University of Technology and towards the end of his studies became a dancer and a member of the P’89 ballet group. At the beginning of the Polish transformation and fledgling capitalism, he danced to famous early disco polo songs such as Mydełko Fa [Fa Soap] or Biały miś [White Teddy Bear]. The judgment of public taste. Their performances were even broadcast on national television and often took place in very noble venues, such as the very Congress Hall again, during the Gala Piosenki Popularnej i Chodnikowej (Gala of Popular and Street Music) in 1992. From the perspective of time, it’s hard to tell whether it should be perceived as merit or crime against Polish culture. This friend of mine also accompanied Edyta Górniak during her first tours and performed in Polish versions of globally acclaimed musicals such as Hair and West Side Story. Just like me, he hid his Polish university diploma way in the back of his dresser drawer.

I must have made it through the casting call for such a serious undertaking in modern art due to the fact that two years earlier I had co-organised and led (there were two of us) the first protests of Vietnamese people in Poland against the owners of market halls in Wólka Kosowska – the largest centre for wholesale trade in Eastern Europe, dominated by merchants from the Far East. An amateur has more than one name.

On 12 May 2008, we notified the commune head of Lesznowola, to which Wólka Kosowska belongs, of our intention to convene a public gathering on 19 May 2008 with the aim of protesting against the unfair business practices of the hall owners, who were known for raising rents by as much as 300%. The gathering was supposed to be peaceful and end upon presenting a petition to the owners of companies from China, Turkey, Poland and Vietnam – that is, from the same countries as the traders-lessees. I delivered an address: Merchants of the world, unite!

Unfortunately, the commune head of Lesznowola banned the gathering. We appealed that decision to the governor of Masovia, who had up to 30 days to consider our complaint. True, he took our arguments into account and overrode the commune head’s decision, but it was all for naught since the date of the demonstration or merchants’ strike had already passed. Oh well. Such was the absurdity of Polish law. The situation repeated itself three times in subsequent years. The Polish legislation failed to provide us with a timely appeal of a decision banning the holding of a public gathering.

With the help of a lawyer from the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, Adam Bodnar – the soon-to-be commissioner for human rights and minister of justice – we filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights against Poland for violating our right to peaceful public gatherings. Several years later, in May 2017, the ECHR ruled in our favour.

In the meantime, President Bronisław Komorowski signed the act amending the act on public gatherings, giving the courts of the second instance only three days to consider appeals. The authorities could (and were required to) notify the interested parties of their decision as quickly as possible: by phone or even by email.

However, the Polish right wing and the president who belonged to that camp introduced into law the term ‘cyclical assemblies’, which had precedence over regular assemblies. One of these cyclical assemblies is the Smoleńsk Mensiversary, organised in Warsaw on the 10th of every month. (The commemoration of the government plane crash became an event that has deeply divided Polish society, ed.).

When abroad, a distant acquaintance becomes a relative & a neighbour becomes family

Vietnamese people in Poland also celebrate their mensiversaries, the so-called Đầy tháng, when an infant turns one month old. This event is an occasion to invite not only one’s closest relatives and friends but also colleagues working in the same market hall. When you live in a foreign land, a distant acquaintance becomes a relative and a neighbour becomes family. The aim is to reinforce contacts, relationships and community spirit – at least as claimed by Polish researchers of the Vietnamese community.

The day after the end of the world, that is, the evening on which I told my compatriot’s girlfriend in a shared kitchen that the PZPR had ceased to exist, I bought a copy of the local daily Głos Szczeciński (Szczecin Voice), with the caption ‘Organ KW Polskiej Zjednoczonej Partii Robotniczej’ (Organ of the Polish United Workers’ Party) missing from the front page. ‘KW’ was an abbreviation for Voivodeship Committee. A whole era was ending, never to return. Regrettably, due to my frequent moves across Poland, I – a Wandering Vietnamese Person – lost my copy of that paper. It would now have cost a fortune.

