By Justine Trinh
Today is the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. A part of me cannot wrap my head around it. Fifty years ago, my mother was eight and displaced as a refugee. She and her family left Saigon on April 23, 1975, as part of the first wave of refugees. They went to the Philippines, and then to Guam, and then Fort Chaffee, one of the four military bases used for Vietnamese resettlement in the United States. What all these places have in common is the presence of U.S. militarism. My mom’s family was then sponsored to go to New Mexico, but later decided they wanted to be closer to their family and community in Orange County.
My mother’s journey reveals the constant displacement that Eric Tang calls “refugee temporality” in his book, Unsettled. Refugee temporality is a position of statelessness which the refugee can never escape because of the cyclic system of displacement that is imposed on them by the nation-state. And while I know a lot about my mother’s migration, I know next to nothing about my father’s—all I know is that he was a boat person who left Vietnam as a teenager and was placed in a refugee camp in Singapore.
As a child, my parents did not outright tell me their stories—I was too young to know about the war or understand the concept to ask. When we went to Vietnam for the first time when I was ten, there were still remnants of the war everywhere. I remember visiting Dinh Độc Lập or the Independence Palace, which had a war room and helicopter landing pads. At the time, my parents tried to explain the war in terms that I could understand. One of those ways was by bringing up that one of the co-hosts of Paris by Night, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ Duyên, was the daughter of the second South Vietnamese Vice President, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ. I knew Paris by Night, but the fact did little to further my understanding of the war or why we lived in America instead of Vietnam despite being Vietnamese. I never questioned my Vietnamese American identity since I grew up around other Vietnamese people in Little Saigon, but I could not articulate the reason for the existence of this ethnic enclave until much later.
When Audrey, the co-editor of Soapberry Review, asked me to create a list of books for the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, I immediately said yes. However, five minutes after agreeing to this, I struggled to choose books. Did I want to choose well-known books, or did I want to highlight obscure ones? Did I want to choose books that I loved, or did I want to choose books that were challenging but made me think? Older books or newer books? I wanted to push back against the idea that Vietnamese American books are “in vogue because of Viet Thanh Nguyen” as one professor claimed to me offhandedly. This list below reflects the decisions I had to make and does not encompass all Vietnamese American books. There were books I wanted to include as this list was originally forty books, but I had to make those hard cuts. Nevertheless, the choices I made only further prove that Vietnamese American literature is not a popular fad, but that it represents real lives that existed before Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize.
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip (1989)
I read Le Ly Hayslip’s 1989 memoir, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, for my literary to film adaptation class at UCI. Hayslip’s story provided a counter narrative to the history of the Vietnam War I learned in high school. Most of the depictions I saw and read in high school prioritized the American soldier perspective and depicted the Vietnamese as victims in need of saving or nameless/faceless enemy combatants. Hayslip’s story shows how the war affected Vietnamese people in complicated and nuanced ways. Due to the placement of Hayslip’s village between North and South, her village shifts allegiance; this leads to constant tension. Hayslip’s personal experience reflects this as she first works for the Viet Cong and is captured and tortured by the South. When she is released from prison, the Viet Cong sentences her to death, necessitating her escape to Da Nang and later Saigon. Her own family becomes fractured in this divide as one of her brothers escapes to Hanoi and her father takes his own life. Hayslip’s memoir shows that Vietnamese people were not passive victims nor were they just enemy combatants without a history as the war forced people to make hard decisions.
Dragonfish by Vu Tran (2015)
Because I am a poor college student who enjoys reading, most of the books I buy are used and come from library bookstores. However, many of the books sold at such bookstores are classics like The Great Gatsby or by more white popular authors such as James Patterson. So when I found Dragon Fish by Vu Tran for ten cents, I had to grab it. His book is the first Vietnamese American book I ever bought and showed me that there were Vietnamese American authors out there developing a literature with its own rich tradition.
Dragonfish follows Robert, a white Oakland cop, who is tasked with finding his ex-wife, Phạm Thị Hong, whom he renames Suzy. During his pursuit throughout Las Vegas, he learns more about her than he did during their 8-year marriage. Robert cannot truly comprehend the trauma she experienced and infantilizes her (when describing their sex life, Robert claims she “whimpers, a child-like thing a lot of Asian women do”). This lack of understanding represents how the United States cannot understand the Vietnamese refugee experience and sees the Vietnamese/Asian female body as both child-like and a sexual object of desire. However, Hong is more than that as she is constantly haunted by her refugee past and continues to leave and run away from multiple institutions such as the nation-state, her husbands, and the daughter she abandoned.
