L'Art Brut and Poetry: Về -- The Way Homeward

 

Amazon and Vietnamese American writers as of 2016 and my nine star-struck roses

 vietnamese american writers on amazon.com

Amazon says readers often bought novels by the following writers, together (I list names in alphabetial order) (meaning a reader who bought a book by one also bought books by the others):
Lan Cao
Uyen Nicole Duong (DNN)
Mai Van Duong Eliott
Andrew Lam
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Andrew X Pham
Ocean Vuong

And, guess who else is lumped into the same list?

GRAHAM GREENE!

I don't see Monique Truong, Why? The writers listed above (myself included) are joined together by topic: they wrote about Vietnam. Is Monique's Book of Salt really about Vietnam???

ARTWORK: My nine roses, star-struck! (enamel, marker, and digital pen UND copyright 2016). I mentioned nine writers in this post, so I posted my nine roses! 

Ve Voi Hoi-An

 

RACISM AND A HUMAN LIFE

 FAIR USE EXCEPTION TO COPYRIGHT: 

One Summer Ann-Margaret Lim On April 22, 1993, 18-year-old 2nd Generation Jamaican youth Stephen Lawrence was attacked and stabbed to death in an unprovoked hate crime by a gang of white boys as he waited at a bus stop in London. His murderers were acquitted and allowed to walk free for 18 years, until two of his six killers were convicted of murder in 2011. for Stephen Lawrence (September 13, 1974—April 22, 1993) In the dream, Stephen   you’re thicker than when we were young but thoughtful, as a first kiss.   We had one summer in Kingston  before England’s white boys  kicked, clubbed, knifed you.    Too brief again, this August light  its hours shifting. And hate, a hungry   animal that only takes.   The day your family stood above   your grave, swept by coconut palms  and a small bird orchestra  I smashed the shuttlecock   repeatedly against my backyard wall my grief knocking back  against the day’s blunt silence.  What loves still lives, transforms   my days, each night  each decade passing—   I follow you, and return to the gate  you towered over   that careless summer  when you were just a boy   laughing against the sky  and I still believed in the light   and what it makes of us. Copyright © 2021 by Ann-Margaret Lim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 21, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets. SEE ALSO:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

JUST LEARNED MADAME NGUYEN VAN THIEU HAS PASSED AWAY

I was the last Vietnamese woman to walk the Tao Dan public park in central Saigon, March 1975, for this honor (the national honor prize in literature for the Trung Sisters' commemoration), awarded by the now defunct Republic of Vietnam.  The collapse of South Vietnam occurred barely a month later...

The award was started by Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu of the First Republic. 

I celebrated (poignantly) my 17th birthday in America,  Happy or sad? What I left behind:  a wound that nevel heals. 

Ừ thu thì cũng vàng thu xứ người...từ Võ Phiến đến DNN

 

ditigal imaging by DNN c 2021

digital imaging inverted c DNN 2021

"Ừ thu thì cũ̉ng vàng thu xứ người" ̣ (VP)

Mây mà không biết mây trôi

Người mà không biết người đời bỏ quên

Cây mà không biết cây im

Đường mà không biết đường tim lạc loài

Lá mà không biết lá rơi

Đẫ́t mà không biết đất trời đổi tên...

DNN copyrighted oct 7 2021

beautiful the best of Vietnamese folk music

 

Kirkus REview on Ng.Uyen Nicole Duong's Postcards from Nam

 https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/uyen-nicole-duong/postcards-from-nam/

POSTCARDS FROM NAM

BY UYEN NICOLE DUONG ‧ RELEASE DATE: AUG. 15, 2011

A lawyer in the United States who escaped Communist Vietnam as a child receives mysterious postcards from a childhood friend that reopens old emotional wounds.

Mimi works in Washington, D.C., as a lawyer. Lost in the hazy blur of her hectic career, she rarely pauses to consider her traumatic childhood. Born and raised in Vietnam, she fled the country with her family in 1975 when Saigon fell to the Communists. Her grandmother refused to join them, however, afraid that her frailty would prevent their escape. Years later, now a successful professional living a thoroughly American life, Mimi begins to receive postcards from someone named Nam—she can’t recall anyone of that name, but he seems to know her well, referring to her as Mi Chau, the Vietnamese name no one she knows now uses. Her mother remembers him, though, as a sweet boy who lived across the alley in Saigon, a talented artist who brought Mimi treats, told her ghost stories, and tearfully professed his love for her. Mimi becomes obsessed with finding Nam and learning his fate, a dogged pursuit that brings her into a long-overdue confrontation with her own, formerly silenced demons, a struggle affectingly portrayed by author Duong. “Nam became my project—the symbol for my pursuit of nobility and the return to my roots.” In nimble prose, the author explores the intractability of the protagonist’s past, as resistant to revision as it is to evasion. Mimi is a memorably drafted character, both emotionally fragile and relentless. This is a brief novella—under 100 pages—but densely layered with poignancy and nuance.

A moving, poetically rendered tale of personal pain buried deep in willful self-reinvention.