The Middle Distance
The back building on Bizetstrasse in Weissensee, Berlin, still bears the imprint of the Berlin I have known for three decades—improvised, subsidized, and now slowly disappearing. Built around the turn of the last century, the long red-brick factory later housed an East German lightbulb plant, and, after the Wall fell, was purchased and converted with […]
Mì gói lá bồ đề
On a humid morning in 1997 in the small town of Hồng Ngự on the border of southern Vietnam and Cambodia, a band of smiling children in red handkerchiefs walked around a frenzied school yard with empty condensed milk cans in their hands. I was still in second grade, and we had just finished our […]
Tri Nhan 004: One of the Lucky Ones
Editor’s note: This poem is best viewed on desktop. Mylo Lam was born in Vietnam and currently lives in Los Angeles. He and his family are refugees from Cambodia. Mylo’s work has been published in The Margins, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nightboat Books, Mānoa, and elsewhere. His multimedia work won Palette Poetry’s Brush & Lyre Prize, his poetry […]
Jackfruit
Jackfruit sizzle like fleshcarried through thecurves of your mouth / Mẹ’s voice wrapped in bare hands_______spilling seeds / an extension – from one land_______and an accent mark to another_______about our names giving way and thenreceding_______from Thuylinh to Thuy_______and the nước that never quenches thirstbecause it’s never enough and only separates_______this line between_______what I know of […]
Cancer Took My Mother & Food Was Her Love Language
Paired With: Bún Bò Huế & the Taste of EnoughFor When You Need to Feed a VillagePlay Song: “Heal the World” by Michael Jackson Amuse-Bouche: The Hunger That Never Leaves Hunger isn’t just about food.It’s about what we’ve been denied—what we crave yet never quite satisfy. My mother answered hunger the only way she knew […]
Mothernoia
I am haunted by the quiet suspicion that the woman before me is devising my murder. At the moment, we’ve resorted to a game of silence. But she is cunning, calculated, waiting with the prowess of a snake, for when I should inevitably misstep, eager. And when a rock is lodged sharply in the tender […]
A Broker in Madness
In order to find a new musical language and new forms for songs, I had to deny the official environment of the Vietnamese Government. My goals are: Break the prejudices about musical aesthetic; Mock the taboo in the language of music; My attitude is not to compromise in any way. – Composer Ngọc Đại, Artist […]
On Singlish
Simi[1] Salah[2] English? There is a particular unease to writing about Singlish in English. Not because the two are incompatible, far from it, but because to write about Singlish in the formal register of Standard English is to risk staging the very hierarchy we hope to interrogate. This paradox is the very condition of thinking […]
I Am Not Mad
“I Am Not Mad” is a translation of the Vietnamese poem, “Tôi Không Giận” by poet Lê Sông Văn, poignantly inspired by the life of Renée Nicole Good, an award-winning poet and mother who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. Lê Sông Văn draws specifically from the tragic […]
I carry you through chinatown
Alief, Houston TX I carry you through chinatownon lunar new year’s eve— softly the karaoke bars dieas hostess girls fly to their nests. Andsoju buddies stumble in a line back to their sports carsexhausted red and blue. But I carry you—a k-pop songsweet not loud or long, we sit outside morii caféeating breeze chalked beignets. […]
what was that? you’re talking too quickly
when you were youngyou were living the sameday in the refugee campuntil you found yourself carryingbaggage from saigon to california you hung on to words toprotect yourselfand i flinched every timeyou raised your voice at home youasked me to take outthe trash and i asked you to repeatyourself in english who knows wheredisappointment will take […]
Con Ma của Bà Nội
ba mẹ tưởng đã thoátkhỏi tiếng rít hỏa tiễn ai ngờ chiến tranhdai như sán trong bụngcào lên cổnổ qua miệnghai cái loagào vào mặt nhau dưới gầm bàncuộc đấu khẩu của họnhư bom nổrung váchlắc nền dướibàn của bà nộitôi dúm ngườiẩn nấpnghe tiếng bà thì thầm máu dòng họ mìnhkhông chảynó ngoằn ngoèotrườn […]
Bà Nội’s Ghost
mother and father thoughtthey escaped the whistling missilesbut found it hitched a ridea parasiteclawing out of their stomachs and into their throatsbursting through their mouthsto roar at each other under the tabletheir arguments, war itselftheir bombs shake the house underneathbà nội’s tablei hideand in safe sheltershe whispers of my inheritance of bloodthat doesn’t flow—but forks […]
Viet Film Fest 2025: On Healing Land, Birds Perch
During my freshman year of high school, while working on a history assignment, I came across a photograph of the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk protesting South Vietnam’s regime in 1963. The American photographer Malcolm W. Browne won 1963 World Press Photo of the Year for capturing the burning monk. Reading the […]
Coi Chừng
Until age seven, all the boats you knew barrelled througha technicolour sea, a Barbie swinging from the ropeor a pirate of the Caribbean with thatfantastic plastic glow, that airbrushed sea spray. Then history said refugees smuggled gold in their rectums, made banksof their bodies only to have them robbedby a barrelling pirate, a simple swell. […]
Dangerous Games
Parallels by Vũ Đình Giang (English translation by Khải Q. Nguyễn), the first Vietnamese queer novel to be translated into another language (the French translation by Yves Bouille in 2014), is not a novel for the faint-hearted; nor is it a novel for the easily distracted. The novel follows the interlinked relationship of three queer […]
In Conversation with Dužan Duong
Dužan Duong’s debut feature film Summer School, 2001 centres around a Vietnamese family living and working near the Czech-German border selling counterfeit goods at the market. After being sent back to Vietnam for 10 years, teenager Kien returns to his family’s market stall in Cheb but finds it difficult to settle back into life in […]
Battle Hymn of the Battleaxe Bà Nộis
Sitting up during twilight hours holding two bottles to newborn twins forces one to slow down and feel the full brunt of patience with every clock tick of the second hand. With no hands free to scroll aimlessly on a phone, I’m consequently forced to nudge the mind to wander and spin its cogs vacantly. […]
The Human Cost of War
Dương Hướng’s No Man River, an award-winning and widely read modern Vietnamese classic, masterfully explores life in rural north Vietnam during the French Indochina War, Vietnam War, and the border war with China. Set in the pastoral Đông Village, the novel chronicles the lives of the villagers during this tumultuous and brutal period of newfound […]
From South Vietnam to the Bible Belt
My childhood home in Texas sits on a street off a major road lined with eight Protestant Christian churches. I know this because I used to count them on the way home from school, wondering as a ten-year-old if people shop for churches like they shop for cars . Down Barnes Bridge Road, you can […]