Yearly Archives: 2020

"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."

"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."

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

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. 

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Underbellies are beautiful. I am drawn to shadows and reflections because they decenter the dominant subject, the main message, and instead reveal the margins of a substance.

So, how do you start loving yourself? When the outside world continues to show you and tell you wherever you go, you don’t belong.