Monthly Archives: August, 2023

Your hand entwined in mine as we tread on.

News from Việt Nam and from Vietnamese Abroad ►Vietnam beat Indonesia on penalty shootout to win AFF U23 Championship ►Job-seeking Vietnamese teens trafficked to Laos, family...

Tender Machines, J. Mae Barizo’s second full-length poetry collection, begins with the epigraph from Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar that tenderness is what women see in other women that they don’t see in a man. This book is for women, in all their roles and royalties—daughter, friend, lover, mother, great-grandmother.

[TIME] As a second-generation Vietnamese American I spent much of my youth railing against my heritage. The reasons were as simple as being a normal rebellious teenager, and as complex as not understanding how PTSD could be a catalyst for generational trauma. As an adult I’ve worked hard to appreciate where I come from, but earlier in 2023 at an online Áccented event hosted by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), I found myself, once again, at odds with my community.

The house is golden / all the way through / rumbling with soft hums / of a neighbor’s mower / I sprawl over the couch / halving my body in spaces / of this poem

diaCRITICS, one of the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diasporic literary magazines, needs your help.

DVAN is thrilled to share some big news that we've received a generous donation of $500,000 from an anonymous donor to initiate an endowment to ensure that DVAN can sustain its efforts in the long run. The goal of the endowment is to raise $4 million over the next four years.

Every time I visit home, my mother cooks a steaming vat of bún thang, the Vietnamese chicken noodle soup originating from Hanoi. It’s a two-day marathon of simmering the broth to the right ratio of savory and sweet. Meanwhile, she prepares the toppings: shredded chicken, thin strips of chả lụa, and meticulously diced egg crepes. Bún thang has a reputation for being simple in its ingredients and preparation, but it’s fussy in a subdued way. The precision of the knife, knowing just when to flip the egg, the rhythm of hand-tearing meat from bone. 

[The New York Times] Hanoi, long a city of storytellers, has been devastated and reborn time and time again. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai guides readers through the literature that has played a part in that renewal.

I was told I was born from a big bang but I don’t remember the boom. I was told I come from the / afterglow, in all of its galactic glory, which lingers lonely somewhere in space and time like / motes dancing alone in the first morning rays.