At Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, a capacity crowd has arrived for a conversation about a brand-new anthology, The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora, one of the first books to gather the voices and perspectives of Vietnamese diasporic authors from across the globe. All three editors—Pulitzer Prize-winner and former San Josean Viet Thanh Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and Lan Duong—are joined on stage by two writers who contributed to the anthology, the French national and award-winning journalist Doan Bui, and Nguyen Phan Que Mai, author of global bestselling novels The Mountains Sing and Dust Child. 

A vibrant conversation unfolds. Nguyen Phan Que Mai reads her poetry in both Vietnamese and English. Pelaud and Viet Thanh Nguyen reflect on decades ago, when they were Berkeley students helping start the organization Ink & Blood, which eventually became the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network (DVAN). Doan Bui regales the crowd with stories of being a Vietnamese-speaking journalist in France and the flavors of racism and privilege the French claim don’t exist.

In total, The Cleaving features dialogues among 37 writers, expanding on the many lives Vietnamese artists inhabit, in terms of family history, legacies of colonialism and militarism, and the writers’ own literary achievements. Taken together, the dialogues demand a deeper reckoning with the conditions of displacement.

Yet The Cleaving is just one of several books and respective events currently set to erupt throughout San Jose and the greater Bay Area, all to reflect on 50 years since the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. 

Exorcising Ghosts

Even before Andrew Lam was the 2015 Lurie Visiting Author at San Jose State, he’d already been writing for at least 20 years, placing him among the first generation of scribes to successfully publish, in English, short stories and journalism about the Vietnamese refugee experience.

Following two works of nonfiction, Lam published Birds of Paradise Lost, a collection of short stories about Vietnamese-American newcomers struggling for acceptance in the San Francisco Bay Area. He regularly crisscrossed the globe on journalism assignments and was even included in the PBS documentary film My Journey Home, in which he returned to Vietnam and visited his mother’s ancestral village.

Lam returns to San Jose yet again on April 27 to keynote an event at 70 W. Hedding St, commemorating the fall of Saigon. The Santa Clara County Supervisors and the Viet Museum at History San Jose are sponsoring the event.

“I’m going to talk about how writing saved my life,” he said, in a recent Zoom call. “It’s funny because people are like, ‘Oh, did you want to be famous?’ I say, ‘No, I wrote so I can exorcise ghosts.’”

If you want to be famous, he added, then writing is probably not a great idea. Instead, writing can be a therapeutic process, even if it spans decades.

“It’s saved me probably thousands of dollars from therapy because you do address the pain, you do address the sadness, and the sorrow,” he said. “And when a story is good, a story is powerful. It has a life of its own and continues to live on. And it is really a blessing in disguise. You suffer for it and go through this sort of agonizing process called ‘a writing life.’ But when a story makes it to the public life, sometime it has a power of its own.”

Lam can cite many examples of just such a life. For instance, a Tulane University professor taught one of Lam’s short stories, “Show and Tell,” about a Vietnamese refugee kid who was in seventh grade. The kid couldn’t speak English, so he had to draw on the chalkboard in order to tell his story. Then he was severely bullied by another kid whose dad was killed in Vietnam. One of the class clowns then befriended the Vietnamese kid and helped explain the kid’s story while the kid wrote on the chalkboard. Eventually, the bully backed off.

At Tulane, one of the students who was assigned to read “Show and Tell” then went home and cried because he recognized himself as someone similar to the bully character in the story. He too had bullied a Vietnamese kid when he was young and now realized he wanted to go find him and apologize.

Lam was floored upon hearing that his short story made a former bully break down and repent. As a writer, he was just trying to exorcise his own trauma, his own grief, and now his words had inspired someone else to make amends for his own past deeds.

“When I started out writing, I didn’t think about any of those things,” Lam said. “I just thought I was expressing my story.” I was basically that voiceless kid who drew on the blackboard. … So in some way, it gives me strength to continue to write, even though when you get older, your power wanes. You feel lazy, and I just want to retire. But sometimes I find that those kinds of experiences really give me this incentive to continue.”

Lam’s new collection, Stories from the Edge of the Sea, explores craving, lust, grief, loss, memory, war and generational trauma. A young dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat while escaping Vietnam. A lonely writer reconnects with a former lover and his current wife in their Berkeley hills home, only to remain heartbroken and empty while the ghosts appear. Several characters navigate the rough waters of perpetual exile and displacement.

Over the years, many other Vietnamese writers have also persisted in English, all while the next generations continue to emerge. Now the diaspora feels stronger than ever. Lam describes the situation as “a hundred flowers blooming in the Vietnamese community.”

Sharing the Burden

At the end of the Kepler’s event, Viet Thanh Nguyen and the other participants are escorted to the signing table, after which the sold-out crowd, row by row, are then allowed to line up and get their books signed. It takes at least half an hour for the line to finally reach the end, as everyone scrambles to take selfies with the authors. Many customers are buying multiple copies of The Cleaving, since there has never been a book anthologizing Vietnamese authors from all over the world. The line is so large that bookstore employees have to reroute the line through the store, in order to properly rearrange the shelves back into their normal places.

