Menu
More than two decades after his family left Vietnam by boat, Tuấn Phan returns to a country much altered. His recent memoir, Remembering Water, braids childhood memories of Vietnam and his family’s departure with reflections on his current life in Saigon. Writer Cameron Walker talks with Tuan about writing a path through the watery nature of memory.
Debut author Tracey Lien’s novel, All That’s Left Unsaid, uses the frame of a detective novel to richly explore the aftermath of a violent killing that leaves a community reeling. Readers may initially anticipate a traditional mystery, but as the novel unfolds, they will discover a compelling family drama and a thought-provoking examination of an immigrant community’s doomed pursuit of the Australian dream.
2018
From Saigon to Bataan to Ohio
Winner of the 2018 Talking Writing Prize for Personal Essay
My mother remembers her hunger in Bataan: that persistent gnawing under the rib cage, the deep breaths she sucked in that never felt like enough air.
Nearly a year after we’d left the Philippines Refugee Processing Center, our second and last refugee camp—after we had already begun to adjust to our new lives in America—my mother’s dreams were still permeated by the sweet, pungent smoke of caramelized pork; the warmth of bitter-melon soup stuffed with minced meat and mushroom.
It had rained hard for hours, and now the monsoon accumulation gushed through the streets and sidewalks of District 1. I was caught in the downpour while riding my motorbike through the boulevards of Saigon, wide lanes relatively devoid of traffic on this wet working day.
It was on this walk that I encountered remnants of old villas. Juxtaposed with the carefully-aged castle and its inventively aged ramparts, there are ruins and faux ruins that make for strange bedfellows. The true past in actual ruins, its modern kitschy version just above it, was glowing in the midday sun.