Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network Series – serie

Of the twelve short stories appearing in Hà Nội at Midnight, ten are appearing in English for the first time. Bringing to life the full range of Bảo Ninh's inventive and poetic language, Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran are granting to English readers Bảo Ninh's first book-length work since The Sorrow of War.Hà Nội and Midnight delineates the complex outpourings of war and the way it remakes our relation to each other.Bảo Ninh's stories accentuate the gamut of human emotions: nostalgia, anguish, desolation, melancholy, poignancy, and hope. His stories wistfully render pre-war Hà Nội, its peaceful alleys and streets, its courteous residents, and the cozy atmosphere when family members, neighbors, and friends gather around a fire or converse in a coffee shop, as in "Hà Nội at Midnight" and in "Reminiscences."Juxtaposed with this tranquility and geniality are the abandoned areas and defoliated forests occasioned by American bombardment and the American use of Agent Orange, as in "An Unnamed Star" and "A Farewell to a Soldier's Life." Images of polluted rivers and streams, the war-torn sky, the pungent air filled with the stench of decomposing human corpses, and the deafening roar of helicopters and bombers hovering in the gloomy sky dominate the settings of Bảo Ninh's stories.Intertwined with these horrific images are human tears shed during farewell ceremonies, when recruits are separated from their loved ones, when parents live in anxiety and hope at home while their children are fighting in a war in remote regions, and when soldiers bury their comrades and burden themselves with their fallen comrades' unfulfilled wishes.

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of its publication, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network is proud to release a newly updated version of Watermark, the seminal anthology of Vietnamese American literature. Contextualized by a new foreword from Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and seasoned with new voices, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition takes its place as a generational work of eclectic and essential voices.Edited by Barbara Tran, Monique Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi, this updated edition of Watermark continues to elevate Vietnamese American literature, whose renaissance it ushered in upon its first publication. Again, some of the most innovative contemporary Vietnamese American writers, such as Linh Dinh, Andrew Lam, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Dao Strom, explore thematic and stylistic territory previously overlooked in other collections, which have traditionally focused on war. New voices such as Anvi Hoàng, Vinh Nguyen, and Vi Khi Nao are included in this new edition, raising the number of pieces from forty to fifty-two.Watermark lifts all constraints, leaving the works to reset the boundaries for themselves. And they do—using poetry, fiction, and experimental forms to venture further into the fringes of the Vietnamese American psyche. A work equal measures foundational and pathbreaking, now available again for a new generation of readers—an essential collection not to be missed.

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of its publication, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network is proud to release a newly updated version of Watermark, the seminal anthology of Vietnamese American literature. Contextualized by a new foreword from Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and seasoned with new voices, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition takes its place as a generational work of eclectic and essential voices. Edited by Barbara Tran, Monique Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi, this updated edition of Watermark continues to elevate Vietnamese American literature, whose renaissance it ushered in upon its first publication. Again, some of the most innovative contemporary Vietnamese American writers, such as Linh Dinh, Andrew Lam, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Dao Strom, explore thematic and stylistic territory previously overlooked in other collections, which have traditionally focused on war. New voices such as Anvi Hoàng, Vinh Nguyen, and Vi Khi Nao are included in this new edition, raising the number of pieces from forty to fifty-two.Watermark lifts all constraints, leaving the works to reset the boundaries for themselves. And they do—using poetry, fiction, and experimental forms to venture further into the fringes of the Vietnamese American psyche. A work equal measures foundational and pathbreaking, now available again and expanded for a new generation of readers—an essential collection not to be missed.

The title of this debut collection, Nothing Follows, is reappropriated from a government document establishing the beginning of a refugee family’s time in the United States. At every coordinate of their lives, the refugee family provides affidavits, letters, and reams of paperwork as they work to beseech those in power to grant them “family reunification” visas for those they had to leave behind in 1975 after the fall of Saigon.Nothing Follows draws from the genres of memoir and poetry. Written from a young girl’s perspective, the center of this world is a military father, an absent mother, sisters who come and go, broken brothers, and friends she meets in San José. With each place the book travels through—from Butler, Pennsylvania, to San José, California—we see that racism, objectification, and sexual violence permeate the realities of the narrator and those close to her. In marking the journey, Lan Duong recreates the portraits of the girl’s friends and family and maps out refugee girlhoods. Spiked with violence, pleasure, and longing, these refuges are questionable sanctuaries for those refugee girls who have grown up during the 1980s in the aftermath of war.