While people wait in line, assistants are passing out flyers for “Still We Rise,” a grand-scale April 26 event in San Francisco that DVAN is organizing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. An entire ensemble cast of Vietnamese writers and artists will participate.

In addition to The Cleaving, another book is also on sale, To Save and Destroy: Writing as an Other, the latest by Viet Thanh Nguyen, now the only former San Josean to deliver the prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard, placing him in the same company as Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Thornton Wilder and Igor Stravinsky. To Save and Destroy compiles the lectures into one book. In the book, Nguyen writes about his college days, when he found solace in scholarship, teaching him that the best way to neutralize the grief of otherness is to make it ever more spacious, rather than reduce it to a singular sorrow.

“Capacious grief acknowledges that the trauma of the other is neither singular nor unique, that there are other others out there with whom we can share the burden,” Nguyen writes. “Perhaps only by expanding our grief might we be able to leave our trauma behind. And in sharing our burden—of writing, of representation, of otherness—we might transform that burden into a gift.”

This is exactly what Lam claims saved his own life: the process of sharing and expanding one’s own inherited otherness. One can look at it from many different perspectives.

“In the Buddhist tradition, they will call it karma,” Lam said. “You are forced to inherit this violence or this loss, this heartbreak, and you repeat it until you somehow find a way to absolve it or exorcise it through spiritual growth or active writing or whatever it is that one does. But you have to actively take charge of that thing. And sometimes you don’t understand it until you really dig deep and then you start seeing those vectors pointing to that shared grief.”

With the largest Vietnamese population of any one city outside Vietnam, San Jose should be proud. Here’s to another hundred flowers, as they prepare to bloom.

Marking a Milestone

Various events are slated to take place this week in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon—a landmark event that led to the evacuation of not only U.S. military personnel and officials but also thousands of South Vietnamese citizens.

April 23

My Vietnam, Your Vietnam

The San Jose Public Library presents a conversation with author Christina Vo on the verge of the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. In My Vietnam, Your Vietnam, Christina Vo and her father, Nghia M. Vo, offer an intimate portrait of Vietnam across two generations and continents. In-person and virtual. Free. April 23, 6-7pm. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Library, Room 113, 150 E San Fernando St, San Jose, San Jose. 408.808.2397 events.sjsu.edu

April 26

Still We Rise: 50 Years After the Vietnam War

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) hosts an unforgettable evening of reflections, poetry and music performances by renowned artists of the Vietnamese diaspora. Including reflections by Viet Thanh Nguyen, An-My Lê, Thy Hope Luong, Paul Tran and several others. Sydney Goldstein Theater, San Francisco. Doors open at 5pm; show starts at 6pm; $56 (including fees). dvan.org/swr

April 27

50 Years of Remembrance and Renewal: April 30 Commemoration

Writer and journalist Andrew Lam will keynote the free event, sponsored by Santa Clara County Supervisors Betty Duong and Otto Lee, and presented by the San Jose-based nonprofit organization Immigrant Resettlement & Cultural Center, Inc. and the Viet Museum at Kelley Park. Santa Clara County Isaac Newton Senter Auditorium, 70 W. Hedding St, San Jose. 1–3pm. Facebook.com

April 30

50th Annual Black April Commemoration: “Honoring History, Shaping Tomorrow”

Every year at San Jose City Hall, the Vietnamese American community in the Bay Area commemorates the sacrifices and legacies of refugees on April 30. This year’s program, performances and exhibits will now explore five decades of sacrifices and struggles, all to help rebuild lasting legacies in San Jose, Santa Clara County, and the United States. Free and open to the public. Black attire encouraged. RSVP through Eventbrite. San Jose City Hall Rotunda, 200 E Santa Clara St, San Jose. Doors at 4:30pm, program at 5pm, dinner reception 6:30pm. varoundtable.org/black-april

The Colors of April: Vietnamese Authors Program (Virtual/In-Person)

Celebrating the release of The Colors of April: Fiction on the Vietnam War’s Legacy 50 Years Later. Program moderated by Cab Tran and Quan Ha (editors), and Kat Georges and Peter Carlaftes (publishers). Digital Humanities Center, Martin Luther King Jr. Main Library, San Jose. In-person and virtual. 5:30–7:30pm. sjpl.bibliocommons.com/events

May 3

VIP Premiere of ‘Daydreamers’

Sundance Award-winning Vietnamese American filmmaker Timothy Linh Bui (Three Seasons, Green Dragon) is premiering his new film, Daydreamers—the first Vietnamese vampire movie—in U.S. theaters starting May 2, including a special premiere event on May 3 in San Jose with Vietnamese community support. A bold, genre-bending supernatural story set in modern-day Saigon and told entirely in Vietnamese, with stunning visual effects and a fresh take on identity, loyalty and survival. AMC Eastridge 15, 2190 Eastridge Loop, San Jose. 5:30–6:45pm meet-and-greet red carpet, 7–8:30pm movie screening, 8:30–9pm Q&A session. Tickets, $20 adv/$25 door, on Eventbrite.