Khuê Phạm is a journalist and novelist who was born in Berlin, Germany. Brothers and Ghosts, Phạm’s first novel, was published in German in 2021, with the English translation following in in 2024. Loosely based on stories related to Phạm’s family, the novel is intergenerational and transnational, following the lives of protagonists Kiều, Minh, and Sơn as their lives cross Germany, the US, and northern and southern Vietnam. Brothers and Ghosts is a groundbreaking work for which Phạm conducted extensive research and interviews, the first major novel from the Vietnamese diaspora in Germany. Brothers and Ghosts has received high critical and public praise, and a stage adaptation of the novel, titled KIM, has been produced and is currently on tour in Germany and Taiwan.
Phạm’s career as a journalist has included time at The Guardian and NPR Berlin. She has been a staff writer and editor at the German weekly Die Zeit for over ten years. Among Phạm’s notable publications at Die Zeit is “Pray for Me,” an investigative piece on the 39 Vietnamese migrants who died on an Essex lorry in 2019. This illuminating and deeply moving article tracks the local and global complexities of contemporary migration, both within and outside of Vietnam. It was nominated for the Nannen Prize, the German equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.
Along with Alice Bota and Özlem Topçu, Phạm also co-authored We New Germans (2012), a book of nonfiction about second-generation immigrants in Germany. Phạm was recently awarded a prestigious grant from the German Literary Fund that will support work on her second novel, which explores questions of motherhood and childhood through the lens of a Vietnamese German woman. She has brought needed attention to Vietnamese communities in Germany and is part of an emerging generation of writers in the country who explore issues of race, identity, and culture. Her writings show how Vietnamese diasporic culture is always evolving and emerging in exciting ways.
This interview was conducted on Zoom on Friday, March 28th, from Phạm’s home in Berlin, Germany. We discussed the meaning of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, and we also talked about a number of other topics including coming to terms with writing about Vietnam and family, journalism as way to deal with interesting or painful topics, the value of being a contradiction, the surprising and beautiful effects of putting your writing out in the world, and how literature can both represent and create diasporas.
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Marguerite Nguyen: Let’s talk about your career in journalism. Can you describe what drew you to journalism and how you developed a love for writing?
Khuê Phạm: I, like many writers, started out with being a bookworm. Even as a kid, I would go to the local library with my mother once a month and borrow loads of books. And it really was our introduction to literature—children’s literature, German literature, etc. So, I fell in love with reading. I read magazines and comics, too, and stories about little witches and what have you.
Then I started to write a little bit when I was in school. When I was 16, I spent an exchange year in the U.S., where I took a creative writing class. And then, as a student, I did my first internships in journalism at The Guardian and with different publications in Germany. I liked the fact that journalism is a profession where every day is quite different from the last and where you are a professional questioner, you get paid for asking other people questions. I love that. I also loved traveling around.
The paper I work for is a weekly paper, so it’s a bit special. You can perhaps compare it to a mixture between the New York Times weekend edition and The Atlantic. We do a lot of in-depth analysis and reporting.
I’ve had the chance to be a witness to world events, for instance, the Brexit vote in 2016. (I’d studied in the UK and was therefore assigned to cover the UK referendum for our paper). When Trump won the first time, I wrote about that, and I co-wrote a big story about the death of the 39 Vietnamese migrants who died in a lorry in Essex. Topics which were interesting or painful to me, I could somehow deal with by reporting about them. That’s what I really like about journalism.
MN: You mentioned that you had studied in the U.S. during high school. What was that experience like, and did it play a significant role in shaping your relationship to America?
KP: When I was 16, I spent a year at a boarding school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. That was an extreme culture shock because it was so different from my life in Berlin. I remember going to my first football game and watching a pep rally and thinking, “What’s going on here?” I was totally shocked.
In Germany, because of Germany’s Nazi past, people are timid when it comes to any expression of patriotism. The pep rally was super patriotic about the school, and I was just not used to something like that, or to football. I later came to like the school because it offered classes we didn’t have in Germany, such as creative writing, photography, and drama. When Brothers and Ghosts was published, my creative writing teacher from that time sent me a message saying he was really proud and had ordered the book for his library. It really meant a lot. In addition to having family in California, the exchange year made me feel like I’ve always had a relationship to the U.S.
