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.
The artists featured mostly work in English and are based in North America, though some also write in French, Hebrew, Vietnamese and live in France, Israel, Australia, and Kyrgyzstan. Some had emigrated from Vietnam in their youth, others were born in America, Canada, Australia to immigrant parents. Yet as wide as this variety of artists is, conversations throughout the book return to questions most relevant to the Vietnamese American experience—questions about the lingering trauma of war and exile, the drive and effort to establish Vietnamese narratives against the dominance of Western perspectives on the Second Indochina War, as well as what it means to write without this burden of representation.
Their perspectives as Vietnamese refugees had largely been left out of Western popular media.
In the 1970s and 1980s, an exodus of Vietnamese people, once citizens of the Republic of Vietnam, fled the now-Communist state, many of whom ended up in America. Early writers of the Vietnamese diaspora featured in The Cleaving are those who were part of this wave, many fleeing as children. Their conversations and their writing tend to centre on their own traumatic experiences of having witnessed the war and the chaos of escape. Their perspectives as Vietnamese refugees had largely been left out of Western popular media, which was dominated by productions such as Apocalypse Now or Miss Saigon. Andrew X Pham, a child refugee who grew up to be author of two memoirs and a novel on the Viet Minh’s resistance against French colonialism, shares that when he started writing in the early 2000s, the burden of representation fell on the few Vietnamese who were writing: “If I did not tell ‘our’ stories, no one will.” Other first-generation immigrant authors share similar experiences—memoirist Le Ly Hayslip, for instance, talks about how her stories of being tortured as a political prisoner in Vietnam drew the audience’s attention at a writers conference in 1985 California, and how it felt necessary for her to tell such stories.
Yet as Dương Vân Mai Elliott points out in conversation with Hayslip, not every writer wants to write about trauma. In fact, many writers that follow this first cohort find themselves being pigeonholed into topics that publishers believe readers would think a writer of Vietnamese descent should focus on—that is, the war, the refugee experience, and the intergenerational trauma this causes. Stepping outside of this limitation seemed difficult: Monique Truong points out that in newspaper and magazine reviews of her novel Bitter in the Mouth, her Asian American identity often overshadowed the nuanced experience of a synesthetic, Vietnamese American adoptee living in the American South that she had portrayed; Vietnamese Australian Tracy Lien, whose debut crime novel All That’s Left Unsaid was published in 2022, voices her frustration at hearing readers and interviewers ask whether the story was based on her personal experience, as if they did not recognise the creativity and craft that went into writing the novel.
Reflecting on this struggle, many authors honed in on the importance of marketability in the publishing industry. While completing his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen heard constant concerns from his agent about how hard it would be to market the novel—and by extension how the publisher might consider the book unpublishable if they find it difficult to sell. Though the work of the first cohorts of Vietnamese diasporic writers have made the “refugee aesthetic” (in the words of Le Ly Hayslip) more salable and thereby opened up more opportunities for authors of Vietnamese heritage, this focus on marketability still left many writers boxed in.
With diverse backgrounds, some authors can evade this—Amy Barry Quan, a Black Vietnamese author who grew up as an adoptee in a white American family, resists stereotypes about her race and gender by refraining from providing an author headshot and sometimes publishing as Barry Quan. Her freedom from labels has allowed to her explore stories of all kinds, from that of a Vietnamese girl who can hear the dead to the journey of a Danvers-based field hockey team towards the 1989 state championship. Others find themselves in a balancing act between creativity and authenticity, such as Violet Kupersmith. While she chooses to publish with an English name that bears no connotation of ethnicity, Kupersmith had moved to Vietnam from the US to reconnect with her heritage in her journey to be a better storyteller. Her folklore-inspired novel, Build Your House Around My Body, combines elements of fairy tales and ghost stories with Vietnam’s colonial history and its traces in contemporary Vietnam.
The Cleaving thus maps the trajectory of Vietnamese diasporic literature, from trauma and separation, to finding space and a voice, to experimenting with storytelling—in terms of form, craft, and philosophy. Shifting the focus away from the wounds of war and exile, Ocean Vuong honours the creativity found among the family of farmers he is descended from, the creativity fundamental to his mother’s and his own survival in America, and credits this as the source to his literary creativity. Meanwhile, Paul Tran elaborates on a poetic form he invented called the Hydra, a 13-line response to the 14-line sonnet which “submits that lessons learned from one experience are hardly ever cleanly and clearly imported to another, though they remain present, informing—and haunting—each new experience.” Echoing this form, this collection, with its conversations organised not in terms of chronology but in terms of interconnecting themes, appears to highlight the diversity of thoughts in the Vietnamese diasporic community, and the potential it has to grow.
As such, even though it is America-centric with occasional features of authors who explored the Vietnamese stories about the people who stayed rather than left the country in the 1970s, such as Anna Moï or Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, The Cleaving leaves an opening for the narrative about Vietnamese diasporic writers to connect with other aspects of the diaspora not featured in the book (for instance, the literature of the Vietnamese community in mainland Europe, such as the recent English translation of Brothers and Ghosts, a novel by Vietnamese German author Khuê Phạm). This collection is but the beginning of an effort to formally identify a Vietnamese diasporic literature, and an invitation for more input to shape this landscape.