Memory without Pyrotechnics: Vu Tran’s Intervu, Part 1

In December 2010, diaCRITICS managing editor Julie Thi Underhill wrote her first diaCRITICIZE about her dilemmas regarding ‘authentic’ belonging as Vietnamese American of Cham-French and Euro-American descent. She centered her bond with her childhood friend V., who she left anonymous to protect his privacy, lest their middle school conversations haunt him. Two months later, diaCRITICS editor Viet Nguyen sent Julie a note asking if V. was the writer Vu Tran who’d been selected as a 2011 finalist for the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, awarded to foreign-born individuals who have demonstrated outstanding achievement during the early stages of their careers. So Vu Tran is easily decoded from V. Not so clandestine after all. Busted!

Julie then requested the “intervu of all time,”  to continue their middle school tradition of puns, in honor of Vu’s recent accomplishments. Julie adds, “Since he is also the first Vietnamese American artist I ever knew, it also feels appropriate to give mad props to Vu for the inspiration he’s provided me during the twenty five (or so) years since he first awed me with his stories.”

This is part one of two. The second part will follow, here on diaCRITICS, on June 8, 2011.

Vu Tran

Vu Tran was born in 1975 in Saigon, Việt Nam. After emigrating by boat to the U.S. in 1980, he was raised near Tulsa, Oklahoma. He decided to become a writer in first grade, and his literary oeuvre has since included multiple genres. Since 1998, Vu’s short stories have appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2009, O. Henry Prize Stories 2007, A Best of Fence, The Southern Review, and Harvard Review.  He has received honors from Glimmer Train Stories and  Michigan Quarterly Review. He received the 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award and is a 2011 finalist for the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise.

Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow, and his PhD from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was the Glenn Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago. His first novel, This Or Any Desert, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. 

Recently I had the honor of speaking with my childhood friend Vu about his immigration, influences, distinctions, responsibilities, motivations, and the necessity for creative people in any given society.

diaCRITICS noticed that you’re a 2011 finalist for the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature. One stipulation of the award is that you are foreign born. When and why did you immigrate to the US?

My dad was an officer in the South Vietnamese Air Force. So when Sài Gòn fell, everyone who’d worked with the Americans or the South Vietnamese Army had to leave. So my dad and his two brothers had to hightail it out of Việt Nam. And my mother was I believe four months pregnant with me, when my dad left. He left and finally made it to the United States, but it took us five more years.

Vu with his older sister Mai and their mom, Sài Gòn Zoo, 1977

I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for my mother. Basically at the time she thought, I may never see my husband ever again. And my father had never met me, you know. I was born after he left. So I didn’t meet him until I was five. My mother heard that there were boats leaving Việt Nam, and she, I think with gold, she bought passage for me, my sister, and her. And story goes we left early early in the morning when it was still dark outside. I remember hiding in somebody’s house, in a room, and I remember eating dried shrimp. I remember liking the dried shrimp. From there to the boat, you had to creep in the dark at night, and every time they said “Get down” you had to go into these trenches, you know, for farming. It was a farmland, I think, right by the coast. That’s what we must have done. We must have traveled all the way to the coast, from Biên Hòa, which is right outside of Sài Gòn, right. And so that must have been a long trip. I don’t remember the trip. But we stayed, we hid somewhere. And then that night there was this long trek from where we were to the boats. And it was across land, and we had to constantly duck down into trenches.

Anyway we got on the boat. So what happened is that as soon as the boat was full, they basically drew up the anchor and left. And there were some people who drowned, who tried to swim for the boat and couldn’t make it. We were headed for Singapore, but we were blown off course and ending up making it to Malaysia, and staying in Pulau Bidong for like six months. And from there my dad sponsored us and that’s why we came to the States. The day was September 12, 1980, is when we arrived in Tulsa. My dad picked us up from the airport. That’s when I came here and that’s why. Basically to reunite with my dad, otherwise we wouldn’t. There was no other way.

How did you end up in Oklahoma?

A Catholic priest sponsored my dad. Most Vietnamese go to California, you know, L.A., Orange County, or they go to Louisiana or Texas. We had a Catholic priest. When my dad came to the United States, a Catholic priest in Kansas City sponsored him and my uncle and they went and lived there for a while. I forget where, in Kansas. But then they moved to Tulsa, where they settled. But yeah, it would have been very different if I had grown up in California.

What was the transition like, to go from the refugee camp to Oklahoma?