MN: It sounds like you’ve always held an interest in nonfiction and fiction writing. What inspired you to turn from journalism and nonfiction writing to fiction?
KP: I was approached by a literary agent who had read some of my work in the magazine and knew my nonfiction book. He asked me if I wanted to write another book. It was like an external trigger that made me think about it.
At first, I was hesitant to write about a Vietnamese topic as a Vietnamese German journalist. The Asian community is much smaller than in the U.S. Invisible even. We have about 200,000 Vietnamese people so the way that you deal with your identity is quite different from the U.S. I was worried about fulfilling a cliche or expectation by writing about Vietnamese topics.
In the course of researching and writing the first draft, I decided the book should be fiction. I finally felt that the story of my family had such great dramatic potential, and it’s closest to my heart. And I feel that writing is always strongest when you somehow have strong emotions about it. I decided that it should not be a memoir of my family but the fictional story of a family which picks up on some of the topics and experiences that some of my relatives have had.
It was a long four years of trial and error, from the initial idea to the final product before publication. I was very unsure how people would take to it in Germany because, again, we don’t have that tradition of Vietnamese diaspora literature here. I didn’t know if German readers or the German literary establishment would take to it. It was my first novel. It was a bit of a risk. And it was the time of the pandemic.
The German version came out on September 2021, and four years later, I still get invitations for readings and messages from readers. The English translation has taken on a second life, and there is also a stage piece based on it, which just played at the National Arts Museum in Bonn a few weeks ago. More than 200 people came. It was moving to see a national museum put on a stage show about Vietnamese German identity and the legacy of the Vietnam War. We used documentary footage from the fall of Saigon and from the helicopter evacuations. Later, I heard that a Vietnamese woman in the audience had been on one of those helicopters. She was in the audience watching the video projection, and she cried.
MN: Would you say that the different versions of Brothers and Ghosts have helped Vietnamese diasporics see themselves in your story and perhaps brought people in the diaspora together?
KP: I feel this is a really different moment in time. When I grew up here in the 1990s, being Vietnamese German felt like a pretty lonely experience. At that time, my parents would have friends over, and they would sing karaoke, or there would be traditional Vietnamese music. It wasn’t really accessible to me as somebody from the second generation who was exposed to both Western and Asian culture. But now, the second generation is coming of age and leaving an imprint in very different fields, connecting across countries and generations.
MN: Brothers and Ghosts seems to have created something of a bridge between the U.S. and Germany.
KP: The was an exploration of my family history, an exploration of the diasporas in Germany and the U.S. I interviewed pretty much all of my relatives one-on-one for several hours about their lives. I’d never spoken to them so deeply about what they’ve gone through. It was a revelation. Maybe for them, it was also nice to see that I was interested in hearing about that. I don’t think they expected that.
The first-generation Vietnamese are quite tough. As refugees, they normally wouldn’t go around talking about their past and their time at the refugee camp. It was fascinating and moving and heartbreaking to hear those stories. It was almost easier for them to speak about these things in the context of book research rather than a personal level.
MN: What were some stories your relatives told you that were especially surprising and perhaps shaped the direction of your novel?
KP: There were a lot of surprises. I hadn’t realized that some of my uncles had tried to escape Vietnam when they were really young, like 13, 14 years old. They got caught, got thrown into prison, these mass prisons they told me about. I heard a lot of dramatic stories and surprisingly beautiful stories. My uncle from South Vietnam became best friends with a child from North Vietnam who had moved to Saigon. That was a really nice story that I put in the book. In the book it becomes a love story between Sơn who’s a teenager and a girl from Hanoi. So, it’s a bit different, but it’s based on that friendship between my uncle and his best friend from Hanoi.
There’s also a character in the book who’s hearing impaired. I have two aunts who are deaf. They cannot speak, they cannot hear. In order to hear their stories, I hired an ASL translator. For the first time, I could properly speak to them. Again, I was surprised to hear what they had to say. My aunt said she always wished that she could have gotten a normal education. She had grown up in Vietnam during a time of war, and there was no space, time, energy, or money to take care of children who had special needs. They had to learn to read lips and were taught at home by the other kids. Just being dragged along.