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Trade at the Europa Fair at the 10th Anniversary Stadium, 2007, photo by Radek Pietruszka / PAP

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I moved from Szczecin to Warsaw a year after completing my studies to work at the 10th Anniversary Stadium. My fellow student remained in Szczecin and married Jadwiga. Both of their sons are born Szczecinians – with a Vietnamese surname. In secondary school they attended a bilingual class: Polish and German. They completed their university education in Germany and stayed there – as Poles. If they had known Vietnamese, perhaps they could have joined the ‘Vietnamese-Polish diaspora’ in Germany, as it is populous there, comprising both those who sought political asylum – the so-called ‘boat people’ from South Vietnam – and economic migrants from after 1989: students, postgraduate students, Gastarbeiters from the times of the GDR.

Freedom is not free

Decades passed, and I had a chance to stand in front of the cameras of national television again. In 2014, I stood for city council on behalf of the Warszawska Wspólnota Samorządowa [Warsaw Local Government Association]. Adam Feder, an editor specialising in light and humorous material, met me to shoot a piece about foreign-born candidates in local elections. We quickly found common ground, and I posed for photos according to instructions and expectations. On the same day, towards the end of the television’s informational programme, the former Dziennik Telewizyjny, now Wiadomości (News), I watched a lengthy TV report featuring, among others, me.

Despite the public media’s favourable presentation, I didn’t win the election. The Warsaw Local Government Association was too small an organisation, a conglomerate of different milieus with a prevalence of representatives of the right wing of the Polish political arena, which is foreign to me. I did not receive a mandate to be councillor of the Capital City of Warsaw, but the number of votes cast for my candidacy ranked me second, only slightly behind the president of the association. As a result of the calculations of coalition members, he became deputy mayor of Ochota – one of Warsaw’s districts – and I felt honoured and proud owing to the votes cast for me.

Only two years later, after the 2015 parliamentary election won by PiS, it was considered a liability to appear in front of the cameras of public television, especially in the main edition of Wiadomości. This was so because the ruling party turned national television into a propaganda machine for the government and the party, just as it was before 1989. It felt as though Wiadomości had been turned back into Dziennik Telewizyjny. Poland was ranked low in terms of freedom of speech. On 11 January 2016, while travelling around Vietnam, concerned, I asked on social media: Who’s in charge of Wiadomości?

I learned from comments that Adam Feder, the editor specialising in light, pleasant, entertaining and humorous material broadcast towards the end of the main edition of the information programme, was booted out of national television. ‘Thanks for info. I’m afraid to return home’ – I replied to the comment.

Poland as a state had been mined. The purchase of Pegasus spyware for the purpose of keeping political opponents under surveillance was one example. Being an immigrant and no stranger to a persecution complex, I also felt the hot breath of Pegasus on my neck. Adam Bodnar, nominated by the coalition after the 2023 parliamentary elections to the position of minister of justice, has a hard nut to crack: restoring order in the legal system, from a rank-and-file neo-judge through to the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Tribunal. His present concerns also include the issue of who will rule on the validity of the presidential election pending in May. We, the Vietnamese, keep our fingers crossed for him and wish him fortitude on this difficult mission.

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Korean War Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C., photo by Carol Highsmith / US Library of Congress

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Several times I posted my photo taken in front of the ‘Freedom is not free’ inscription carved on the Monument to the Veterans of the Korean War in the capital city of the United States as my profile photo on Facebook. This way I alluded to the current political situation in Vietnam and the Third Polish Republic.

Either way, it was possible for me to stand for the city council because in 2007 I became a naturalised Pole. I submitted an application for Polish citizenship as early as the 1990s, but towards the end of his first term, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski refused to grant it to me.

Unlike a decision on permanent residence, one cannot appeal a refusal to be granted Polish citizenship. On the other hand, one can submit as many applications as one deems appropriate. At the end of his second term, in response to my second application, President Kwaśniewski issued a promise that one day I would become a citizen of Poland. Meaning that it was a conditional decision to grant me citizenship.