The title of this debut collection, Nothing Follows, is reappropriated from a government document establishing the beginning of a refugee family’s time in the United States. At every coordinate of their lives, the refugee family provides affidavits, letters, and reams of paperwork as they work to beseech those in power to grant them “family reunification” visas for those they had to leave behind in 1975 after the fall of Saigon.Nothing Follows draws from the genres of memoir and poetry. Written from a young girl’s perspective, the center of this world is a military father, an absent mother, sisters who come and go, broken brothers, and friends she meets in San José. With each place the book travels through—from Butler, Pennsylvania, to San José, California—we see that racism, objectification, and sexual violence permeate the realities of the narrator and those close to her. In marking the journey, Lan Duong recreates the portraits of the girl’s friends and family and maps out refugee girlhoods. Spiked with violence, pleasure, and longing, these refuges are questionable sanctuaries for those refugee girls who have grown up during the 1980s in the aftermath of war.

Drowning Dragon Slips by Burning Plains counters the narrative held in the West about women and the land of the quaintly "lush" and "charming" Mekong Delta. A rice field in the middle of the communist and American-backed government, the delta was an essential resource that fed both sides of the war in Vietnam. The Mekong Delta went through countless massacres on an immense scale. Yet, history wiped the injuries away as if the river forgot. In her debut collection, Khải Đơn explores the meaning of being a woman in a land robbed of its innocence. Through a collage-like approach of personal history and fables, Khải Đơn's poems present an insidious flow of recollections that young people do not want to remember and that old people avoid discussing. In poems that lament and wonder, Khải Đơn reclaims the narrative for her people by unexpected material yielded from social research, CIA documents, and American military evaluations to erode the dominant narrative about the Delta in and after the war. Her poems tell tales of the old bombs turning into mangoes, rice germinating out of bullet holes, and every woman losing her way home.

Breaking a thirty-year silence, Bảo Ninh has permitted at last the publication of a new work in English. Ninh is perhaps Vietnam's foremost chronicler of the war, which he joined at age 17. Bringing to life the full range of his inventive and poetic language, Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran are granting to English readers Bảo Ninh's first book-length work since The Sorrow of War, which catapulted him to fame and which was banned in Vietnam until 2006. In Hà Nội at Midnight, ten stories are appearing in the West for the first time.Juxtaposed with tranquility and geniality are abandoned landscapes and defoliated forests. Polluted rivers and streams, the war-torn sky, pungent air filled with the stench of decomposing human corpses, and the deafening roar of helicopters and bombers hovering in the gloom dominate the settings of Bảo Ninh's stories.Intertwined with these horrific images are human tears shed during farewell ceremonies, when recruits are separated from their loved ones, when parents live in anxiety and hope while their children are fighting in remote regions, and when soldiers bury their comrades and burden themselves with the fallen's unfulfilled wishes. Hà Nội at Midnight delineates the complex outpourings of war and the way it remakes human relationships.

While mainstream Vietnamese history chronicles a few woman warriors of the past and some contemporary female activists, Vietnamese women always have performed their roles in the quiet shadows of men. To illuminate those shadows, Quan Manh Ha and Quynh H. Vo have brought into English the first anthology of its kind, featuring twenty-two contemporary stories written by Vietnamese women whose narratives make visible the multitudinous lives of Vietnamese women over the last two decades.All the stories in Longings appear in English for the first time, inviting new readers to appreciate the "Longings" or aspirations of Vietnamese women as they have had to face suffering and struggle, hope and despair, sorrow and joy, while navigating an uncharted course through the social and economic waves that have lifted or lowered their lives since the US–Vietnam normalization in the mid-1990s.The wife in Da Ngan's "The Innermost Feelings of White Pillows" suppresses sexual frustration at her husband's impotence by stuffing her pillows with new fibers. The rural women in Tran Thuy Mai's "Green Plums" have no choice but to become prostitutes to earn a living. The mother in Pham Thi Phong Diep's "Mother and Son" demonstrates an unconditional sacrifice and ineffable love for her adopted son despite his insolence and ingratitude. A woman in Nguyen Thi Chau Giang's "Late Moon" violates all prescribed gender norms in order to live freely.Longings brings together stories by both well-established and emerging Vietnamese writers, those who come from various regions in Vietnam and represent the diversity and richness in Vietnamese short fiction. This anthology expands the audience for deserving authors and broadens perspective on the heterogeneous voices, narrative styles, and thematic interests of women who contribute to the growing corpus of contemporary Vietnamese short fiction.