They never had the chance to get a proper education that would allow them to use their intelligence and talent. I learned from the ASL translator that with immigrant families with a child who has a disability, especially an invisible disability, they cannot properly take care of it. It’s terrible. It’s a wasted chance. I wonder about this unexplored potential, the life they perhaps could have had if they had grown up under different circumstances.
MN: The interviews you conducted reveal so much complexity about the lives of Vietnamese diasporics that you bring into the novel. Yet as you said earlier, a lot of stereotypes and assumptions about Vietnamese Germans exist. How did you negotiate the different pressures of representation as a writer—the desire to do justice to the stories you heard, the desire to write the story you wanted to write, and the desire not to replicate certain cliches?
KP: I think if you’re a person of color in Germany, the assumption is you’re an immigrant, so all you know to write about is your life and your community, but you don’t really have any other qualifications apart from that. And that puts writers of color in a difficult spot because on the one hand, they do understand much more about their community. But, for example, I don’t want to be the ambassador. I don’t want to carry that burden of representation. I don’t want to stereotype myself. But I have found my peace with it. I’ve been with Die Zeit for more than 10 years. I’ve covered so many mainstream topics, like British politics, and I’m now a magazine writer who has profiled all kinds of people. In my journalistic work, I sometimes revert to Vietnamese German topics, but not much at all. My journalistic work is quite normal if you want to call it that.
My fictional work is a great space to be a bit more subjective in my writing and to put myself forward as a person more. And this has not led to the effect I feared. I do not feel like I got stereotyped, and it did not make me smaller to write about it. It actually showed the complexity of what it means to be have this identity, and it enabled me to find my own words to describe my own journey.
To give you a very simple example, my name Khuê Phạm often posed difficulties when I started getting published as a writer. “How do you write that name? What’s the first name? What’s the last name?” They could never put the accent under the “a” in my last name. They don’t have that in the German or Western keyboard. The layout system that we use for our newspaper doesn’t have that little dot. For a very long time, my published name would have the correct accent on my first name, but not on my last name. It was quite symbolic of how I felt. At some point I thought: Why don’t we find a solution? Now, every time the paper prints my name, they add the dot by hand. A lot of people who have written about me have gone out of their way to get it right. So sometimes you can make demands. It’s okay to be a bit complicated and not be as linear as other people would expect. And perhaps to be a contradiction.
MN: Making room for complexity and contradiction seems important these days, especially given how increasingly polarized political discourse is becoming around the world.
KP: Yes. If you listen to the discourse of MAGA, complexities are often reduced. It’s always us against the foreign invaders. But people like you and I are neither. We’re none of those two categories of people. In fact, a lot of people don’t fit into these two categories. A lot of people are in between. What I try to do is describe big historical events through the lens of a family in order to make the person’s experience palpable to people who don’t know it. They might never have heard of Vietnam, but they may know the problem of being part of a family where one uncle supports vaccinations and the other doesn’t.
This kind of complexity is a very human experience, and it can free us from categories and cliches. A lot of the identity questions that people like us have are perhaps questions that other people have too. We just ask them in a more pronounced way. And I feel that it is possible to make it more understandable if you break it down to the level of human dynamics and emotions. They take place in a certain cultural or political context, but very often they are just part of the human experience that a lot of people share, be they Vietnamese or not.
MN: On the topic of contradictions, were there ever times during the process of writing this novel when you felt conflicted about what you wanted to write and what you thought editors, publishers, or readers might expect from you?
KP: Luckily, I never had an instance when my editor said, “Oh, why don’t you write it this way or that way? Or aren’t Vietnamese women this way and not that way?” But I certainly had moments where I felt protective, especially with my family. This is also why I chose the format of fiction. I felt that it could protect them. For example, in the story, the uncle of the main character is a Trump supporter, and I don’t know if my uncles have ever voted for Donald Trump. If this had been nonfiction, they perhaps would have felt uncomfortable being portrayed in such a way. I was also conscious about the topic of Vietnamese upbringing. As we all know, a lot of families struggle with that—violence, verbal abuse. I didn’t really dig into that for my first book, but it’s an important topic to address. It’s important to be honest. That’s what writing is for. The new book does explore some of these topics. And it’s also a work of fiction.
