surname việt given name nam

all vietnamese everything.

[surnameviet]

looking like johnny dang.

[surnameviet]

Hoàng Thùy Linh - Tứ Phủ

và em đã biết kêu tên nỗi buồn...

[surnameviet]

Driver by day, TikTok star by night: The Vietnamese gig worker living a double life

“Driving is quite hard and tiring. It doesn’t offer me opportunities for growth,” Huynh said. “It’s TikTok that is my opportunity to develop and escape this job.”

[surnameviet]

[surnameviet]

As he and his parents prepare a Saturday dinner, drawing on his mother’s self-taught culinary repertoire (which began in a Thai refugee camp), and his father’s ancestry as a free-diver and fishmonger from Phú Quốc, Vietnam, Tu reflects on his visibility as a “celebrity chef,” tracing how he went from refugee roots and a childhood in West Oakland, to this new life by relying on things learned from his family kitchen--rather than the “formal” skills and training learned in culinary school--including how to turn something “inedible,” such as fish bloodline, into a beautiful dish.

[surnameviet]

New poetry collection by Hieu Minh Nguyen. 

“Nguyen... attempts a courageous exorcism of shame in his brilliant and disquieting second collection, exposing the baggage of living as a queer person of color in a white-supremacist, classist, heteronormative society.” 

[surnameviet]

Check out Bao Phi’s children’s book!

[powerofthestruggle]

Colonialists, International Traitors, Think Carefully Before You Take Vietnam

[surnameviet]

diaCRITICIZE: “Vietnam” is a 7-Letter Word

This article appeared first in slightly different form on the De-Canon blog on 11/10/17. It was compiled in response to the Ken Burns’ documentary on “The Vietnam War” that aired on PBS in September 2017.

Let me be clear here in saying: my critique of the emotional habits of (some of) these men is by no means intended to diminish the reality of their traumas. That reality—of being pawn or witness or player in a grave disaster—is no doubt immense and lasting. And I see that what these men may be seeking—what I assume all of us who’ve suffered variations of war trauma ultimately seek—is a reaffirmation of our humanity, after having faced the inhumanity of, not just the great demon of war itself, but also, quite possibly, the blurry evidences within ourselves: what war drives people to do to other people.

Part of that recovery involves, no doubt, sharing our stories with one another.

[surnameviet]

Books and Authors: Talking with Bao Phi and Thi Bui, by Sarah Hunter | Booklist Online

INTERVIEWER: There are some harsh realities present in your story—particularly the mention of the war that killed the father’s brother. How do you approach addressing such topics for a young audience?

THI BUI: Having grown up in similar circumstances with a similar background, these realities don’t seem particularly harsh to me—they just are. If you decenter an easier life as what’s normal, you can portray a less easy life more truthfully. I have always thought it was awful to go through trauma as a child and then have to present it to people as though you are the odd one. It seems to me that those children would very much have a desire to be seen and have their experiences counted—not paraded or overly emphasized as the cornerstone of their identity, but just acknowledged as part of their lives and something they have to deal with on a regular basis.

BAO PHI: I’m a father now, and I’ve been reading stories or telling stories to my daughter for years. As she’s grown, she’s become a part of this world: the lack of Asian American history and issues both in classrooms and the Western consciousness; police brutality and Black Lives Matter; deportation and xenophobia; the fact that we live on indigenous land; that there is a racist and sexist in the highest office in this country. There is no fairy tale we can tell to shield her from all of this, and maybe we shouldn’t. So the question is how are we honest with her without scaring her. How do I tell her about these things that have happened to our family, and are therefore part of her history? I don’t know if I have a solid answer, but the best we can do is be intentional.

[surnameviet]

Definitive For Americans: A Refugee’s Review of ‘The Vietnam War’

The documentary is called 'The Vietnam War', but for refugee Beth Nguyen, the series doesn't focus enough on her country of birth.

I keep saying to people that the documentary should be subtitled “The American Experience” (or more accurately, “The Mostly White American Experience”). But perhaps that would be redundant. I do not think that the filmmakers intended offense, in the way that most good liberals never intend offense. It’s more that their perspective is so trenchant, so supported, that they seem to have had no need to reconsider it.

So I watched the first episode as it premiered. Within the first ten minutes, the filmmakers opt for a strange reverse-sequence of events. We see the famous image of the naked, napalmed Vietnamese girl, running backward instead of forward. We see helicopters coming up from the water instead of being pushed into it. I suppose these reversed moments could be seen as a literal notion of rewind, a way to start at the beginning. But the visual result is awkward and even accidentally mocking. The rest of the episode is worse. At first, it seems that the filmmakers will provide a history of Vietnam, possibly covering the complicated history of colonization. Yet the filmmakers interject this history with flash-forwards to images of combat in 1960s, when the U.S. is very much involved in Vietnam. The message is clear: the Americans think of the war as their experience; the history of Vietnam on its own doesn’t matter. To me, it feels like the same erasure or diminishment of the Vietnamese experience that we have always seen.

