Southwest Citizen: Vina Kay

Southwest Minneapolis Patch:  You are working on several projects right now, so what should we call you?

Vina Kay:  Well, when people ask me, I usually say I’m a writer, but I think that’s only about a third of what I’m doing these days. It just seems like the easiest thing to say and then people don’t usually ask too many more questions. (laughs) The thing I really love is creative writing, and I only really discovered that after I chose to stay home with my two boys. I started using nap time and other little breaks to really write what I wanted to.

Southwest Minneapolis Patch:  So what writing are you doing right now?

Kay:  After a trip my family took to Thailand with my parents, who were not in good health and wanted to take one more trip to their homeland, I started writing about the experience. I wrote not just about the trip itself, but also about family--being an immigrant family and about loss. Then I ended up doing a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series program for a year in the area of creative non-fiction. I worked with mentors in a number of areas, and I discovered during that year a love of poetry. I had my manuscript for the memoir down, but I didn’t love the way the story unfolded, so I played around with the idea of turning it into poetry. I’ve been going through the manuscript chapter by chapter--there are fifty chapters--and writing at least one poem for each chapter. I have to say, I’m just loving the process, and I’m about halfway through. I really look forward to sitting down with the writing I’ve already done and re-imagining it--seeing what moves me and then writing a poem.

Southwest Minneapolis Patch:  Tell us about your family.

Kay:  My parents immigrated to the US from Thailand. My mother is from Chiang Mai and my father was from Bangkok. They settled in Omaha, Nebraska in the ‘60s where I was born and raised, so we were an immigrant family. But it really wasn’t the way we think of immigrant families now. When I think of minority immigrants in the Twin Cities, it seems that more often they are part of immigrant communities. That wasn’t true for us at all--we were very much alone. So it was isolating, but our family was really close. They were ambitious and wanted us to get good educations. They moved there for graduate school and they liked it, it was a good place to grow up. I think you make your community wherever you land sometimes, so they made it there. Over the years, a number of my mother’s nieces have come to Omaha as well, so now there really is a community of family there which is really nice. Then I went on to Carleton College for undergraduate study where I met my husband, and we both came to the Twin Cities for law school after that. We live in Southwest Minneapolis with our two sons.

Southwest Minneapolis Patch:  You’ve been working on integration in schools. How did you become involved in that effort?

Kay:  After law school I worked at the Institute on Race and Poverty, and there I got really interested in the issue of segregation and came to understand through that work how housing and education are connected--that we have segregated communities and segregated schools. I did a lot of research on it, and discovered how those issues are connected to a whole range of opportunities. For example, if you live in the right kind of neighborhood in terms of opportunity, you have safe housing, you have good schools, access to transportation lines and better employment--it all kind of comes together. Then the opposite is true if you don’t live in an opportunity-rich neighborhood. That’s hard, and schools become one area where we can do some shifting of those opportunities and make them more broadly available. 

You know, it’s been almost 60 years since Brown vs. Board of Education, and schools in the Twin Cities are more segregated now than they were 40 years ago. There’s a concentration of communities in poverty that happen to also be communities of color in the urban core, and it’s becoming more so in the inner-ring suburbs too. The recent events in Eden Prairie over school boundaries, the white flight from some of the closer suburbs to the outer-ring suburbs, it’s all really interesting to me. So I’m coming back to this work now because I think it’s really important to try and understand the perspectives of both sides: the communities of color trying to seek out more opportunities and those families trying to hold onto the concept of a neighborhood school and why that’s important to them. I really believe that somewhere in there, there’s some common ground. We just need to expand what our definition of community is, and it takes some shifting of the framework in order to do that. It’s not just diversity for the sake of diversity that we need. We need to build more authentic community structures where everybody can participate, because that’s going to be for the good of all of us.

Southwest Minneapolis Patch:  So does your work with schools tie into your documentary film work?

Kay:  Yes. I’m exploring the possibility of a film that tells the story of integration and connects what happened in the past in the civil rights movement to where we are today, because I think we’ve lost track of that history and the passion and inspiration that grew out of that movement. I feel like we need to reclaim that piece of our history and pick it up again and think about what we really want. What kind of community do we really want to be? 

Last week I had the opportunity to interview Matt Little, who’s turning 90 this year. He’s a longtime local civil rights activist who was really involved in the NAACP and led the 1963 March on Washington for the Minnesota delegation. He’s also been involved in school desegregation lawsuits here. I just felt it was really important to capture his story, and it was just great to meet him. I asked him, what do whites have to gain from integration? And he said we have to stop asking that question, because that makes it seem like us versus them. He said instead we should look at what we all have to gain from an integrated community. So I think that’s the kind of re-framing I’d really like to pursue through this work.

I’m also working with a filmmaker named Jan Selby on a documentary about Montessori education, but in the context of education reform. That project is actually a little further along. It's about redefining schools as places for learning passionately, creatively, and collaboratively. We'll be looking at schools that range from a charter school in North Minneapolis, to a school in St. Paul that draws students from a neighboring public housing project, to a school on an Indian reservation in South Dakota that is working to preserve the culture of its students.

Southwest Minneapolis Patch:  Would you share one of your poems?

Kay:  Sure. Here’s one I wrote recently:

Imagine this, now, in your comfortable life
A family preparing for a faraway war
to come crashing into theirs.
They did not want this stone of fear.
Preparation comforts some:
an underground shelter, food, a plan.
But when the rumbling came anyway, 
imagine the panic. Scurrying
underground, taking meaningless 
things, forgetting the important.
Among them, a baby, newborn, nameless.
When the mother had gathered all
the children underground, and then
realized what she had left,
she turned. The ground shook
and children cried. Imagine
the choice – when have you 
had to make such a choice?
When it grew quiet, they all emerged
into air and light –
these things were still theirs, 
and the baby, too, alive. But
what she had seen above, they
had all missed in their dark hole –
that though the ground shook,
her small view of the sky remained the same,
that from where she lay, the 
sky stayed true. Imagine, then, 
the square of sky the baby girl watched.
It, more than anything, you can.