I think the hardest adjustment was meeting my dad, who was essentially a stranger. I remember like the first night or two, we were all sleeping in the same bed, and I was really afraid of my dad. I mean, I was five days before turning five. I had no idea who this man was. And I must have gone through a frightening experience, or something. It was weird to suddenly be living with this man I didn’t know. And actually for like many many years—I forget this—for many years I still felt that my dad was an outsider in the family. Like I knew that he was my dad, and that we were a family. Rationally and intellectually I knew—I never thought I was not his son. But there was always this weird sense that he was not one of us. Weird, you know. I don’t know when that went away. I don’t know how old I was. But I remember for most of my young life, maybe even until nine or ten, every once in a while I’d think of my dad as an outsider. It was really weird. But I think that’s the only adjustment I remember having to make.

I remember not knowing English. I went to kindergarten and said, “What the…? I don’t understand anyone.” So I literally remember learning English. I gotta say how lucky I was to come here right as I was starting kindergarten. I had already been to kindergarten in Việt Nam. But here I was starting on time. It’s amazing that it aligned so neatly that I came here right in time to do that. Because I can’t imagine being like my cousins, you know, coming here, starting school in the 8th grade, at that age. Can you imagine how hard that could have been? And my uncle who came here when he was 17, oh my god. I was incredibly lucky. Now that I think about it.

Vu with his parents, his brother Joseph, and his sister Mai, celebrating Mai's First Communion, in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma

Have you ever speculated how life would have been different if you’d have grown up in a place like California?

Here’s the funny thing. Anytime I think about how my life would have been if I had grown up elsewhere, like California or even Việt Nam, I always think of it in terms of writing. Because that’s the only thing that fucking matters to me, you know? Like would I have been a writer if I’d grown up in Việt Nam. I don’t know. I don’t think I would have, honestly. I wouldn’t have been exposed to writing in the same way, or to books in the same way, I don’t think. Had I grown up in California, I think I would have eventually engaged with books. I think my sensibility would be a little different. Maybe I still would have felt like an outsider in California, I don’t know. But I definitely think feeling like an outsider in Tulsa definitely informed me as a young writer.

Did you know that a lot of my stories in eighth grade, ninth grade, and tenth grade, they were always about people who went into alternate worlds? It was really weird. I wrote a story about this man who traveled in a train, and when he would travel into the train he would move into this alternate world where his wife was still alive. And the only thing he would take back from that world was his wedding ring. I constantly wrote stories like this. A lot of it had to do with how much I loved the Narnia chronicles—The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe—and that idea of entering another world through a wardrobe. I love that idea of an alternate world. And I have to imagine that was, that had something to do with me feeling outside of things. But everyone feels like an outsider when they’re in high school, and middle school. So that was my outsidership.

When and how did you realize that you wanted to grow up to be a writer?

First grade. It was one of the prefab classrooms at Lynnwood Elementary [in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.]  And I was in my reading group with, I think, like seven other kids. And our assignment was to write a story. And I remember writing a story where at the end the character wakes up and the whole story was a dream. You know one of those really awful cliché endings. I don’t remember anything else about the story but that, but that was when I knew I wanted to be a writer. I guess I must have been about six. And it’s strange—I’ve never for a second wanted to do anything else.

Vu in blue, age six, approximately when he decided to become a writer, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, 1981

Who were your earliest literary influences, the people that kind of blew your mind?

Oh, you remember this. Jules Verne was my first favorite writer. I loved Jules Verne. Who else did I really love? I loved Greek mythology. In elementary school, there was this great collection of watercolored Greek mythology books, and I learned Greek mythology by reading those books. I checked out all of them and read it.

So what were the stories like that you were writing as a kid? How would you characterize the kind of writing you were doing by eighth or ninth grade?

I wouldn’t call it magic realism at all, I know that, because that’s something completely different. They were always grounded in real reality, but there would always be fantastic elements, like a man going into a train and going into an alternate world, or whatever. Honestly they were always kind of dark, they were always noir-ish. I think I’ve always loved that element, you know. It was usually a male protagonist who was confused. And they were always, I think, very sentimental in some way. I remember loving surprise endings—most kids do. I think I became a much better writer when I stopped writing surprise endings. I think that’s a mark of immaturity. There are people who can do it really well, and maturely, for the most part. But at that time, there was always some magical element.

When I got to college, I would always write these dark and violent stories, like badly violent. They were badly written, first of all, but they were overly violent. I don’t know, maybe I was watching really violent movies at that time. Or thought that I would sound more mature if I had violence and I had cursing, that I could sound more adult. More mature. But in high school, the stories were more sentimental and fantastic. In middle school, I wrote a lot of fairy tale retellings, that kind of fantasy.

