19 Essential Vietnamese Diaspora Books

Growing up in the 1990s in the U.S., it was difficult to find Vietnamese stories. It’s a struggle familiar to many Vietnamese Americans. If we were on TV or film, we were background players with neither lines nor names, furniture, more or less, to the stories of white Americans in the land of our ancestors—Vietnam, which is never really a country in these stories, just a war. And if we were in books, we were definitely not on the covers. At the local library, most of the books on Vietnam were war memoirs by American war veterans or dry analysis of what the war was about and what went wrong.

It wasn’t until college in an Asian American studies course that I encountered a book by a Vietnamese American: Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge. It was the first time I heard a story of the War and the migration that came after it from a Vietnamese perspective. Though the characters in the book were vastly different from me, it was the first time I got the other side of this story that everyone seemed to be telling, the first time I could imagine people like me and my parents in this history.

Lan Cao’s 1997 book was the first novel by a Vietnamese American writer to be put out by a major publisher (in this case, Viking). But it was not the first time a Vietnamese person in the diaspora had written and published a book. They were just a bit harder to find. Perhaps the easiest to pick up at the local bookstore or library was Le Ly Hayslip’s 1989 memoir, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, which was published by Doubleday. But dig a little more and you might stumble upon 1996’s Once Upon a Dream (called “the first anthology of poetry, fiction, autobiography and artwork to focus on the experience of Vietnamese immigrants”) edited by De Tran, Andrew Lam, and Hai Dai Nguyen and published by Andrews & McMeel or No Passenger on the River by Trần Văn Dĩnh. The copyright date of this last book is 1965 and it is the oldest book by a Vietnamese American writer I have in my personal library.  (In 1983, Trần Văn Dĩnh would come out with the novel Blue Dragon, White Tiger, which will be reissued by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, who is the publisher of diaCRITICS). Which is all to say, we were out there, you just had to know where to look. (To say nothing of Vietnamese language publishing in the U.S.)

Now, 50 years after the end of the war and the start of a mass movement of refugees, it seems like we are in a Vietnamese diasporic renaissance. Indeed, it is an incredible moment to be a Vietnamese diasporic writer, as Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in the foreword to The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. Just go to your local library catalog or search a bookstore online with the word “Nguyen” (the most common of Vietnamese names), and you’ll find a lot of writers of Vietnamese descent. And that’s only for “Nguyen!”

It is a good time to be a Vietnamese diasporic writer!

Looking back at the last 50 years, we asked writers, scholars, and critics about the Vietnamese diasporic books they think are the most important and below you will find their thoughts. This is, of course, not an exhaustive list, nor is it a ranked one, because I’ve always believed that art isn’t a competition. Think of it, rather, as a list of suggestions, good places to start when thinking about Vietnamese diasporic literature.

Happy reading!

Eric Nguyen
Editor-in-Chief
diaCRITICS

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Narrative plenitude requires style. That is, while amplifying voices is undoubtably a noble endeavor, formal variation registers difference. Monique Truong’s 2003 novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003), is an aggressively literary work, where Truong’s imaginative and sophisticated prose brings to life Bình, a queer Vietnamese chef working in Paris under the employ of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas during the 1920s. Instead of revolving around the period of refuge or “the war,” The Book of Salt delves into the history of Vietnamese mobility to reconsider the multiple promises held within the Vietnamese diasporic past, bringing into question singular constructions of the Vietnamese present. — Timothy August, author of The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America

As the first Vietnamese American graphic memoir ever published, Vietnamerica by GB Tran (Villard, 2011) offers a vital contribution to literature on the Vietnam War and refugees. For decades, U.S. media culture inundated the popular consciousness with negative portrayals of Vietnamese people, and obscuring their creative voices. This illustrated book challenges such stereotypes through an intergenerational story that uses sequential art to explore the author’s personal identity and family history. Tran effectively taps into the power of visual images to represent Vietnamese collective memory, migration, and politics. His debut is indispensable for anyone wishing to understand the experience of the diaspora over the past century. — Long Bui, author of Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory

Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018) is a brilliant book exploring the aftermath of the speaker’s brother’s suicide through poetry and collage––this assemblage is an attempt to piece together the story of the brother’s life, death, and its aftermath. Nguyen engages with visual representation, not so much as a form of ekphrasis, but as a means of creating new possibilities of seeing and being seen. Her groundbreaking visual poetry travels through time in order to heal the past and define new futures. A must read for anyone who is interested in Vietnamese diasporic literature. — Cathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost

The Dragon Hunt (Hyperion, 1999), Trần Vũ’s debut anthology of short fiction, sensitively translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Đường, instantly created a stir in the mainstream literary community when it appeared in 1999, four years after the U.S. normalized diplomatic and trade relations with Vietnam. In this brutal yet lyrical collection, renewed relations between the U.S. and Vietnam simply represent a systemic erasure of history and collusion of mercenary interests. “Nhã Nam,” the collection’s most haunting story, depicts how a refugee’s nostalgia is transformed into rapacious consumerism upon his return to the homeland, while Vietnam itself becomes a spectacle in showcasing its violent history as a water puppet performance for tourists. For Trần Vũ, whose harrowing escape by boat from Vietnam in 1979 and formative years in France as a ward of the state (for he came to France as an unchaperoned minor) have revealed that there is no redemptive arc for a displaced person. To flee one’s country is to be thrust into another, equally oppressive milieu. The collision of cultures in the aftermath of war and migration simply engenders more trauma and injustice. For these reasons, The Dragon Hunt is eerily prescient and definitely worth another read in 2025. — Thuy Dinh, coeditor of Da Màu Magazine and editor-at-large at Asymptote

In 2003, Vietnamese American author Monique Truong published The Book of Salt, a historical fiction novel about Binh, a gay Vietnamese cook who worked for the American writers Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Binh’s character is based on two Indochinese chefs that Toklas footnoted in her cookbook, which Truong discovered during college. By writing about a subject that is not the Vietnam War, Truong subverted the expectations of the American publishing industry for a Vietnamese writer. That same year, her essay “The Season De l’Amour” appeared in the New York Times, a beautifully-written piece about her first encounter with Paris in 1984 as a 16-year-old girl. Truong’s versions of Paris are timeless, shedding light on Vietnamese American postcolonial identity. — Cathy Duong, diaCRITICS Contributing Writer

Lac Su’s memoir I Love Yous Are for White People (Harper Perennial, 2009) stands alone in the Vietnamese American literary canon as a searing testament to the shadows often left unspoken—domestic violence, toxic masculinity, misogyny, and the unforgiving grip of tiger parenting. In a society that casts Asian Americans as the model minority—silent achievers, paragons of filial piety, harmonious households—the memoir ruptures this illusion. Su invites us into a world where the myth fractures, where his father’s harshness is not born of evil, but of wounds unhealed. Beneath the stern hand lies the weight of exile, poverty, and the suffocating role of patriarch in a foreign land. His brutality, though never excused, is layered—entangled in the wreckage of war, the bitterness of broken dreams, and the crushing expectations he carries as a man trying to build a new life from ruins. — Quan Manh Ha, editor of The Colors of April: Fiction on the Vietnam War’s Legacy 50 Years Later

E.M. Tran’s Daughters of the New Year (Hanover Square Press, 2022) is a feat of diasporic Vietnamese writing. It offers a voice to every generation of Vietnamese history—from those who survived long before the events of 1975, to those who carried Vietnamese culture into the U.S., to those who are learning today how to balance their American and Vietnamese heritages. The book is a stunning re-imagination of the past, moving backwards in chronological time as a method of ancestral uncovering, revealing truths about women, youth, and violence overtime. Tran manages to weave together strong themes and cyclical narratives in a way that reveals omnipresent topics with careful subtlety, leaving readers equally appreciative of both history and the future. — Melina Kritikopoulos, diaCRITICS Contributing Writer

A lullaby that sings with the force of history and memory, love and grit, Ru by Kim Thúy (Libre Expression, 2009/Bloomsbury, 2012) is a kaleidoscope of loss and hope, each snapshot revealing what it means to live—to be exiled and othered and to begin again with the audacity to dream. A stream remembering finding its source, Ru flows across time and space, connecting the past to the present with piercing clarity. Astonishing in its breadth, colored by shadow and light, Thúy’s fragmented novel shows us the pangs and joys of motherhood, womanhood, life. — Kathy L. Nguyễn, diaCRITICS Editorial Steering Committee member and co-director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network

When reading The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai (Algonquin, 2020) I learned about the Land Reform, the Great Hunger, the Indochina War, and the American War. More importantly, I saw the resilience of the Vietnamese people through grandmother Trần Diệu Lan and her granddaughter Hương as they fought to reunite their family. Though the novel depicts war’s atrocities, slivers of hope carried me through. It also deepened my understanding of my own family’s intergenerational trauma. This book is important because it highlights a history often overlooked, told from a Vietnamese perspective, while showing the strength of the human spirit. — Thị Minh Huyền Nguyễn, diaCRITICS Contributing Editor

Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (Viking, 1997) appeared at a time in the 1990s when Vietnamese American literature and literary criticism were beginning to congeal as vibrant, vital fields. Considered to be the earliest Vietnamese American novel published by a major press, Monkey Bridge uses the trope of a hidden diary to treat various refugee topics that still resonate—transnational memory, refugee archives, how forced displacement shapes narrative form. Along with other works around that time, such as Monique Truong’s essays and the anthology Once Upon a Dream, Monkey Bridge evoked the richness of Vietnamese diasporic storytelling and showed how an emerging literature could be a vehicle for creating community. — Marguerite Nguyen, diaCRITICS Editorial Steering Committee member and author of America’s Vietnam: The Longue Durée of U.S. Literature and Empire

The Make Believers edited by Thi Bui and Vu Tran (McSweeney’s, 2025) is a collection of stories, personal reflections, dialogues, and poems by established diasporic Vietnamese writers from various shores, edited and designed by Vietnamese American writers. The book offers accounts of overlooked historical events, insights about what it means to be a child of refugees and immigrants from Vietnam, as well as playful renderings and fiction. It is presented in a foil-stamped cigar box. This book is important because the contributors fully embrace their identity as one that vacillates between loss and joy and was published by the prestigious literary magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly. It is the first of its kind. — Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, diaCRITICS Editorial Steering Committee member and Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network

I’ve previously written for diaCRITICS about comics being a valuable way into the Vietnamese diasporic experience, so when I first thought about which book I’d recommend, The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui (Abrams, 2017) immediately came to mind. It’s a brilliant memoir about the history of the war in Vietnam and everything that came thereafter in the United States. However, I recently re-read another graphic novel I also wanted to highlight here: The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen (Random House Graphic, 2020). It’s a deeply poignant, fictional comic about a young man reckoning with his family and identity through Vietnamese and Western fairytales. I felt the book captured an essential truth about the diasporic experience: stories help us grapple with our families, ourselves and who we all are now. — Sheila Ngọc Phạm, diaCRITICS Contributing Editor

Nguyễn Công Luận described himself as a “nobody” who had not “contributed anything great to my people nor to my army,” and yet he has written the most detailed personal account of the Vietnam War that I have read. Born during French occupation, Luận, whose body shook from Parkinsons, gifted us with Nationalist in the Việt Nam Wars (Indiana University Press, 2012), a dense account from the perspective of a foot soldier. Compiled from his flawless photographic memory, Luận’s book allows the reader to journey from the horrors of French occupation all the way to the Fall of Saigon. A. Must. Read. — Z.M. Quỳnh, diaCRITICS Contributing Writer

Thanh Tâm Tuyền was one of the luminaries of South Vietnamese literature. After Vietnam’s division in 1954, he was part of a cohort of Northern refugees that formed the Sáng Tạo group, whose existentialist style revolutionized the literary landscape. Upon the end of the war, he spent seven years in re-education camp, during which he continued to compose poetry. A small selection of these poems survived and were published in Houston, Texas in a collection titled Thở Ở Đâu Xa [“Poems from Somewhere Far Away”] (Trầm Khắc Phục, 1990). The angst and bitterness that characterized his earlier writing is absent in these poems; even its sense of melancholy is more muted. Instead, he writes about enjoying tea with other prisoners, tumbling down a mountain while chopping wood, and having imaginary conversations with his daughter on her birthday. In his isolation, he yearns to return to the social world in which language regains its meaning: “the long beginning of autumn / a cool gust / reality and falsehood become a daze / alone, who sings?” He is the same existentialist as before—but with these poems, mundane daily rituals have displaced lyrical confessions as the site for the interrogation of consciousness. — Sydney To, former Deputy Editor of diaCRITICS

Nguyễn Trí’s 2015 novel Thiên đường ảo vọng [“The Fantasy of Paradise”] (Nhà xuất bản Trẻ, 2015) links the political and social uncertainties of 21st-century Vietnam to the continuing fallout from the Vietnamese War—as a civil war. Upon their release from prison, the novel’s protagonists, Lâm and Cường, remain socially and economically marginalized for their affiliation with the southern Republic of Vietnam. They travel the country to mine for gold. They encounter the risks of malaria, injury, violence, substance addiction, and returning to labor camps. The novel leads readers into an unfamiliar world with its own values and idioms. — Ben Tran, diaCRITICS Editorial Steering Committee member and author of Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam

When the Vietnamese French writer Linda Lê passed away in 2022 at the age of 58, she left us with twelve published novels and two collections of essays. She also left this rhetorical question, embedded in her fourth novel, as if she were penning her own irony-laced obit: “What greater crime than still to believe in literature in this century?” Her fifth novel Slander, translated from the French by Esther Allen (Christian Bourgois, 1993/University of Nebraska Press, 1996), is a masterwork that refuses to believe or to tether itself to the diasporic myths of belonging, whether it’s to a country, a language, or a family. Slander is bracingly fragmented, nonlinear, and thematically veined with madness. For Slander’s narrators—a niece who’s a “dirty foreigner writing in French” and her uncle, a patient in an asylum who’s now working in a library—the border between sanity and insanity fluctuates and blurs, and it’s their uneasy relationship to literature, as a writer and as a reader respectively, that may or may not allow them to slip between the two. — Monique Truong, author of Mai’s Áo Dài and The Sweetest Fruits

During Operation Babylift in 1975, children from South Việt Nam were evacuated to the US and other asylum countries. In historical accounts of the Fall of Sài Gòn, the operation is positioned as a humanitarian opportunity or unfortunate tragedy, depending on the plane. Aimee Phan devoted her stunning debut collection, We Should Never Meet (St. Martin’s, 2004), to portraying Operation Babylift in a prismatic manner, illuminating characters across spans of time and text. “The delta” is my favorite story, a bittersweet bildungsroman of love lost through natural causes. Phan underscores the everyday attachments and tragedies that matter deeply, even as external battles rage. — Julie Thi Underhill, former Editor-in-Chief of diaCRITICS

Nothing Follows by Lan Duong (Texas Tech University Press, 2023) is everything we must follow, everything most poetically fierce and desirable that moves us deeply, propelling us forward amidst this apathetic, banal, feral world, since nothing means existential love for the world, even in the loss of memory that haunts into oblivion. As life emerges from the ruins of death. Lan Duong’s poetry muses on that interstice of life and death, where memory embraces loss, as death turns us into nothing. But that Nothing Follows us. — Quynh H. Vo, co-author of The Making of Little Saigon: Narratives of Nostalgia, (Dis)enchantments, and Aspirations

Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin (Henry Holt, 2023) is a heartbreaking novel set in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, following the story of a Vietnamese family who decides to flee and join relatives who have already emigrated to the United States. They separate themselves into two different boats; one carries the three oldest siblings to Hong Kong, but the boat with their parents and four younger siblings never arrives. The novel follows the three children’s onward journey to England and their struggle to find safety and stability in their new home, occasionally intercepted by the ghost of their youngest sibling, Dao, who watches over them. — Daniella Zalcman, diaCRITICS Editorial Steering Committee member and photojournalist

Timothy K. August is the author of The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America. His recent work has appeared in Canadian Literature, MELUS, and Modern Fiction Studies. He is an Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University, and the co-chair of The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies.

Long T. Bui is Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently working on his graphic memoir.

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Split, winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History, and Becoming Ghost. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney’s and she has received awards from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She currently lives in New York City.

Thuy Dinh is a bilingual critic, literary translator, coeditor of the Vietnamese webzine Da Màu, and editor-at-large for the Vietnamese Diaspora at Asymptote Journal. Her essays and poetry translations have appeared in Asymptote, Manoa, Michigan Quarterly Review, NBC Think, NPR Books, Prairie Schooner, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Amerasia, among others. Green Rice, her co-translation of the selected poetry of Lâm Thị Mỹ Dạ, was published by Curbstone Press in 2005, and nominated for the Kiriyama Prize in 2006.

Cathy Duong co-hosts cà phê book club, a monthly book club that meets in coffee shops across north Orange County, CA (IG: @caphebookclub). She enjoys traveling to Little Saigons, playing V-pop on her ukulele, and analyzing diasporic Viet literature.

Quan Manh Ha is professor of American literature at the University of Montana and the cotranslator/coeditor of eight books, including Hanoi at Midnight (by Bao Ninh), No Man River (by Duong Huong), and The Colors of April, among other titles.

Melina Kritikopoulos is a poet, audio producer, and undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. A Bay Area native, Mel calls on her mixed-race ancestry and queer identities to explore of legacy, life and the absurdity of being a young adult through her poetry and prose.