The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui (2017)
Last year, I was asked to choose my top ten books of the 21st century, and I resisted choosing The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. Not because I hate it; I absolutely love Bui’s work. Yet, I resisted because this book broke my heart. It reminded me of how I still struggle to ask my parents the hard questions about their lives. The impetus of The Best We Could Do originated with Bui’s academic work with oral histories, which required her to have difficult conversations with her parents. While at times her parents are seen as overbearing and violent, Bui humanizes them by showing her parents’ past growing up in a divided Vietnam. Like how her parents’ childhood impacted them into adulthood, Bui’s childhood continues to affect her even as she becomes a mother herself. The Best We Could Do is a masterclass on how illustrated memoirs can tackle such hard subjects artistically and empathetically.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)
When putting this list together, I was debating if I should even include Viet Thanh Nguyen because he is so well-known. I did not want to pander to popular constructions of what Vietnamese American literature should be. But I decided to include The Sympathizer because it highlights my own personal and academic journey. I first met Nguyen when I was an undergraduate student at UCI where he was discussing The Sympathizer at a small lunch gathering for Asian American studies. During this meeting, I asked him “Why a squid?” which he answered very graciously and earned me the nickname “Squid Girl.” Fast forward to now, I am a PhD student attending his talk about The Sympathizer in Idaho and writing a review of A Man of Two Faces for Soapberry Review. Surprisingly, the name, Squid Girl, has stuck after almost nine years. The Sympathizer provides an alternative narrative to the Vietnam War that looks at all the sides empathetically, while his memoir, A Man of Two Faces, shows how the war affects the personal years after it is over. It is just as Nguyen states in Nothing Ever Dies: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees by Yến Lê Espiritu (2014)
Within my Western high school education, my history teacher made it clear that Vietnamese stories were not a part of history or academia. During our unit on the Vietnam War, he only highlighted the American veteran perspective by showing movies like Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon, which characterized Vietnamese people as victims and communist enemies with distinction. I remember being horrified as I watched Vietnamese civilians, who looked like me, being slaughtered and raped as their villages were destroyed, but my teacher made it clear that that part of the story did not matter as the real victim was the United States as they lost the war. Yến Lê Espiritu makes clear in Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees that while the United States did lose the war, the refugees produced proved to be a solution to rehabilitate the American image “from military aggressors into magnanimous rescuers.” Utilizing different fields such as history, critical refugee studies, and Asian American studies, Espiritu moves away from the “damage-centered” approach to look at how Vietnamese Americans form alternative narratives that challenge established public narratives such as my history teacher’s conception of Vietnamese people as victim and enemy. While the high school curriculum has not moved away from this concept (and my history teacher continues to teach at this school), Body Counts allowed me to reconceptualize my family’s history of refugeehood beyond victims of war and trauma in need of saving.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (2019)
“Let me begin again.”
These are the words that Ocean Vuong starts his book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, with and these are the same words I used for my piece on it for the Soapberry Review in which I argue for the necessity of the Vietnamese American novel. While American high school history textbooks often conflate the war with the country, Vietnamese American literature demonstrates that we are a people with afterlives beyond the war. However, we are still affected by the aftermath, and Vuong calls out the contradictions and complexities. For example, the protagonist’s mom, Hong, is a manicurist, which has a history stemming from the actress Tippi Hedren bringing her own personal manicurist to Hope Village, a refugee camp in Northern California, to teach Vietnamese women. However, this puts Hong in a position in which she is expected to do emotional labor as a submissive Asian woman. Vuong’s language is also so stunningly beautiful as he conveys a story about a son writing to his mother who cannot read. There is this desire to communicate, but at the same time, Vuong highlights the impossibility.
Little Sister Left Behind by Samantha Lê (2007)
Little Sister Left Behind by Samantha Lê is not as well-known as some of the other books on this list as it was not published by a mainstream press, yet the story it tells is just as valid and powerful as the others. Little Sister Left Behind is a hybrid memoir that includes both real and fictional events, intentionally blurring the line between fiction and memoir. The memoir follows a family’s journey after the war. Believing that the American Dream is the solution to their problems, such as starvation, the family escapes to the United States. However, once they arrive, they all leave the family to escape each other. Many Vietnamese refugees faced downward mobility and this includes the family within the story. The father, a doctor in Vietnam, refuses to redo his medical training because in his perspective, he already worked hard, and he should be able to reap the benefits of the American Dream instead of being relegated to menial labor. This refusal to work forces his wife and daughters to work instead to make ends meet, which highlights the gendered expectations. While at times Lê can be blunt with her messaging about the American Dream, she shows the violence it inflicts with its false promises as none of Lê’s characters (and us by extension) were ever meant to achieve the American Dream.
