Portrait by Caitlin Abrams, hair by Oskar Ly, makeup by Peter Phung.
Saymoukda Mooks Duangphouxay Vongsay
Walk the streets of St. Paul and you’ll find the literary landmarks: the bronze plaques up and down Laurel Terrace and Summit Avenue, where F. Scott Fitzgerald was born, and lived from time to time; the nationally bestowed plaque at 270 North Kent Street, where Penumbra Theater helped launch August Wilson on his journey from emerging playwright to theatrical icon.
Lots of good work emerged from St. Paul in the 20th century, right? But we’re well into the 21st, and quietly, unofficially, St. Paul has crowned a poem of the century. It came into the world on a Coffee House Press promotional coffee sleeve, distributed at places like Nina’s Coffee Café on Selby Avenue and Workhorse Coffee on University. Its popularity encouraged it to jump onto those ads inside busses, and from there, to leap again onto a sign alongside the light rail stop platform at the Western Avenue station. Next, it turned into an illustrated standalone book.
Book illustration by Cori Nakamura Lin
Mooks's When Everything was Everything
Portrait of the artist as a young family; more at WhenEverythingWasEverything.com
The poem (and the book) is called When Everything Was Everything, and the writer is Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay, whom everyone seems to call “Mooks.”
Mooks is a born beauty and something like St. Paul arts royalty, married as she is to DJ Kool AKiEM, one half of hip-hop legends Micranots (a pioneering Rhymesayers act).
The two have an adorable toddler together now, and they’re raising him in St. Paul, maybe as F. Scott and Zelda did once, trying to move forward with art-making and life-making at the same time. Mooks’s St. Paul, however, would likely be unrecognizable to anyone circulating during Fitzgerald’s era.
How to explain to someone who didn’t live through the 1990s and 2000s the phenomena of Tiger Jack Rosenbloom: the Rondo shopkeeper, gun enthusiast, and shouter-by-signboard (you can still see versions of these leading up to the freeway ramp on Dale). Over the course of 50 years, Rosenbloom became almost the sole commercial survivor of the bulldozing of this African-American neighborhood to make way for I-94, which hollowed out the city and paved the way for Frogtown to become one of the state’s centers of Southeast Asian refugee life. You had to be there to understand, and Mooks was, capturing the specificity of the scene as only a poet can:
Food stamps in my pocket. Two dollars’ worth of Now n’ Laters. Green saliva, couldn’t swallow quick enough. Standing nervous. Red light on Dale Street. Crossed the bridge over Hwy 94. Trekking back to St. Albans. Candy wrappers clenched tight. Waved good-bye to Tiger Jack.
In the ink-and-watercolor illustrations of the poem, Chicago- and Minneapolis-based artist Cori Nakamura Lin renders Tiger Jack with his American flag. The roaring thrum of I-94. A refugee girl amidst the chain-link fences.
“It might have all started at one of those Scholastic book fairs,” Mooks, 38, told me when I met her for larb at Lao-Thai Family Restaurant. It’s a place she’s been going for 30 years. Throughout our meal, she greeted tables full of other guests; she seemed to know half the restaurant. Lao-Thai is also the place right beside the light rail station where her poem appeared.
“I remember looking for a book with an Asian girl on the cover, and thinking, How come I don’t get a book?” she recalled. “It would have been so awesome to see something like this when I was a kid, with the long-ass Lao name on the cover.”
Photo courtesy Smallest Museum (spoons).
Mooks's Ahan on Spoons
Mooks’s installation, Ahan on Spoons: Poems on a Refugee’s Forgiveness, at the Smallest Museum in St. Paul.
When her family arrived in 1985—refugees from the Secret War—they had nothing. Mooks would go with her parents to pick cucumbers in a farmer’s field. She remembers greeting her mother, at the end of her shift on the Christmas-tree-wreath assembly line. “I hated that smell of pine on her hands,” she said. “And I love that Christmassy pine smell today.”
That tension—hating the difficulty the refugee experience put her family through, and loving life as it unfolded thereafter—has informed all of Mooks’s work.
This is especially true of Kung Fu Zombies vs. Cannibals, a play about the travails of a young woman and a younger orphan in a world almost wiped out by solar flares. She wrote and debuted it at the Southern Theater. The show sold out its run in 2013; a second staging sold out, again. The play bursts with pop-culture references, elaborate fight sequences, and a hip-hop soundtrack. And it helped her win the same Jerome Fellowship, through the Playwrights’ Center, that supported August Wilson early in his career.
“Her combination of difficult themes, honesty, pop culture, and extreme theatricality is really special,” Hayley Finn told me. Finn is associate artistic director of the Playwrights’ Center, and accompanied Mooks to Chicago, on a trip designed to showcase her work to artistic directors. “She thinks big, she’s very funny, and she’s really loved in this community. She’s amazing.”
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When I met with Mooks, she was in the weeds with the prequel to her Kung Fu Zombies play, tentatively scheduled for a theater debut in 2021. Her mind seemed to be occupied with the challenge of how to get by as a writer and get through the winter with a toddler. Her own father, who worked his way up from a refugee collecting food stamps to a mechanical engineer designing parts for Pentair, used to take her to Red Balloon.
Photos courtesy Laichee Yang (shaman performance).
Mooks Shaman Warrior
Mooks performs a Shaman Warrior blessing (guerrilla blessings to strangers) at the Saint Paul Art Crawl in 2017.
At this Grand Avenue children’s bookshop, they couldn’t afford to buy much. They’d reverently take the books off the shelves, and slide them carefully back in. Mooks recalls an illustrated children’s dictionary they bought with their scant funds, and how furious she was, years after she’d given it away, when she learned other children had ripped the pages. She has been afraid to bring her toddler to Red Balloon, Mooks said, out of fear he might pick up a book and instantly destroy it.
“You should go,” I urged her, telling her that Red Balloon probably had her book, the one made from her very popular poem, on the shelves. Her smile, always alive and moving, suddenly vanished, as if I had just told her something shocking.
As far as literary landmarks go, getting the most popular new St. Paul poem into the most popular St. Paul children’s bookstore might not seem like a particularly lofty literary landmark.But that’s the nature of literary heights, in St. Paul and everywhere else. One day an average-looking baby is born into an average apartment, or an unanticipated play appears before an unexpecting audience, and it’s only ages later that anyone peers back and casts a plaque.
