Looking Back, Looking Forward: New Ways of Writing Vietnam

This panel seminar seeks to open meaningful discussions about changing writing styles as expressed in Vietnamese literature and contemporary Vietnamese American (VA) literature. While early predecessors of Vietnamese publications focus on a more traditional genre of writing favored towards the Government system as connected to historical conflict, Vietnam-related writing coming from 1975-onwards is moving, even leaning outside figurative and physical spheres of literature, including the Western canon of war literature. Authors like Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer) and others take back the “label” of the Vietnam War and offer a different interpretation of war, creating war stories that do not include the main veteran character. Vietnamese literature in translation within the anthology Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath interpret war experiences as experiences of love, nature, and family rather than violence, blood, and/or masculinity, and shed a light on humanity affected by a war between its own people. Women’s voices, traditionally under-represented, are emerging more deliberately, freely. While the Asian American Model Minority Myth typically represents East Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders or AAPI, it excludes Southeast Asian Americans (Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and more) which do not convey the overarching complexities of migrant experiences of refugee life and poverty; instead, such a Myth-mindset proves to be a misconception and stereotype that Vietnamese American authors are trying to break out of. Participants are invited to explore freshly defining “ways of writing” as reflected in Vietnamese and VA literature.