In our community, you feel protective, especially when you write about a community that is marginalized. Through fiction, you always have this layer of disclaimer.
MN: Is there anything about the reception of the novel that has surprised you?
KP: It’s quite interesting to see the different perspectives people take. A lot of interviews I did in Germany entailed explaining Vietnamese culture and addressing questions of cultural identity associated with growing up in Germany. For many people in Germany, it was like an introduction to the Vietnam War and its legacy. With other online talks or seminars, in the U.S. for example, you could tell they were quite deep into the topic of the Asian diaspora. They could pick up nuances and see it in the context of other works of the Asian diaspora.
With the stage piece in Taiwan, it was interesting to see how they would connect the novel to the story of Taiwan. At first sight, it doesn’t really have a clear connection. But I learned that a lot of people were really interested in the story because Taiwan has a lot of Vietnamese immigrants as well. Somebody said to me that as a Taiwanese person, the story felt very close because they were also, in a way, second-generation to mainland China. And if you look at it, the history of China and Taiwan somewhat mirrors the division between communist and anti-communist Vietnam.
What is surprising to me are the parallels that people draw that are not so obvious to me but somehow lay dormant in the novel. The reader’s interpretations can go much further than what I, as the author, had intended. It opens up my eyes to the book in a new way.
MN: The global resonance of Brothers and Ghosts brings me to the impetus behind this special issue of diaCRITICS. We are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the “end” of the Vietnam War. What does this moment mean for you? How do you think about this historic moment?
KP: First and foremost, for somebody living in the Vietnamese diaspora, it’s an opportunity to bring the topic to the table. There are so many mythologies about the Vietnam War, and most of them are written by American war reporters or film directors. They show a very specific kind of white male perspective that is quite different from the perspective that a lot of Vietnamese people have. As a piece of pop culture, the Vietnam War always has some grand story to tell. Like the small, brave Vietnamese fighting back against the big imperialists. The 1968 movement, or the David and Goliath narrative that the Vietnamese Communists love.
But all of these narratives tell just one side of the story. This war is a part of our human memory, but it is not fully understood yet. In historical time, fifty years is not a long time. A lot of people who have lived through that war are still alive. They can still tell how it divided their families or how they struggled through that time. I wish there was a chance to look at it from all perspectives, from the sides of the winners and the losers, and especially from the ground, from the perspectives of people who actually live in the country—to document it and to show its many facets beyond American war movies and documentaries. Coming from Germany, where the whole society took such a close and self-critical look at its past with the Second World War, what we call dealing with the past, I wish there was a chance to do something similar in Vietnam, especially since a lot of people are still alive.
I don’t know what the perspective in Vietnam is beyond party lines. My sense is that a lot of people in Vietnam, which is a young country, want to get over it. They want to move on. Why always talk about the past? It’s such a burden. But I do feel that the past always affects the present, and perhaps if we had a chance to take a more critical and honest look at what happened at that time and in the years after, then it could touch people much more. But it’s difficult to do such a research project in Vietnam itself due to censorship rules.
I did an event in Saigon last year, and I received some questions about identity along the lines of: Why does the diaspora have such hangups about the past? I can see that perhaps they think we are producing a cliché, or taking a cliched look at things. But in Vietnam, a lot of people also wonder what it means to be Vietnamese today. In a country where you don’t have free speech, free press, or free literature, it’s so hard to have these intellectual discussions.
I do feel as Vietnam grows economically, it is so important not to leave out the intellectual and cultural questions. Otherwise, you’ll have a country that’s becoming richer and richer, but it’s not developing as a society in terms of reflecting on its own past or values or taking into consideration what people think, not only the party. I feel that people from the diaspora can be in dialogue with that. I am conscious of the fact that I wrote Brothers and Ghosts from the perspective of the diaspora. It has a very strong international angle and makes it very clear.
But I did interview a lot of people who had fought in the Vietnam War or survived or tried to escape. I wanted to treat that with respect. Perhaps in the diaspora, we are not burdened by censorship. But we don’t know better. Perhaps we can collaborate across academic institutions, newspapers, etc. We can use these tools to explore. The Vietnam War is to me an important event that I feel connected to, not from the experience of being a refugee myself because I did not experience that, but by feeling that it’s part of my legacy. It’s a historic event that’s not fully understood.