Vu and Julie, front and center, with classmates at South Intermediate High School, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, 1991
Some outsiders—Vu, Matt, Jesse, Julie—in Broken Arrow High School, 1993
"Excellence doesn't just happen!" Julie made this photo of Vu in 1993, in 11th grade AP English, but really in an alternate world, a vutopia of some kind

So what’s the first piece you ever published? 

My first published story was the story called Solomon’s Dream. It was in the Antioch Review in 1998. It was about a Catholic priest in Biên Hòa. I was 22, is that right? That was the first story I ever sent out to get published. The other story was an honorable mention in a magazine and they published it. So the first two stories that I ever sent out got published. And I didn’t get published again for another five years. [Laughs]. Even though I had sent, god, so many stories out. So I got lucky my first two times, then nothing for like five years.

Who are your influences now?

I love Peter Carey. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. John Fowles. Alice Munro. Tim O’Brien. [Vladimir] Nabokov. I love Raymond Chandler—great crime fiction. There’s more that I am forgetting.

Do you think that there is something particular about being a refugee that makes imagining home and being home very crucial? Does being a refugee call into question the idea of home?

I’m writing a bit of a crime novel right now. It’s a noir novel, right. The thing about noir fiction is that it’s usually about people who are always looking for something and knowing that they’re not going to find it. And to the degree that at some point they just are in that default mode, and obviously with noir fiction that’s like a dark worldview and a dark approach to living when you constantly feel like you are looking for something even though you don’t know what it is. I feel like in some ways being a refugee is kind of like that. Because home will never really be home. Because the home that you grew up in is not home in the sense that it is for everyone. Because you belong there only because you are physically there and you are raised there, but it really doesn’t belong to you in the same way it belongs to someone who white and American, and was born and raised there with white and American parents, right. And your other home, the home that you were taken from, will never be home to you in the real sense, either, because you didn’t grow up there. So it’s like, you know, when people say they are looking for something, if they’ve found it, then they have it—they possess it. But I think with us, as refugees, even if we find it, it’s not really ours in the same way as it is for other people. It’s not like finding a lost key—oh my god, I found my key, now I can open the door.

It sounds like there are continuities from your early work to now, in a way. But how do you think that your stories have evolved, conceptually and formally, since you first started writing, seriously?

This is really funny. I was really into the Harlem Renaissance, and into African American literature. Like I loved Toni Morrison. I loved John Edgar Wideman. And I read the Harlem Renaissance. Ralph Ellison—Invisible Man is still one of my favorite novels. But the earlier Harlem Renaissance like Jean Toomer—Cane, and shit like that, aw man, I loved that stuff. I wrote like that. I was trying to appropriate their lyricism. But I was also trying to appropriate their politics. Basically a lot of my characters were Asian American characters with African American themes of racism and shit like that. It was so bad. But I really aped Faulkner for a long time. I tried to write like Faulkner. And then I think, in Iowa, I realized that every sentence didn’t need to be like a fucking poem. I didn’t have to try so hard. And I really pared down my language a lot. I wrote with more subtlety, I think. I would say that college is when I really began writing seriously. From there and then into Iowa, I tried to write with more subtlety and I really pared down my language. It used to be, I tried so hard, I was so ambitious, I would do all these tricks and it didn’t work then, but it was adventurous. And I think in the last eight years I’ve been trying to reclaim that adventurousness, if that makes any sense. So it’s like learning the rules. I started off not following the rules very well, at all, because I didn’t know them. And then I learned all the rules. And in the last eight years I’ve been trying to distance—trying to kind of exploit the rules, and move beyond them. Does that make sense?

Yes, it does.

And also trying to write more genuinely. I feel for a long time I was writing about ideas that weren’t really my true ideas. Not that I stole them, but like, I don’t feel they came from a sincere and true place.

Do you think that’s age, and having more life under your belt? Or do you think it’s something else that’s allowed you to do more of that?

I think it’s a natural thing. I think that you become a better writer when you’re writing from a place that’s actually your own. I think most writers, unless they’re brilliant, they’re not writing well unless they’re writing from a true place. If they’re appropriating someone else’s ideas and their concerns, it just doesn’t work. The reader will know that. I think when I started writing from my own place, I think it showed, my writing was just better.

What did it look like to be writing from your own place?

