Yearly Archives: 2020

Lynn Nguyen Boland shares a poetic homily to her mother, meditating on memories of mothering and the complexities of belonging, heritage, language and home.

Hong Khaou’s new film Monsoon is a poetic, and at times, frustrating ballad that tells the story of a life in-between, coloured by multiple homes, identities and stories left untold.

as my fever rides on
to a brighter & snowier peak
the tyrant of my heart texts me a HuffPo
article about the novel coronavirus

Socio-cultural, literary, and political news and events relating to the Vietnamese diaspora and to Việt Nam.

With ears comfortable to the sounds of the hums of quê hương, or quê nhà, my parents listened to an evoked past that reverberated well into the present. Yet these very sounds, as beautiful and tragically poignant as they are, sometimes suffocated me at night in our familiar home.

"This process of conversationally positing and collectively falsifying speculative interpretations of official matters based on private information networks is so ubiquitous in Vietnamese society, I’m not even sure it registers as part of the pandemic response. But it surely was."

This installation of ÁCCENTED will be hosted by Pulitzer-prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, and will feature actor Marc dela Cruz, playwright Qui Nguyen, journalist/editor/critic Diep Tran, and playwright/producer/performer Susan Lieu.

A tragedy is at the the center of Tim Tsai's documentary about a small coastal Texan town. It's a tragedy of a life lost, a divided community, and of how some Vietnamese refugees were never able to make a home in Seadrift, Texas.

In her autobiography "White Métisse," Kim Lefèvre writes of her childhood and adolescence as the child of an unknown French father and a Vietnamese mother in Indochina and later Viet Nam. Being a métisse child during the turbulent period of rising nationalism, resistance to colonial power and war in Indochina, she becomes the unknowing lightning rod for the enmity directed at the French and those who collaborated with them.

Somewhere between this love-hate-consume-inserting dynamics, and somewhere between my coming of age, somewhere in my lung-full of drowsy cries, I defied the things I love. A reversion. The flip one must do to serve râu câu.