On condition that I renounce my Vietnamese citizenship

What a curse!

But I accepted my fate, or rather, the maliciousness of Mr President. He didn’t need to order me to give up my original citizenship. After all, I can be an exemplary Vietnamese citizen and a True Polish Patriot, as they say in certain political circles. However, without thinking twice, I submitted an application to the Vietnamese authorities for a renunciation of my Vietnamese citizenship.

Two years have passed since I officially turned into a Pole, but I’m still a slanted-eyed, black-haired Vietnamese.

As a Vietnamese, or rather an Asian, I was invited to take part as an extra in a photo session of… Aleksandra Kwaśniewska, the daughter of the presidential couple, because I’m in the records of at least two acting agencies. Aleksandra had lived in the Viceroy’s Palace (Presidential Palace, ed) in Krakowskie Przedmieście for eight years, so the key idea behind the session was that the princess awoke from her sleep and Asian tourists started taking photos of her. In issue 12, dated 14 June 2007, the magazine Viva! celebrated its 10th anniversary, so you could see the daughter of the presidential pair as a princess, and me as a tourist passionately taking photos of her, featured both on the cover and inside.

Yes, sometimes I’m a tourist in this land.

And I was so young back then! And so handsome! An Asian prince good and proper!

Many times I wrote ‘I am Asia’

Little wonder that I was the main guide in the Podróż do Azji (Trip to Asia) project. As part of this artistic and social project organised by Joanna Warsza, Anna Gajewska and me at the 10th Anniversary Stadium, participants obtained a plane ticket, a map of the Vietnamese sector in the Europe Bazaar and an MP3 player. They’d take a commuter train to a platform of the Asian zone in Warsaw with its shops, bars, video cassette rental shops, hairdressing and beauty salons. Little Vietnam, Little Asia in the capital city of Poland.

It was an acoustic walk. On the soundtrack, along the crucial section next to the exit from the tunnel towards Praski Port, where the stadium’s Cultural Centre and Vietnamese Buddhist temple were located, I’d declare in a trembling voice:

Text

No, I will never come back to the Stadium.
It’s no longer the place or the time.
I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!

These phrases were the borrowed and paraphrased lyrics of Halina Frąckowiak’s hit single Papierowy księżyc (Paper Moon) that I had often heard during summer camp after the Polish language course in Olsztyn in the summer of 1984.

This independent project was appreciated by readers of the magazine Co jest grane (What’s Going On) and awarded it a Wdech Prize in the category Events of the Year.

As part of another cultural event that took place at the Bazaar – Radio Stadion Nadaje [Stadium Radio Is Broadcasting] – I also quoted the lyrics to the song Wielki Targ [The Great Bazaar] sung by Alicja Majewska to Wojciech Młynarski’s lyrics:

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Here you’ll sell every word
And every thought, too
Even today
You can set up your booth
A colourful human crowd
In a flash will engulf you
Banters, yawping, tumult and ballyhoo
The Great Bazaar
Bustling and bold
Among complaints
That the quality is low
Bow your head, there’s somebody coming
To the Great Bazaar with stacks of dough

In any case, life is not a Viva! cover. I look nice only on photographs, in a family album; but in fact, I often feel terrible.

Text

I’m still a stranger
Completely foreign here
Like a foe

Author

– Wciąż bardziej obcy’ by Lady Pank

In everyday life, I stand out from native Poles because of the way I look.

In the end, it was not the Kwaśniewski family but President Lech Kaczyński who granted me citizenship. After 25 years from my first encounter with the Polish language, I became a Pole. And the process of getting acquainted with this language and with being a Pole is still under way. One thing’s for sure: I’ve been eagerly using the right to vote and my Polish passport. I left Vietnam as a minor. I turned 18 during the transit between Hanoi and Warsaw or, to be more precise, in Moscow. It was a Sunday and on the next day – Monday, 26 September 1983 – I reached the Polish Language School for Foreigners in Łódź. After one year of studying Polish while still in Hanoi, I attended the course ‘Polish for adults’.