I think for a long time I was writing stories about Việt Nam and thinking I had to write about a certain kind of displacement—I had to write from a certain point of view. But those were all ideas that I had gathered from other books I’d read, and other people I’d talked to. I felt like that wasn’t my own personal sense of displacement, you know. So for example I would write about a character who was coming back to Việt Nam and I would imagine that character from the point of view of someone else coming back to Việt Nam. It wasn’t my own point of view. For some reason, I always kind of stayed away from myself. And then I remember, I think the first story that I wrote that I felt was truly me was, like this, I feel embarrassed. It was a love story, a novella I wrote, for an ex-girlfriend. And I wrote it over Christmas in 2001. And I finally felt myself actually writing myself into the story. And it’s not about writing autobiographically so that it’s suddenly yours now, but like literally putting myself into the way that he would respond to things and into the way that he would see the world. Does that make sense? And it showed. I think it worked. That novella is the first story I wrote that I felt was truly mature, because I was writing from a place that was solely my own place. I know that it’s almost a generic way to describe it, but I think it’s the best way I can do it.

That absolutely makes sense. How do you think textures of memory inform and shape your writing? How does memory configure into the way that you write?

It probably figures into the way that everyone writes. Oh my god, Kazuo Ishiguro once explained memory in a really good way and I forgot how exactly he put it. That there’s a difference between nostalgia and a glorification of the past. I think the way memory ends up being a texture in my story is always in tone. I’ll explain it this way. You know Wong Kar-Wai, right? You watch a Wong Kar-Wai movie, and there is a tone of romanticism at its most lush, right. It’s about love, but really the thing that makes his style uniquely his own is that tone of memory in all of his work. It’s nostalgia but it’s also sadness for something that is gone forever, that is not retrievable. I think that’s the thing about memory, is that you can be nostalgic about it, but you’re inevitably sad about it because you know that you can never recreate the past. You can try to, but you can’t. And that tone comes through in a lot of my favorite books and movies and music. Music especially. I think that’s the texture of memory that I have. Sometimes it’s more literal. I have a lot of retrospective narrators who recount the past from the filter of their present point of view. But I think more than anything it’s just that tone. That tone of sadness that you really can’t reclaim the past.

Vu, fifth from left, in 1996 with family on his first trip to Việt Nam since fleeing as a child

It seems like war ends up being a predominant theme in the writings of Vietnamese Americans, sometimes even as an act of resisting that the entire sense of Vietnamese-ness not be reduced to the war. As some have said, Việt Nam is a country not a war. Do you feel that the war, as a topic, has been an important aspect of your own writing? And why or why not?

You asked about my evolution as a writer. That was one of the themes I felt that I had to write about. I’m glad you asked this, because that was the missing part of what I was trying to explain. I felt when I wrote about war, I was writing it from the perspective of what I thought people expected me to write, that war. At this point I feel that writing about the Việt Nam war is so difficult, not only for me, but for all writers, least of which Vietnamese American writers or any Asian—any immigrant writer coming from a war-torn country. I think the thing about war is that if you write about it from the sense that war is awful, that war is hell, and all those kinds of clichés—war being the defining feature of that character’s identity, makes it less interesting, at this point. If you can somewhat make the character in that narrative go beyond the context of war that’s when it becomes much more interesting. Because there are so many ways you can say that war is awful and it makes people suffer. Romantic relationships make people suffer. The IRS makes people suffer. You know what I mean? I don’t know how much you can say about that idea of war being awful, but whatever is communicated, I feel, needs to come from that individual character, not just from the idea of war itself. Does that makes sense?

It’s been interesting to watch Vietnamese American writing—the people who are taking it up—find their own way to write about or to not write about war. Which is one thing I like about The Gangster We Are All Looking For by lê thi diem thúy. There are traces of war, but that’s not what the main protagonist is struggling with, in particular. She’s struggling with the repercussions of the displacements and separations, and all that. 

Here’s the thing is that when you write about war—if you grow up in America, or grow up in the West, and you read war literature, especially Việt Nam War literature, you’re reading primarily white writers. And quite frankly, they’ve written the best literature on war, I think, the most interesting literature. But the perspective that they are imposing, the perspective that war is this outlandish, this unique experience. Whereas if you are writing from the Việt Nam perspective, you know, that we’ve had centuries of war. That we’ve always lived with this. That this is just a fact of life, right. And if you write from the western perspective, inevitably there will be something that is disingenuous about it. You’re treating it as if it’s some kind of alien creature. But it is the fabric of our culture that we’re always at war. So saying that war sucks is like saying that Việt Nam culture sucks. That’s not even an argument after a while. That’s not even remotely interesting. I don’t know yet how to write about it, to be honest with you. I just know the ways that I don’t want to write it. Or the ways that it’s been written that I don’t like to read. What it should actually be or how I should write it, I’m not sure I know yet.