The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen (2020)
There are many reasons why I chose The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen to be on this list, but if I am being honest, the initial reason was because it was pretty. The first time I opened the book, I was blown away by Nguyen’s artwork so much so that I spent the next hour looking at his portfolio online instead of reading the book (One day, I will get a print to hang in my office but today is not the day ☹). However, once I was able to look past the art and really dig into the story, I was captivated by the storyline. The main character, Tiến, struggles to communicate with and come out to his mother, Helen, a Vietnamese refugee who has resettled in the United States. In order to bridge this linguistic gap, Tiến and Helen read fairy tales to one another. At first, Helen tells Tiến to read the stories verbatim so she can practice her English, but by the end of the graphic novel, Helen changes the ending to The Little Mermaid to create a space of acceptance. Nguyen’s work is so relatable that it reminds me of the times I struggled to communicate with my own parents as a kid and how I wished my parents created that space for me. Now that I am older, I can be more empathetic as Nguyen shows the audience how Helen is caught in between two cultures and two countries as she confesses, “It feels like I died on that boat. And I am still stuck in the middle of the ocean. Far away from my mother…and far away from my son.”
em by Kim Thúy (2020)
The Vietnamese word em is an honorific that has different connotations depending on the group of people addressed. It could mean little sibling in a family, or it could refer to the younger person between two people or the woman in a couple. Em denotes intimacy and closeness, but Kim Thúy takes the concept even further by connecting the word to the French word aimer, “to love,” specifically the imperative, “love,” aime. By doing so, Thúy looks at the Vietnam War through a lens of love to show that it goes hand in hand with colonization. Thúy highlighting that connection between love and colonization was mind blowing for me. When we think of colonization, we often think of the violence it engenders rather than the love co-existing within these ideas. One of the reasons Vietnam was colonized was for its rubber, and while rubber was used for automobiles, it was also used to create condoms to protect soldiers in war from sexually transmitted infections. After all, war facilitates sex work and “love” runs rampant until the soldiers have to go back home. Thúy attends to the Vietnamese body that has been neglected and humanizes them with love.
Read more of my thoughts on the theme of love in em here.
The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh (2022)
When people think of Orange County (OC), often the shows, The O.C. or The Real Housewives of Orange County come to mind. These depictions tend to show a very rich and white lifestyle; in reality, the OC is a diverse place with many ethnic enclaves. Those shows represent a specific version of the OC that does not encompass every experience yet defines it within the popular imagination. However, in The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh, I saw my home in her descriptions of Kim Su, Bánh Mì & Chè Cali, and Phước Lộc Thọ that went beyond name-dropping. As a kid, my parents would take me at least once a month to Kim Su for dim sum, and Bánh Mì & Chè Cali is such a staple within the community. The other night, my uncle and I tried to find a pho restaurant at 8:30 p.m., and we found ourselves at Bánh Mì & Chè Cali. Huynh captures the intimacy and nuance of Little Saigon without sensationalizing it, all while capturing the complicated, multilayered relationships of a Vietnamese American family affected by displacement.
Read my review here.
The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo (2021)
My mother is not much of a reader, but when she saw The Great Gatsby on my high school English syllabus, she was so excited. She remembered being enthralled with the 1920s after reading the same book when she was my age and wanted to share that excitement by showing me the 1974 adaptation starring Mia Farrow and Robert Redford. I was captivated with the glamor of what I saw on screen, and while no one in the movie looked like me, I still wanted to take part in the revelry of a Gatsby party. But deep down, I knew that someone like me would never have a chance in participating in such during the 1920s. If The Great Gatsby is “all about Daisy,” Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful recenters the narrative around Jordan, who is a queer Vietnamese adoptee whose belonging in the upper echelon of society is tentative because of her race. While Jordan is barred from Southern/Western traditions, it was so cool to see someone who looks like me represented within this well-known story.
Read my review here.
The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memory of Vietnam by Vinh Nguyen (2025)
Originally this list was eleven books, but three weeks before this list was supposed to come out, I texted Audrey if I could add one more. I recently went to Viet Fest this year where I met Vinh Nguyen. I had known about his upcoming memoir, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memory of Vietnam, but I told myself I could only buy one book at the festival. It was between his book and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s newest book, To Save and to Destroy. I went with the latter; I immediately regretted not getting both. I tried so hard to hold firm in my decision, but hearing Nguyen talk about his journey to publish The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse and what it was about immediately sold me (and my boyfriend had to sneak out of the panel to buy it for me). I got on the plane the next day with his book in hand, and I could not put it down. Nguyen’s memoir captures the complicated relationship between loss and memory as Nguyen and his family were separated from his father, who later mysteriously vanished. The book is a meditation on the fallibility of memory: for example, Nguyen discusses a destroyed photo of his father and him where he cannot describe its exact details. Nevertheless, the memory of it still lives on and allows him to imagine what it could have been. Through these memories and these pages, he gives his father a life both in what is remembered and what is imagined.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.