MN: Has your book been translated in Vietnamese?
KP: No. We did reach out to a few Vietnamese publishers when it was published in German. And two of them took a close look at it. But I just heard from someone that they said, unfortunately, it was not possible for them to translate it, publish it. This is not for literary reasons, but for political reasons. Apparently, ever since then—that was in 2021 or 2022—it’s become even more difficult in the publishing industry with crackdowns, especially with small publishers.
But I am meeting with the Goethe Institute, which is organizing the tour I’m doing in May, and they will organize a networking lunch with different Vietnamese publishers. I’m interested to speak to them, hear what they have to say.
How do you feel about narratives of the Vietnam War?
MN: I also think the U.S. is still reliant on white, masculinist narratives of the war in popular culture. Even some scholarly works still ignore Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic perspectives and overlook the global nature of the war, the fact that it involved not only the U.S. but also China, the Soviet Union, Australia, South Korea, Canada, etc.
Like you, I think we need to engage with the perspectives of those who lived through the war and the imprint the war left on subsequent generations. We can also go in the other temporal direction and pay more attention to Vietnam’s longer history—the days of French colonialism, the earlier days of US-Vietnamese contact, even earlier days of European presence. Recognizing Vietnamese history before these moments is also important so that our understanding of Vietnam is not limited to this one 20th century event, despite how transformative it was.
But scholarly and literary works, like yours, that are coming out are really changing things. When I started graduate school, there was a lot of skepticism about whether Vietnamese American literature was even a viable category. So the evolution of Vietnamese diasporic literature has been very exciting.
I am curious how literature’s imaginative, inventive abilities might combine with realism in a way that provides a more nuanced portrayal of the Vietnam War. Literature can take us into the complex histories and lives of characters to shape and reshape public consciousness about the war. But there is also the question of who is going to listen to it, who’s going to read it.
KP: That’s the challenge, right? We are connected to and passionate about this topic. But how do we reach others?
Here in Germany, the 50th anniversary is probably not going to be a big thing like in the U.S. because Germany was not fighting in the war like the U.S. But I am doing a few events in different places. And it does seem to be a moment when people are taking a look at Vietnam again, which they know mainly as a country of tourism and great food and friendly people.
It’s a chance to have discussions about Vietnam and what it has gone through, but it will take more decades to explore this topic and broaden it. And I wonder what it will be like in Vietnam. I’m going there in May for a week for reading tours and look forward to the conversations and seeing how people feel about this topic.
I do think that literature can sometimes really touch people in very special ways because you read it and it’s so personal. You read it and think about it, and perhaps you identify with a character, and that’s a very powerful way of speaking to someone. I’m not going to change the minds of 80 million people, but even if those who read the book somehow think differently about the war, that’s already a small difference, a small step towards making our community a bit more understandable to others. I’ve received that feedback from some readers. That the book made them understand. A lot of Germans wrote to me, for example, saying they had a Vietnamese friend but never really knew much about their past, and this book helped them understand better.
I’ve also been asked quite a few times from the younger generation how to talk to parents or family about their stories. So, literature can even open up a space for conversation within a family.
There was a mixed-race schoolboy, around 14 or 15 years old, who came to two of my readings. He told me that after reading Brothers and Ghosts, he decided to find the contact information of his grandmother in Vietnam. And he wrote to them. That’s quite amazing. A lot of times people already have within them a desire to connect with parts of their family or their Vietnamese culture. They may have an ambivalent relationship to it, and then they see that other people also have an ambivalent relationship with Vietnam or Vietnamese culture, or a difficult relationship with their parents. And they realize they’re not the only one.
MN: Literature can humanize your struggles when the outside world doesn’t.
KP: Yes, it can. When I was younger, I often struggled with my Vietnamese background. But perhaps it is precisely that struggle and the contradictions and the challenges that come with it that are a driving force for me to write. And maybe it’s something that other people connect to because they also know the struggle.
MN: I know that you’re at work on your second novel. And you were also recently awarded a grant from the German Literature Fund. Congratulations! What did it feel like to win this prize, and what are your hopes for this upcoming year?
