Essays

We had decided to get married and have a wedding in the flickering cauldron that is inordinately expensive Los Angeles.

The image of you painfully exhaling your last breath still haunts every fragile fiber of my memory.

In both texts, the authors experiment with formally innovative narrative structure to push boundaries around the how and what—the technique and content—of Southeast Asian American life writing.

Among unconventional themes, the expression of pain in Lynh Bacardi’s work—the greatest depth of despair in lives of the social margins manifested—sheds light on what otherwise can be invisible to Vietnamese society.

“I really joined this residency to meet other authors from different cultural environments. …We talked, we listened, we engaged in dialogues,” Aubert-Nguyen said. “It helped me better understand their narrative styles, their esthetics, their oeuvres. Because we talked a lot about literature, but also art, music, graphic novels, traveling and cuisine. So it was very full and very diverse.”

The true North was a land of nothing. Of nothing to do. Nowhere to go. And no one to meet.