It is an incredible moment to be a Vietnamese diasporic writer. Four decades ago, when I was first fantasizing about the possibility of being a writer, very few Vietnamese writers were publishing in English. I knew about this scarcity because I haunted the aisles of the San José Public Library in California, reading anything that intrigued me, including any book that might tell me more about where I came from and who my people were. I was an American, but I was not American-born, and the reminders of my other country were ever present in the 1970s and 1980s, when the United States was fighting its war in Việt Nam again in memory. In 1982 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was constructed, honoring the more than fifty-eight thousand American soldiers who died in the war but forgetting to mention the more than two hundred thousand South Vietnamese soldiers who died, or the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians who perished, or the Laotians and Cambodians who were also lost, both as soldiers and civilians. By now it is a cliché among Vietnamese in the diaspora to say that Việt Nam is a country and not a war, but in my childhood and adolescence, war was almost the only association in English with the name of the country of my birth.
I yearned to hear the voices of Vietnamese people because, as an American, I understood how Americans saw and heard, or didn’t hear, Vietnamese people. I watched almost all of Hollywood’s Vietnam War movies, an exercise I recommend to no one, especially if you are Vietnamese. Whether Americans meant the war or the country when they said Việt Nam, “Vietnam” for Americans was an American drama, an American civil war, a conflict in the American soul in which we were the extras. This was our country, and this was our war, and yet our only place in American movies was to be killed, raped, threatened, or rescued. All we could do was scream, cry, beg, threaten, or curse, and if we could say anything at all, it was either “me love you long time” or “thank you” for being rescued. Of course, we were never so rude as to mention, at least in English, that we wouldn’t have needed to be rescued by Americans if we hadn’t been invaded by Americans in the first place.
Perhaps I intuitively understood that this American understanding would have global significance. The United States was a world power, and its memories of the war and the country that both had the same name would influence how the rest of the world saw these things. American memories certainly influenced me, but they also confused me, because they were not the same as the memories of my parents or, so far as I could tell, the memories of thousands of other Vietnamese people in the refugee community of San José, one of the largest outposts of the global Vietnamese refugee diaspora that sprang into being in the wake of the war. Back then, that diaspora numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Now the number is roughly four million, relative to a Vietnamese population in the country of origin that is more than ninety-five million. The global diaspora is a minority but a significant one. When it comes to literature, for example, it’s possible that more non-Vietnamese people have read books by diasporic Vietnamese authors than have read books by Vietnamese writers from the homeland. The names of some of the writers in this volume—Kim Thúy of Canada and Ocean Vuong of the United States, for instance—would likely be recognized by their national literary audiences more so than their contemporary postwar equivalents in Việt Nam.
The reasons for this are complex and perhaps have something to do with the Vietnamese government’s highly restrictive attitude when it comes to free speech, artistic freedom, and cultural production, which has prevented many diasporic writers from being translated and published in Vietnamese. For those refugees who fled to countries like the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, and Israel, the situation we find ourselves in is contradictory. Unlike in Việt Nam, we are generally free to say what we like, which has undoubtedly spurred literary, cultural, artistic, and political expression. But we also reside in countries shaped by some mix of past and present imperialism, colonialism, and racism, where our presence as refugees and immigrants, Vietnamese and Asian, brings mixed results. Sometimes we are the evidence of our countries’ tolerance for diversity. Other times, we are treated as the Yellow Peril, as was the case during the global COVID-19 pandemic.
The importance of literature specifically and writing in general is magnified in these kinds of moments, especially as we look back on the war in Việt Nam and other episodes in our countries’ histories of maltreatment toward people of color, minorities of various kinds, Indigenous peoples, and others who were colonized. For many immigrants and refugees, writing and storytelling became some of our most important tools, methods, or weapons for fighting back against racist erasure, sexual exploitation, and imperialist manipulation. In my adventures in the San José library, what I discovered was that the books about Việt Nam were mostly about the war and therefore mostly about Americans. I found one well-intentioned children’s book about a Vietnamese refugee, but I didn’t recognize myself in its world of rice paddies, water buffalo, and half-naked peasant boys, even if others might have. I finally stumbled on the novel Blue Dragon White Tiger by Trần Văn Dĩnh, a diplomat writing about the war from a South Vietnamese point of view and perhaps the first Vietnamese writer to write fiction in English. He said, “I am a Vietnamese by birth, an American by choice.” An echo of this must have stuck in my head, for decades later I wrote, “I was born in Việt Nam, but made in America.” His novel put another thought in my head: we could write about our own experiences, in English, which was an adopted tongue that felt like my native tongue.
Others did not see this tongue in my mouth as my native tongue. Another cliché of the Asian American experience, perhaps applicable to other countries where Asians find themselves to be a minority, and where they find themselves seen as foreigners, is the question: “Where are you really from?” And the statement: “Your English is so good!” Now that there are more of us writing in English (and French and German and other languages), perhaps these kinds of questions and comments are rarer in countries with white, or at least non-Asian, majorities. But even after I published my first novel (written in English), a white American editor asked me if any of my work has been translated into English. I am not convinced we in the diaspora have won the battle against our perceived foreignness and our lack of legitimacy in speaking the master’s various tongues, but if we have made progress, much of that credit is due to our storytellers.
“For many immigrants and refugees, writing and storytelling became some of our most important tools, methods, or weapons for fighting back against racist erasure, sexual exploitation, and imperialist manipulation.”