KP: It’s really amazing. The prize will support you for one year if you win one of their grants for an ongoing project. I did not expect this to happen. And it’s such a relief to have it, and it felt quite motivating because I’m working on this new novel that explores questions of motherhood and childhood through the lens of a Vietnamese German woman. And I have a son now who’s four years old.
When I grew up in Germany, I always grew up with the expectation to perform. To do well in school, to get a good job, to have a career. That was how I’d make it in society. And when I became a mother, somehow that came crashing down because I realized that I couldn’t work in the same way that I did before—always going the extra mile and never taking a rest, never feeling that it’s good enough.
When you have a kid, life turns upside down, and you’re faced with very different challenges every day. Seemingly mundane challenges, physical challenges. And it made me rethink so many things about my life and about how I saw myself. And it also made me think a lot about my own childhood because you look at your child and you think, I want my child to grow up happy, and I want him to hear that I love him every day. And I noticed my parents became different people when they became grandparents, they changed. They were so tough and strict when I was younger, and now they’re soft like butter. They go to such lengths to play with him and make him happy. They never complain. They’ve helped me so much. It made me look at them in a different way.
So, I’m trying to work through all these topics in this new book. It’s also an exploration of identity, an exploration of what it means to have a home, to have a family. But in a way, the focus will be much smaller than my last novel. It’s third-person and focused on one main character, a woman, and we meet her in her late 30s and also as a child as a child and teenager. This time, I felt it would be good to immerse myself more into one character in order to go deeper into their inner journey. But there are also many other characters surrounding her.
This is why I actually thought I would never get that grant from the literary foundation because I thought, this is a women’s topic. In the literary establishment, this is not seen as real literature. A lot of juries, a lot of committees have a lot of men in positions of power. I had this notion that it would not be seen as equally important as hard topics.
MN: How do you think the writing process for this novel will be different from your last novel?
KP: It’s very different because now I have a kid. So again, I cannot perform in the same way I did. My word count every day is much, much lower. I can only devote so many hours a day to writing before I have to go and pick up my kid at daycare. My mind is more scattered because I have so many things to carry around with me mentally. But at the same time, it’s also like a meditation and an escape. And in contrast to the last book, as I’m writing, there’s a group of people I speak to a lot. I send them individual chapters, and we talk about them. It’s quite an open process this time.
MN: What’s next on your reading list?
KP: I definitely want to read Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’m such a great fan of hers. I think Americanah is one of the great diasporic novels of our times.
MN: I think I’ve exhausted you for almost two hours. Thank you so much for taking the time for this interview. It’s always exciting when a new work related to Vietnamese diaspora appears. DVAN is always thinking about how to support the artists, so it’s thrilling to see how well your novel has been received, and I also hope it brings more attention to the excellent journalistic work you’ve done.
KP: The support has been really great and uplifting. I personally feel very much like I am part of the special family of Vietnamese diaspora writers. I do feel that we are connected and we have a lot in common, even though we grew up in different countries. It’s quite interesting to see how common threads, common topics, like what we talked earlier about family upbringing, plays out in different countries. For example, a few months ago, Elizabeth Ai was here to promote New Wave, the documentary, and reached out to me and asked if I could moderate the talk, and it was really nice to connect across different disciplines and realize that we have a lot of common interests.
That’s why I feel quite connected to this family of Vietnamese diaspora writers, and I think that DVAN is a great institution, a great network. As somebody coming from a country where the community is much smaller, it’s great to know that DVAN is out there. It’s a place where you can connect with like-minded people. And I do feel that perhaps for younger writers, it’s great to see what’s already out there. See that things are moving forward, and people are pushing for it, claiming space, and so on. I feel like I’m part of something that’s developing, moving, evolving, and that’s pretty cool.
Marguerite Nguyen is an Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University. Her research and teaching cover Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, and ecocriticism.
Khuê Phạm is an award-winning Vietnamese-German writer. A graduate from the LSE, she freelanced for The Guardian and NPR’s Berlin bureau before becoming an editor at Die Zeit. She was nominated for Germany’s version of the Pulitzer Prize. Her novel Brothers and Ghosts is inspired by the story of her Vietnamese family.