So, I did not have the right to vote in Vietnam. The Vietnamese Embassy never organised voting for its citizens. These were just unnecessary formalities. The one who is supposed to be elected will be elected: 99% of votes cast, 100% of the norm, 120% of the plan. Sound familiar?

I’m still a stranger

Completely foreign here
Like a foe

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The Vietnamese Embassy in Warsaw, photo: Wikipedia

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Due to my involvement in the activity of the Vietnamese democratic opposition, I’m considered a stranger among my people, an enemy and subverter in the eyes of the Vietnamese authorities.

To visit my family in Vietnam, I still have to apply for a visa at the Embassy of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in Warsaw. They can either grant me a visa or decline my application, arguing that it is not an independent consular decision but permission of the authorities.

But I’m still a stranger in my block of flats in Czerniaków, in the street, on a tram or on a bus. My face and my accent prevent me from being fully a Pole, although I don’t know what exactly that’s supposed to mean.

Text

I’m still a stranger
I’m still a stranger to you
And to myself

One day I was telling my friend that in the block where I bought an apartment on credit some people don’t respond to my ‘good mornings’, which makes me switch to vulgar speech.

Oh… Why should I care about somebody else’s behaviour? I don’t give a hang about them. Enough! I can’t be a stranger to myself. It’s a form of self-defence. I also had to get rid of my persecution complex, which is such an obvious companion for an immigrant on foreign soil. Enough! I can’t look at Polish life without emotions any longer. I can’t look at Polish reality with the eyes of a spectator:

Text

Someone else changes the world for you,
Sticks their neck out, raises an alarm.
And you stay away, ‘cause that’s a safe way,
You lose nothing, in any event.

Author

– ‘Przeżyj to sam’ by Lombard

Beyond a doubt, participating in general voting and travelling the world with a Polish passport are rights and privileges for me – an immigrant from faraway Vietnam. I’m not the only one, though. More and more of my compatriots obtain the right of residence in Poland and become Polish citizens administratively.

Vietnam established diplomatic relationships with the Polish People’s Republic 75 years ago as members of the former Soviet Bloc. At that time, diplomatic relationships were also established with Czechoslovakia or the German Democratic Republic. The first Vietnamese students began studying in Kraków and Łódź. A few individuals got married here, despite the order to return to their country. The beginnings of the Vietnamese community in Poland date back to those days. However, the Vietnamese diaspora emerged and developed dynamically only after 1989. The political and economic transformation in Poland created excellent conditions for entrepreneurial Vietnamese people craving financial success. In the formative years of this community, the priority was to gain financial self-sufficiency and legal residency. Lots of people had only a temporary residence permit. Little wonder that the Vietnamese avoided publicity and tried to be as invisible as possible in Polish society. But they gradually opened up and entered the social, economic and cultural mainstream of life in Poland. They passed the exam of being good citizens during the two momentous events of recent years: the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are more and more people who become engaged in artistic pursuits and in activism. I’m proud that there’s a place for me among these female and male activists and leaders.

I’m Vietnamese. I feel Polish, too, when I cast my vote in general, local or parliamentary elections, its location being either a local kindergarten or any other place in the world while I’m travelling with a Polish passport. It warms my heart when I hear people speaking Polish abroad, and I sometimes start talking to them, to their astonishment.

The last parliamentary election in Poland marked an important, long-awaited breakthrough. I was deeply moved while watching a TV programme in which the chairwoman of an electoral commission in the Wola district of Warsaw reported with tears in her eyes that voters had stood patiently, or rather in a disciplined manner, in a queue to cast their votes. I was touched when I saw how residents of Wrocław’s Jagodno district waited in a long queue until 3am to vote. This is what democratic voting mobilisation looks like to me. Like a call to battle for survival.

If I ever in the future leave Poland for good, I will take all these Polish songs and poems with me.

This essay was written in the context of the Familiar Strangers exhibition at BOZAR in Brussels, co-organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, where a selection of Tuong’s Facebook posts is also presented.

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