Writing is perhaps the art with the lowest price of entry. All that writing costs is a writer’s time, and some portion of their life and spirit. TV and the movies would allow us to make a much larger impact, for even a bad TV show or movie will be seen by millions, whereas a good or great book would be lucky if it sells hundreds of thousands of copies. But TV and the movies are the slowest to change, being so expensive to create, finance, and produce. Vietnamese diasporic writers have seized on the more readily available literary medium, in poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, to tell our stories. I say “our” with the awareness that there is an oftentimes ambivalent relationship between a so-called minority writer and their community, the infamous burden of representation where a so-called minority writer is expected to speak for their entire community. That burden is imposed by the so-called majority and also by the community, and the result is that sometimes the community groans at a writer’s inaccuracies while the writer sighs in exasperation and demands simply to be seen as a writer.
I hope one thing this book demonstrates is that to be a diasporic Vietnamese writer and to be just a writer are not mutually exclusive choices. They are mutually exclusive only in the sense that dominant societies built on legacies and realities of racism, sexism, and colonialism have imposed such a binary on us, and not on writers of the majority, who have the freedom to be just writers. These unmarked writers rarely have to question their individuality and their freedom. That in itself is a privilege of race, gender, class, ability, and sexuality, and is not something that we who have not been so privileged should yearn for. Instead, we should be working to create a world where such an advantage is questioned, where we should ask why some writers (and people) have adjectives put before them, like “Vietnamese American writer,” and other writers do not. I have no problem with adjectives and with being a Vietnamese American writer, but there should be adjectives for all or adjectives for none. Call me a Vietnamese American writer so long as you call a white American writer a “white American writer.”
Adjectives and identities such as “Vietnamese American” are symptoms of deeper structural inequities. Instead of treating “Vietnamese diasporic” or any identity like it as a problem or a pejorative, we should be asking why a need for such an adjective or identity exists in the first place. Attempting to answer that question from many different perspectives, this book is also an effort to reach what I call “narrative plenitude.” Narrative scarcity is when almost none of the stories are about us, which is why any time a story by one of us appears, an unfair burden is put on that story and its creator that would hardly ever be put on a white writer, a white male writer, a white straight male writer. Narrative scarcity is only a symptom of structural inequity, a sign of other injustices throughout a society that have stifled us in many different ways historically and in the present. In contrast, narrative plenitude is when there are many stories about us. When no one story or one person has to carry the burden of representation. When there are so many stories we cannot keep up.
Narrative plenitude cannot be achieved without social and economic justice. We still live in unjust times, and we have not reached narrative plenitude when it comes to diasporic Vietnamese people. Even when it comes to the largest such community, Vietnamese Americans, we are not there yet. But in the realm of literature, signs of hope flash. In the 1980s and 1990s, when Le Ly Hayslip and Andrew X. Pham were publishing, I read their books right away. Even as recently as ten years or twenty years ago, when I first encountered the works of Lan Cao, Monique Truong, Dao Strom, Bao Phi, Thanhhà Lại, Aimee Phan, Beth (Bich) Minh Nguyen, Amy Quan Barry, Hoa Nguyen, Vincent Lam, and Dương Vân Mai Elliott, I could still keep up. But now that’s no longer possible. Partly this is because I’ve become more aware of writers writing in other languages besides English, like Hoai Huong Aubert-Nguyen, Doan Bui, Vaan Nguyen, Anna Moï, and Marcellino Trương Lực. And partly this is because there are so many writers publishing their first books in English over the past few years at a rate I could only have fantasized about decades ago: Thi Bui, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Duy Đoàn, Cathy Linh Che, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Violet Kupersmith, Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood, and Paul Tran. There are many more Vietnamese diasporic writers not included in this book. The increasing diversity of such writers means that the war and colonialism and history are no longer the only preoccupations, even if they still are the most prominent.
When it comes to our domination by the past, I am reminded of the ending of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, when she says this about slavery: “This is not a story to pass on.” The implication is twofold: don’t ignore this story, and yet don’t keep telling this story. Both can be true at the same time, because history is not done with us, even if we are sick of history. In the case of Vietnamese diasporic writers, a horrific past of colonialism and war has killed millions and has produced the diaspora. No wonder some writers want to take a pass. Must we always be defined by horror? And no wonder some writers refuse to pass on by. If we do not write about this horror, won’t we be defined by a history written by our colonizers?
This edited volume dwells on both questions and includes some newer voices like André Dao and Tracey Lien in Australia and T.K. Lê and Duy Đoàn. There are also arts activists Philip Nguyễn and Minh Huynh Vu as well as visual artist Matt Huynh and musical artist Thảo Nguyễn in the United States who gesture toward what a new generation might think. Narrative plenitude is also about the need for new voices, new writers, and new ideas to take the stage and have their turn. We have more than one generation and more than one voice, and this book collectively makes that claim. No more voices for the voiceless, which was never a title that many of us wanted to adopt or have placed on us. We could sense that when any of us were called a voice for the voiceless, what others really wanted was to have just one of us speak in place of the chorus or the cacophony of our communities, who were never voiceless. Rather than seeking voices for the voiceless, abolish the conditions of voicelessness instead. Literature and writing, storytelling and art, cannot accomplish that abolition on their own. Only social and political movements, motivated by utopian dreams, can abolish these conditions of mass inequity and injustice. But literature and writing, storytelling and art, can illuminate the way.
This essay is the Foreword to The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora, edited by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer, Nothing Ever Dies, and, most recently, To Save and to Destroy. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen is Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