You said that you think that a lot of the best war literature has been written by non-Vietnamese writers. Do you think that those same writers have that disingenuousness about the war? How could they manage to write it well if they are disingenuous?

I’ll take Tim O’Brien for example. I feel that The Things They Carried is not about the Việt Nam war after a while. In that chapter How to Tell A True War Story, the real title of that piece is How to Tell A True Story, you know. It’s really about the act of writing about one’s experience, and so it goes beyond the war in that sense. The war is kind of like a context for him to talk about these things. I feel like writers like him aren’t necessarily disingenuous at all. I think a writer like Robert Owen Butler, his story collection—I once loved that book a lot, and now I don’t, I really don’t like it. I’m not one to question someone’s motivations, or whatever, but I feel like reading his other work now, I realize that a lot of the voices in that story collection, it’s ventriloquism. It’s not writing from a brutal, raw, honest, and true place, it’s ventriloquism. It’s appropriating someone else’s rawness. And I kind of resent that collection now. But I feel like that’s what I was doing for a long time. The same thing that Robert Owen Butler was doing. Because I was on the outside of it as much as he is. Even though he was there and he was a translator. But I feel like I’m as much of an outsider as he is. And I felt like for a long time I was doing the same thing he was.

Do you think that the publishing industry attempts to pigeonhole the ‘ethnic American’ writer, and, if you’ve ever felt it, how has this affected you?

I think it does. And you know, I hate, I’ve never liked when people talk this way. They’re pigeonholing us. I don’t like feeling like a victim of anything, you know. But I do think it’s true. When I was trying to publish my book, when I first was looking for an agent, my first agent that I worked with extensively, he read a story of mine and he loved it. But it was the one that was most obviously about the war. He kept telling me—he literally said this, Julie—“Can you have more of the war stuff in your other stories?” Because I didn’t. You know, I was purposely not trying to write about the war. And he was telling me that you should. And in many ways, the story that he liked was my best story, I still think. So maybe he’s making a point here, you know, I shouldn’t just be so offended by it. I ended up still writing a collection of stories—there was only one story with anything directly about the war, and in the other stories any time war is mentioned it is only in passing. And my collection got rejected by fifteen different people, fifteen different houses in New York. And it could have been they just didn’t like them. But I really think a lot of it had to do with their expectations. This is a collection about Việt Nam, and there are no pyrotechnics here. Where are the pyrotechnics? There’s nothing here. It’s like, you know, lonely sensitive people, you know, having a hard time connecting with one another. Why the fuck would we want this collection?

[Laughs].

We want some people dying and shit. You know. And that’s what my novel, in a sense, is about. My novel is about a white American police officer who marries a Vietnamese woman who immigrated from Việt Nam. And one of the reasons their marriage doesn’t work out is that she never tells him shit about Việt Nam. And he wants it, you know. He wants her to tell him all these things, but she doesn’t. In a sense, I want to fucking deny readers that, because it’s not what we are, you know.

So you do see or believe that this interest in the war has overdetermined how people want to read your writing, you think? Maybe even that Vietnamese character is you, saying, ‘I’m not going to tell you anything!’

Yeah, yeah, I think it is. Well the another thing is, I don’t know these things. I don’t. It’s like, you want to hear from me? I don’t know it. I grew up in fucking Broken Arrow, Oklahoma! I don’t know about people getting their brains blown out in war! I don’t know about that shit. I’m as ignorant as you are. Why should I be telling you this stuff just because I was born there? Or because my parents are from there? I’m not an expert on it. And I’m too lazy to do the research!

[Laughs]. Do you feel that even in the way your characters can still remember the place, if they are from Việt Nam, do you feel that your work is inherently transnational? I mean, do you think there is a transnational element to your writing, where you are able to be in multiple spaces at once, and keep the conversation going?

Yeah, I think that’s probably inevitable at this point, you know. I have this joke with my friends—every once in a while I’ll say, ‘You mean I’m not white?’ [Laughs]. Because, I mean, I feel as much as white American as I do a Vietnamese person. So I think in my novel right now, I think you are absolutely right. I have a character in there who is 28. And he came to the States with his father from a refugee camp when he was about six or seven. That’s me. But the white American police officer is me, too. So it’s very transnational. The plot of the novel is he’s going back to Las Vegas to find his ex-wife for her new Vietnamese husband, right. So he’s entering a Vietnamese community that he is unfamiliar with. That’s me. Every time I engage with the Vietnamese community, I’m as much a stranger as he is. I am privy to stuff that he isn’t, because I grew up in a Vietnamese family. But I am as much as stranger as he is. So yeah, it’s all those things. Those perspectives are inevitable at this point.

