A Cross-Cultural Context for Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Writing

Abstract

In the last few years, a publishing sea change has occurred. For the twenty-five years after the end of the war and the reunification of Viet Nam as the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam (SRV), thousands of books by Euro-American writers on the American War in Vietnam appeared. Now, Vietnamese and Vietnamese American writers are being published in unprecedented numbers. For the first time, Euro-American readers and the younger generations of Vietnamese Americans who do not read Vietnamese fluently, if at all, have access to a transnational perspective on the war.¹ Works from contemporary Viet Nam are available to English-language readers thanks to anthologies including John Balaban and Nguyen Qui Duc’s Vietnam:A Traveler’s Literary Companion, Linh Dinh’s Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam, the fiction by Duong Thu Huong and Nguyen Huy Thiep, two controversial writers in Viet Nam (the SRV), and the ongoing series of publications of contemporary Vietnamese works in translation by the University of Massachusetts and Curbstone Presses.²

And now, many years after the end of the war, many Americans are still discussing, pondering over the Vietnam War, with nearly 7,000 books published on this topic. This shows that the American people are a responsible nation, seriously trying to draw lessons from past experience in order to formulate a better path for the future. The war has brought the two nations closer, and the day will come, I hope, when the American people will agree that an end to the Vietnam War was indeed a victory for both nations

—Luu Doan Huynh

[I]n Vietnam, . . . the term for “culture” itself, van hoa, may be translated literally into English as “the change which literature (and art) brings about.”

—Greg Lockhart and Monique Lockhart