Editor’s Picks: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Choices for Best of 2013

Editor Viet Thanh Nguyen picks the best of the year in diaCRITICS.

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Thanks to all our readers and writers for making 2013 a successful one for diaCRITICS. Our readers came from 163 countries, with the USA, Germany, Vietnam, Canada, the UK, Australia, and France leading the way. I am privileged to have met many new friends and writers through editing diaCRITICS, first virtually, and then often in person. I hope to meet even more in 2014.

Without further ado, here are my choices for the best of 2013. First are the five posts published this year that garnered the most reads. At the top is The Vietnamese in Germany (Part 1 of 2), authored by Kien Nghi Ha, who contacted me and said he had been reading us in Germany and wanted to contribute. I learned so much from his two-part post about the Vietnamese of Berlin, and the photos of Kiên Hoàng Lê that accompanied the writing were spectacular.

Vietnamesisches Leben Berlin

The second most read post was mine, diaCRITICIZE: My Black April, which was also the most commented on post of the year. Passions still run strong about the fall of Saigon, all it symbolizes, and how it is commemorated.

Veterans at the 35th anniversary commemoration of the fall of Saigon in Little Saigon, Orange County, CA.

The third most read post was  Why I Write: Huy Đức, author of Bên Thắng Cuộc (The Winning Side)Bên Thắng Cuộc (The Winning Side) is a much talked-about, candid account of the years after war’s end from someone on the winning side. 

Next came Anvi Hoàng & Tết 2013 ở Mỹ: Vietnamese American Intellectuals on Tết in the USA. Anvi Hoàng, one of our columnists, asks some Vietnamese American intellectuals what Tet means to them.

Last comes a reprint from Eric Brightwell and his blog on Amoeba Records, The Vietnamese New Wave Revival. This one brought back lots of memories from the eighties, of Modern Talking, CC Catch, Bad Boy Blue, Sandra, and boys and girls with amazing hairdos. You had to be there, and if you weren’t, here’s your introduction to the sights and sounds of life for refugee youth in America.

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Besides the top five most read posts, there are many others deserving of praise, some of which, being published later in the year, got less airtime and less of a chance to garner reads. In no particular order, these are five of them.

We reprinted Cara Van Le’s Part of Memory is Forgetting, which talks movingly about how even young Vietnamese Americans can’t forget the past, not when they keep being reminded of it.

Clip from Dave Navarro’s MTV Cribs tour.

One of our diaCRITICS, Dao Strom, published a new book in a daring, beautiful format–an EP album with an accompanying book of her writings. She discussed this book in Dao Strom: Reimagining the Book, with diaCRITIC and poet Kim-An Lieberman. Kim-An passed away in December, and we will feature her obituary next week.

We published quite a few reprints of articles by Thuy Linh, Thanh Nien‘s resident movie critic. She has strong opinions about the state of Vietnamese cinema, which needs as much help as it can get. The Need to be Less Cynical: Thuy Linh on Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema asks whether Vietnamese filmmakers have run out of ideas.

A scene from Ngo Quang Hai’s crime/psychological thriller Mua he lanh (Cold Summer), which is playing in theaters now. Vietnamese filmmakers should experiment more with genres like historical rather than keep making movies like this.
A scene from Ngo Quang Hai’s crime/psychological thriller Mua he lanh (Cold Summer), which is playing in theaters now. Vietnamese filmmakers should experiment more with genres like historical rather than keep making movies like this.

diaCRITIC and poet/fiction writer/translator/editor/photographer Linh Dinh continues his series of photographic essays reporting on the bleak side of America. Postcard from the End of America: San Jose reports on my hometown and the picture isn’t pretty for a city on the fringes of Silicon Valley, which may soon have a Vietnamese mayor.

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One of our great new writers, Eric Nguyen, interviewed one of our great established writers, Andrew X. Pham, in Words Belong to Everyone. To aspiring writers, Andrew says, “I think a lot of people like the idea of being a writer, but they don’t actually like the work. It’s just nasty work: you’re sitting there, bleeding all over the computer and you’re hating yourself.”

There you have it. Now go and write some.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor, writer and scholar. His novel, The Sympathizer, is forthcoming from Grove/Atlantic in 2015. 

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