Eric Nguyen is the Editor-in-Chief of diaCRITICS.

Kathy L. Nguyễn is a writer, editor and co-director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). Her short stories, essays, and articles have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Fringe, Women’s World, and elsewhere. She co-edited Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, and was the editor of Nhà, an award-winning diasporic arts & culture magazine. She is a recipient of the San Francisco Artist grant (2024-2025) and Artist Impact Endowment (2024-2026) from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Vashon Artist Residency (2025), and a Christina Meldrum Memorial Scholarship from the Community of Writers (2023), among others.

Thị Minh Huyền Nguyễn (she/her) is a writer, designer and marathon runner. Huyền works between fashion, culture and sports. In 2023 she founded her running community @joyruncollective to create more access to sports (especially for women, queer and non-binary people of color). Her work appears here: Vogue Germany, Konfekt Magazine, Daddy Magazine, and diaCRITICS (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network). In October 2024, she completed the World Marathon Majors series with the Chicago Marathon, which only 239 German women and 4 Vietnamese women have completed so far.

Marguerite Nguyen is an Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University. Her research and teaching cover Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, and ecocriticism.

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and Cofounder and Executive Director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).

Sheila Ngọc Phạm is a writer, editor, researcher, producer and curator. She has written for arts and cultural institutions and a wide range of literary and mainstream publications, and is the 2025 Imago Fellow at the State Library of NSW. Sheila is a contributing editor to DVAN and has previously held editorial roles at the ABC, producing radio documentaries and stories. Her full-length radio features include the Tongue Tied and Fluent series (2019) (co-produced with Masako Fukui), The Lost Cinema of Tan Hiep (2016) and Saigon’s Wartime Beat (2012) – with her feature about Vietnam’s rock music history inspiring the mainstage play she is currently developing with support from National Theatre of Parramatta. She curated an exhibition of Đông Hồ paintings (2019) for the State Library of NSW, and most recently, MÌNH (2023) for Fairfield City Museum and Gallery.

Z.M. Quỳnh is a Vietnamese American dancer, performance artist, and writer whose short stories, essays, and poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Vice Terraform, Masque & Spectacle, Kweli Journal, Strange Horizons, Glittership, and in the anthologies: The SEA is Ours, Genius Loci: The Spirit of Place, People of Color Destroy Science Fiction, and Luminescent Threads – Connections to Octavia Butler. Zora is an award-winning community organizer, DEI & leadership developer, and social justice movement strategist. Zora is the winner of the 2021 San Francisco Foundation Nomadic Press Literary Award. Zora has received scholarships to attend the Kweli International Literary Festival, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, VONA, Writing The Other, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop. Zora is a frequent book reviewer and essayist for diaCRITICS (diacritics.org). You can find Zora sipping boba at zmquynh.com or some iteration of @zmquynh on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

Sydney Van To is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley researching global existentialism and Vietnamese communism. He is also the publication lead of DVAN’s collaborative imprints with Kaya Press and Texas Tech University Press.

Ben Tran is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and English at Vanderbilt University.

Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She’s a novelist, essayist, children’s book author, and librettist. Her novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Her children’s picture book Mai’s Áo Dài (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2025) is co-written with Thai Nguyen and illustrated by Dung Ho.

Julie Thi Underhill was born in Missouri one year after her Chăm-Polish mother fled Việt Nam as Saigon fell. Julie’s forthcoming photography collection Descendants of Champa features eleven years of portraits from Việt Nam and Cambodia, prefaced by historical memoir. In 2022, Julie held a Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellowship at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. She has a B.A. in Liberal Arts (The Evergreen State College) and an M.A. in Ethnic Studies (UC Berkeley). She is currently a Senior Adjunct Professor in Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts.

Quynh H. Vo is a literary scholar, writer, and translator based in Washington, D.C., where she teaches and researches global Asian literature and culture at American University. She is a co-author (with Dr. Tung Bui, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa) of The Making of Little Saigon: Narratives of Nostalgia, (Dis)enchantments, and Aspirations (Hamilton Books, 2024) and a co-translator (with Dr. Quan Manh Ha, University of Montana) of Longings: Contemporary Fiction by Vietnamese Women Writers (Texas Tech University Press, 2024).

Daniella Zalcman is a Vietnamese-American photojournalist, journalism professor, and community organizer based in New Orleans. She is also part of the diaCRITICS steering committee.