Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, The Colors of April: Fiction on the Vietnam War’s Legacy 50 Years Later is a stirring and timely anthology that conglomerates the voices of contemporary Vietnamese and Vietnamese American authors. Within its pages lies a mosaic of narratives—stories shaped by exile and endurance, memory and reconciliation. These are not merely tales of war, but meditations on its lingering reverberations across generations and geographies.
The title, The Colors of April, gestures toward that pivotal moment in April 1975 when Saigon fell and the war officially ended. Yet, rather than dwell in bloodshed or battlefields, the book’s cover—a serene green background adorned with delicate petals—subtly indicates the themes of healing, remembrance, and transnational kinship. It is not the machinery of war that dominates this collection, but its aftermath, especially when writers express a fervent desire for inner peace and healing, both at personal and collective levels.
For decades, literature on the Vietnam War published in the US has often bifurcated into two distinct streams—those written in English by diasporic authors, and those by Vietnamese writers in English translation. By constellating voices from both within and beyond Vietnam, this book forges a literary bridge, offering a prismatic view of a shared, fractured history. Regardless of origin, language, or political legacy, these authors speak to one another across the chasm of war, inviting readers into an empathetic reckoning with sorrow, resilience, and survival.
The editors write, “We are defined not by the wars we fight, but by the stories we choose to tell.” And indeed, each story in this collection becomes a thread in a larger fabric of memory. In Nguyễn Thị Kim Hòa’s haunting “A Rockfall Dream,” Văn Xương’s layered “Echoes,” and Trần Thị Tú Ngọc’s melancholic “In Silence, In Rain,” readers encounter the emotional terrain of postwar Vietnam—family tensions, generational silence, and the enduring presence of loss.
From the diaspora, other voices illuminate the fragmented journeys of refugees: Barbara Tran’s “Laws of Motion” exposes the vulnerability of the adopted child in a foreign land; Gin To’s “Bad Things Didn’t Happen” skewers the absurdities of assimilation with wry humor; Annhien Nguyen’s “A Mother’s Song” traces the slow disillusionment behind the American Dream. Yet through these stories, hope flickers persistently, even defiantly. There is grace in the resilience of characters who, despite fractured pasts, yearn to mend, to reconnect, to remember.
In narratives like Vũ Cao Phan’s “War’s End” and Văn Xương’s aforementioned “Echoes,” reconciliation is not just political or national—it is deeply human. Christina Vo’s “The Return” and Vu Tran’s “Lost Love” echo with nostalgia and longing, capturing the ache of return of second-generation Vietnamese Americans drawn back to the country their parents once fled, seeking not just roots, but a sense of belonging and peace. Notably, the anthology does not shy away from critiquing the architects of narrative power. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Immolation” is a searing indictment of American media’s myth-making, while Kevin D. Pham’s “A Vietnamese Arrière-Boutique” explores how propaganda haunts both sides of the war’s ideological divide.
While it features a few familiar names, The Colors of April is not a collection featuring solely literary celebrity. Instead, it elevates a chorus of voices—established and emerging alike—each one vital in stitching together a collective remembrance. The reader leaves not with the clamor of war in their ears, but with the quieter hues of serenity, of stories softly blooming where silence once lived.
As the editors remind us, “Together they [the stories] show how the literal and ideological oceans that once divided the Vietnamese—separating those who left from those who stayed—are now finding common shores.” The Colors of April is not just a literary accomplishment; it is a gesture toward healing, and a testament to the power of storytelling to reunite what history has torn apart.
Hồ Thị Vân Anh currently works as a lecturer of Literature at the Department of Literature and Linguistics, Vinh University, Vietnam. She completed her PhD degree from the Hanoi National University of Education, Vietnam in 2022. She is the author of the forthcoming book Nước Mỹ của Faulkner (Faulkner’s America) (2025) and co-authored Giáo trình Văn học Âu – Mỹ (A Textbook of European and American Literature) (2021). She is the alumna of the 2023 SUSI -Study of U.S. Institutes for Scholars program of the U.S. Department of State. Her areas of academic interest include the classics in American literature, Vietnamese American literature, and contemporary Vietnamese literature.