[surnameviet]

He was 20 and unarmed. A police shooting brings Seattle's Vietnamese Americans into the world of activism

The fatal police shooting of a Vietnamese American man outside Seattle has opened up a debate on race, policing and Asian Americans. And it's challenged a family initially reluctant to go against police.

In the nearly four months after the killing, the Vietnamese American community in Seattle — among the largest in the country — has experienced a political awakening around Le.

His death has become a catalyst for a campaign by activists to make it easier in Washington state to prosecute police officers in shooting cases. It has also emerged as a key example in a wider push to require police dash and body cameras, which were not in place when Le was killed.

His family too has now joined the movement against police violence.

“I don’t want my son’s honor to be violated,” said Le’s father, Hoai Le, who settled in the U.S. in 1991 after fleeing persecution in Vietnam. “I want justice. I believe in government.... But my hate for police was really deep when I heard my son was killed.”

[surnameviet]

Nguyen spoke with local author Kao Kalia Yang at St. Kate's last Friday.

In response to this unbalanced perspective of the war and its ethics, Nothing Ever Dies revolves around the pursuit of what Nguyen terms "just memory."

"What I look for and argue for ... is a just memory that strives both to remember one's own and others, while at the same time drawing attention to the life cycle of memories and their industrial production, how they are fashioned and forgotten, how they evolve and change," he writes.

Since "[m]emories are signs and products of power, and in turn, they service power," it follows that "just as countries and peoples are not economically at the same level, neither are their memories."

"One sign of this inequality," he adds, "is that while the United States lost the war in fact, it won the war in memory on most of the world's cultural fronts outside of Vietnam, dominating as it does moviemaking, book publishing, fine art and the production of historical archives."

[surnameviet]

A Vietnam Story Told Through the Eyes of Refugee Parents

Talking with Thi Bui, the Berkeley author and illustrator of 'The Best We Could Do' — a gorgeous memoir of her parents' struggles immigrating from Vietnam.

What do you want people to think about when they finish reading your book?

The lessons that we learn are not that profound, and we keep learning them over and over again. It boils down to what I say with the book. Vietnamese people are people, too. It’s easy to romanticize or demonize or dehumanize other people in war. My hope is that people can see the humanity of others and the value of other lives rather than just our own.

[surnameviet]

Q&A With Singer/Songwriter Thao Nguyen, subject of “Nobody Dies” Documentary | CAAM Home

As a second generation Vietnamese American, how do you think the war in Vietnam impacts you today?

I believe in the inherited trauma of war. I think there’s a lot of weight to absorb when you are raised by people whose lives were upended, who had to flee to live. I cannot imagine how lonely and scary it was to start a life in a bracingly different country and language. It’s difficult for me to acknowledge the indignities and humiliations great and small, some of which I witnessed, some of which I suspect they endured, of being new and Asian in America. It’s hard for a kid to ask her parents about their history when she suspects it is at times incredibly painful.

As I talk about in the film, my father was very volatile and difficult to reach and he oppressed our home in many ways. I think so much of what he could not express, and so much of what he did express, was a product of the trauma of war, of fighting for his country and for losing his country. I wonder of course what else he lost. My brother and I grew up not asking a lot of questions. In many ways it felt not only uncomfortable but perhaps unfair to ask our parents to revisit all they endured. But just because you don’t talk about it doesn’t mean your life and the life of your kids will not be informed by it.

All of this unspoken influence of the war in Vietnam has compelled me to learn more about it, to read firsthand Vietnamese accounts, to watch films, to ask questions, to really engage with the war and what it meant for my family, to re-visit its backdrop presence in my childhood and bring it to the fore and look at it. When I go home now I try to ask my relatives more direct questions about the war, I try to remember stories my grandmother would tell.

On a sweeter bittersweet note, I look back with great tenderness and nostalgia for all the gathering my parents had in our home, with friends who were fellow Vietnamese refugees. I remember them singing old songs and ruefully laughing and immersed in a such a thick nostalgic bond, that kind of bond does not seem to come from anything else besides making it through a war and re-uniting on the other side.

[megaivile-blog]

Generations and the Night Blooming Cereus

-Megan Le

[shanteparadigm]

This week, we’re reading GB Tran’s Vietnamerica (Villard, 2010). My class is extra-fortunate in that GB will be joining us via Skype today to talk about his work. We round out the week bu reading Anne Cheng’s “Fantasy’s Repulsion and Investment: David Henry Hwang and Ralph Ellison,” from The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (OUP, 2001) and Tabachnick and Rabkin’s essays from Teaching the Graphic Novel (MLA, 2009).

[surnameviet]

Vietnamerica, with some other interesting books and essays mentioned above!