Yearly Archives: 2019

For Vietnamese kids who left Vietnam but weren’t part of the large migration wave to the US after the fall of Saigon in 1975, who went to New Caledonia, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), Canada, France, West Germany, the Philippines, even Norway, we are like seeds spread by the winds that sprouted and learned how to thrive without anyone knowing what to name us. We are part of the Vietnamese diaspora, but we have yet to name ourselves.

Filmmaker Maegan Houang explains that "In Full Bloom" tells the story of Cecile, an elderly Vietnamese hoarder, whose life is upended when worms open a black hole in her house.

On 1 July 1972 during the Easter Offensive two Vietnamese journalists, Ngy Thanh and Đoàn Kế Tường, used a heavily damaged railway bridge to cross the Bến Đá River, which bisects Highway One between the cities of Quảng Trị and Huế. What met them on the other side was a scene of carnage: many hundreds of civilian and military personnel corpses littered the highway, the result of an attack two months earlier.

Her research focuses not just on the events of the massacre, but on the civilian efforts—spearheaded by the independent newspaper Sóng Thần (which my mother and father were publishers and editors of)—to identify and bury the bodies of the dead in the aftermath of the event.

I had a calm come over me that felt so right, I was in my motherland, and I was about to become a mom. I remember saying to myself that no matter what, these girls will be my legacy.

“People here,” he says, “still think Vietnam is a jungle—brown savages, an exotic Asian whore who you can’t possess, but still satisfies all your sexual demands. It’s burnt into the American imagination. You can’t change that.” In a quietly controlled book, it’s an unexpected moment of rage, where the author and her character lay bare the type of narrative she’s working against.

I wait for something meaningful, deep. A lesson, a memory. But they don’t say anything.

Socio-cultural, literary, and political news and events relating to Việt Nam and to the Vietnamese diaspora.■ News from the Diaspora ■Two Americans sentenced to...

Dear Sweet Baby, / I thought of you last night. / Your memory hit me with / A pierce and an ache, / And I sobbed longingly for you. Deep belly crying, / The kind that howls. / Three years ago today / I found out that after 13 weeks of carrying you, / I had lost you.

who / deserves a perfect night, you in reverse / i will see us aged in reverse in Calauit Island / safari park the mid-resort of life upon life / quietly underneath