Nine years in the making, Jemimah Wei’s debut novel is a complicated story of two sisters who found and lost each other amidst the busy, urban, competitive island of Singapore. It provides a glimpse of Singapore without the glitz and glamour, a Singapore in which the expectation of excellence drives a wedge through even the strongest bonds of sisterhood.
Author: Thảo Tô
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and what is now celebrated in Vietnam as the unification of the country. Outside of Vietnam, this anniversary is tinted with stories of exile, of loss and trauma, of surviving in a new country and culture, where Vietnamese voices often go unheard. The Cleaving is a collection of conversations between writers and artists of Vietnamese heritage, from those who have been creating for decades to those who have just published their debut novel, in which they share their experiences and reflections on this journey of survival over the last half century.
A collection of 49 poems of varying forms, from scattered verses to prose poetry, Primordial is more than the sum of its parts. Mai Der Vang, equipped with the eloquence and talent for crafting vivid imagery that had made her previous collection a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, brings together the overlaying experiences of the Hmong people, ravaged and displaced by war, and of the elusive, ethereal, endangered saola, a rare species of bovine with a pair of long sword-like horns that only came to be known and classified in scientific terms in 1992.
A new addition to the catalogue of stories about the Vietnamese diaspora, Khuê Phạm’s Brothers and Ghosts (translated, somewhat unusually, from the original German to English by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey) follows the three intertwining stories of Kiều, a Vietnamese German journalist, her father Minh who arrived in Germany in 1968, and of her uncle Sơn who migrated to America in 1975 the aftermath of the war between North and South Vietnam. Kiều’s father rarely speaks about his past and the family he hardly ever sees, while Kiều herself is often too occupied with her identity as a second-generation immigrant to begin asking questions. Her family’s history and the intergenerational trauma that comes with it becomes an unspoken topic that is only unraveled after the passing of Kiều’s grandmother, which brings the two brothers Minh and Sơn together again in California. Brought together in a single volume, the stories of Kiều, Minh, and Sơn provide a snapshot of the complexity of the Vietnamese diasporic experience, and how families can grow together as well as apart.
Migration, especially in literature, is normally seen as having “the West” as its destination. Migration within Asia, from the less affluent to richer places, appears far less often. Singapore, for example, has had a long history as a trading port drawing in merchants and laborers from East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Singapore’s colonial history also left in its wake connections with other British colonies like India—and this link is the core of Prasanthi Ram’s Nine Yard Sarees.
Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s second novel, and the first to be rendered in English by Nguyễn An Lý opens with a mysterious description.
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