Viet Thanh Nguyen

Ocean Vuong is the Walt Whitman of Vietnamese American literature. Lyrical, expansive, sexual, provocative, he sings of the Vietnamese body and of Vietnamese history.

A graphic memoir of a South Vietnamese family’s refugee experiences and their settlement in California. Painful, moving, and gripping.

Truong discovered that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had a Vietnamese cook. This poetic novel is the imagined life of that Vietnamese cook, caught up in colonialism and a witness to the development of modernist literature.

Pham bicycled across Vietnam in the early 1990s, when the country was very poor. Catfish and Mandala is an excellent account of what Vietnam looked like then, on the cusp of moving from communism to capitalism.

A burned-out detective goes looking for his Vietnamese ex-wife in the dim, violent world of Las Vegas in a hardboiled detective novel that crosses with the refugee saga. This one kept me up to finish it.

A spare, lyrical novel about a young girl who flees Vietnam and grows up in San Diego, struggling to understand herself and her war-marked parents.

A novel in prose-poems about a refugee child’s life in Alabama, this book won the National Book Award for young people’s literature.

An epic about the shattering impact of the Vietnam War on one family, and connecting that war to America’s misadventures in the Middle East.

She is Vietnam’s most widely known dissident writer, who was exiled for writing books like this, which reveal the postwar failures of communism.

Lam is the cultural ambassador-par-excellence between Vietnam and the United States, and these essays prove it.

This novel expressed what I asked for in my nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War: fiction’s need to depict the power and the cost of empathy.

Widely considered to be the most important novel of the North Vietnamese soldier’s experiences, this is one of the great war novels of the world.

Bao Phi is an angry, radical poet, and I love angry, radical poets. He’s also a spoken word slam champion, and you should really catch him live—but the poems grab you from the page as well.

Nguyen Du’s The Tale of Kieu is Vietnam’s classic epic poem and is in English translation.

A dazzling comic book account of a family shattered by the Vietnam War, their struggles in the United States, and the difficult return to Vietnam. Visually stunning.

I teach this memoir regularly, and it retains its power as a page-turning account of a young South Vietnamese girl caught up in the war and its aftermath.
The Great Vietnam War novel was not written by an American.

One of the earliest Vietnamese American memoirs. Read this book and go to Duc’s bar Tadioto in Hanoi, the hippest spot in town run by a man who knows everyone.

Emerging from mid-century social movements, Civil Rights Era formations, and anti-war protests, Asian American studies is now an established field of transnational inquiry, diasporic engagement, and rights activism. These histories and origin points analogously serve as initial moorings for Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, a collection that considers-almost fifty years after its student protest founding--the possibilities of and limitations inherent in Asian American studies as historically entrenched, politically embedded, and institutionally situated interdiscipline. Unequivocally, Flashpoints for Asian American Studies investigates the multivalent ways in which the field has at times and--more provocatively, has not--responded to various contemporary crises, particularly as they are manifest in prevailing racist, sexist, homophobic, and exclusionary politics at home, ever-expanding imperial and militarized practices abroad, and neoliberal practices in higher education.

Transnational writers are increasingly opposed to representations of refugees, exiles, migrants, and their descendants as emblematic victims. With the rise of populist nationalisms in the USA and the UK in the eras of Trumpism, Brexit, and their aftermath, targets of nationalist groups have increasingly been represented, and thus constituted, as individual suffering victims. Certain groups embrace such representations. They use them to secure help and protection for themselves. Less scrupulous individuals may even embrace these representations to elide their own accountability and further nefarious goals. This book examines an intriguing selection of writers to show how they are attempting to recalibrate such stories to reject victimhood. It explores how just memory is deployed to ascribe agency to transnational characters.