Do you think it might be a condition of a diaspora to be looking to interpret or revisit the past, in particular, in whatever form that it is? I’m thinking also of artists in exile from Europe, in their own diasporas, as well. I’m just wondering how much the past is part of that feeling of being dispersed or in exile from home.

I really do think that this is that way for everyone. I think everyone feels it. Diaspora obviously refers to those of us who are physically not in the country that we grew up in or were born in. But in a more metaphoric sense, I feel everyone goes through that, everyone experiences that. When you are an adult, you are no longer the child that you once were. That is a displacement. It is. The most vivid memories that you’ll always have will always be the memories that you have between the ages of four and twelve probably, between four and seventeen. And those memories will always be more vivid than the rest of your life, probably. But you will never be that child or teenager again. You are now forty or fifty years old. So you will feel displaced. That really in a metaphoric sense will be no different than someone who is physically removed from the country they were born in or grew up in. I think politically speaking it’s a little different, it’s more obvious that you’re displaced in that way. So if you are obviously like us, you are ethnic, our displacement is more heightened because there are immediate expectations for us from people that we meet, you know, that are different.

It's Not a Through Street, It's a Vu Street, photographed by Julie, Berkeley, California, 2009

Part two will continue on June 8, 2011, here at diaCRITICS.

Julie Thi Underhill has known Vu Tran since they were in sixth grade in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. After a twenty-five year friendship, Julie deeply appreciates Vu’s role in her life as friend and inspiration, since influencing and critiquing one another’s writing and visual art in middle school. Vu was the first and only peer reviewer of Julie’s poetry, which she began publishing in ninth grade. In 2001, they undertook a study and travel trip together to Việt Nam. They’ve remained close throughout middle school, high school, college, university, and beyond, despite a few moments of tension in middle school, including Vu’s infamous tripping of the airport security alarm in Dallas/Ft. Worth, on the way back from a gifted/talented field trip to NASA in the late 1980s.

Julie is a managing editor for diaCRITICS, and a writer, photographer, and filmmaker. She’s previously written for diaCRITICS about her ‘authenticity’ as a Vietnamese-American, Democratic Kampuchea’s Genocide of the Cham, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud’s launch party for this is all i choose to tell, a preview of UCLA’s VSA culture show tribute to Tam Tran, and a preview of the first San Francisco Diasporic Vietnamese Film Festival.

Vu Tran’s short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories 2009, the 2007 O. Henry Prize StoriesA Best of FenceThe Southern Review, and Harvard Review.  He has also received honors from Glimmer Train Stories and the Michigan Quarterly Review, and is a recipient of a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2011 Finalist Award for the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise.  His first novel, This Or Any Desert, is forthcoming from WW Norton.  Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow, and his PhD from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was the Glenn Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction.  He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.

Vu’s short story Vespertine appeared online last year at FiveChapters.

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  1. Terrific interview. Thanks! Vu’s surmise that he would not have become a writer in Viet Nam is shared by many others. Nguyen Ngoc Ngan dramatized this insight by writing his first book on the beach in Malaysia. I am so pleased to hear about the early science fiction. This bent is shared by some of the best vet authors, for instance Gus Hasford and Tim O’Brien, and of course Joe Haldeman’s Forever War. Most people who want success in mainstream terms abandon the form as Vu has, since it is determinedly a working-class publishing genre. There is one sf author in French, Michel Truong, but he adamantly denies that he is in any way Vietnamese. Wild to hear someone from Oklahoma say that US history is peaceful while that of Viet Nam is warlike. That does not square with the past at all. I get what he’s talking about – the whole thrust of the middle-class white authors vet Vu likes, such as O’Brien, is that of outrage at getting their noses rubbed in history. I love the pushback he gave to middle-class publishing personnel who wanted war stories. I love the reading black writers and moving on. Finally, for what it is worth, from a Southern white man, I see Vu and all you all as white, white, white, much less marked as other than Jews and Italians were in my 60s childhood in New Haven. The whole “diversity” thing is a form of whiteness, admitting variety into privilege as we have done here since colonial contact. Looking forward to the next instalment and to reading the work.

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