Monthly Archives: September, 2020

THIS IS FOR MẸ: Blood Utterances

"Oh, sure. I mean, it isn’t very spacious, my womb. Always been a little too small. Suffocating, even."

Sự thật đằng sau việc tháo gỡ các tượng đài ở Mỹ

Thử tưởng tượng một thời gian sau khi Miền Nam thất thủ vào ngày 30 tháng 4, 1975, các tượng đài của các tướng sĩ của phe thua cuộc Việt Nam Cộng Hòa bỗng được dựng lên nhan nhản tại các tỉnh thành hay những địa danh ghi dấu các trận đánh lịch sử? Và thử tưởng tượng lá cờ vàng ba gạch đỏ vẫn tung bay đâu đó tại một vài nơi ở Việt Nam?

Coming of Age in Cabramatta

"Given the current debates about representation in literature, I find myself reflecting on how I have always preferred books to be windows rather than mirrors. I was a voracious reader from a young age but growing up I didn’t particularly yearn for stories about what it meant to be Vietnamese – especially in Australia – because I was already drowning in the experience of it."

GB Tran Is A Cartoonist Dad in the “Age of Covid”

"A cartoonist has gotta cartoon, though, so I redirected my energy into these spontaneous diary comics to document and process this next normal. Five months later, they've become essential in maintaining my sanity during these continued insane times."

In the Diaspora: September 2020

Socio-cultural, literary, and political news and events relating to the Vietnamese diaspora and to Việt Nam.

Nhà (hàng): Confessions of a Restaurant Kid

The restaurant and this building I was about to go into for the last time was where I learned to walk. It was where I learned to talk. And now I had to say goodbye. 

Book Review: The Coconut Children

"Coconut Children" is a coming-of-age story about a cohort forever uneasy with itself and others. A generation that was taken from Vietnam before it could lay roots, and then transplanted to a land where the soil was rich but alien, never quite nourishing.

Land as Memory, Body as Subject: To Call Oneself a Vietnamese Settler

As a settler, and someone whose familial and ancestral history is also tied to histories of displacement, understanding and living on Indigenous land is a political commitment that is just as important as understanding my fractured relationship to my family’s homeland of Vietnam.

Fuck off, we’re full ~ a poem by Tracey Lien

To move to another suburb, for another school, because the pre-school teacher said there were too many Asians at this one, that you’d develop an Asian accent, that a new environment was the only way to cleanse the tongue.

Điều tra dân số & Cha tôi

Đưa đồng bào của ông tham gia vào Thống Kê Dân Số là sự mở rộng đương nhiên trong công việc phục vụ cộng đồng của cha tôi - để đảm bảo người Việt được đại diện trong bức chân dung tự họa của Hoa Kỳ.