“If the rain could wash away everything, maybe we could all find peace. For the third generation after the war, what was left behind wasn’t anger or bitterness, but an enduring sorrow that echoed from the heart.”
Coming in the second story of the new anthology The Colors of April, this quote identifies some of the emotions frequently expressed by Vietnamese writers, of all generations, when reflecting on the war with America.
In an attempt to push back against the foreign reduction of Vietnam to only a country that underwent a devastating war five decades ago, I write very little about anything related to war, literature included. Doing so, however, risks dismissing or downplaying its importance in the literary canon and Vietnamese lives around the world. The 50th anniversary of the war’s end is ushering in a great number of books addressing it and, while I will continue to explore and champion works beyond war, it’s a good opportunity to acknowledge and reflect upon the significant impact the war has had on literature.
Colors of April, co-edited by Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran, provides a well-rounded view of the war and its aftermath via writers from a multitude of backgrounds, generations, circumstances, and perspectives as well as styles and interests. After noting the failures of the politically motivated, one-dimensional, white American-centric media that came in the postwar period, the editors acknowledge “a whole generation of Vietnamese Americans who have grown up knowing little about the circumstances of their citizenship, why their grandparents left Vietnam … now reconnecting with their roots and the country.” For them, the collection offers examples of the stories their families did not share; the experiences of a country and people they were separated from; and members of their own generation who are navigating what it means to be Vietnamese American in America or as one of the many Việt Kiều moving to Vietnam to find a country quite different from what they may have imagined.
Amongst the book’s 28 stories are several that contain expected themes: war is miserable; grief eclipses winners and losers; physical and emotional traumas get passed down, and reconciliation is not just possible but essential for healing.
The nuances and range of the collection make it valuable beyond this specifically defined group of Vietnamese Americans, however. Readers who remember daily war reports issued from Saigon may be surprised to read about a nation now filled with trendy trinket shops whose interiors are designed to entice youths eager for social media photo backdrops, as one story depicts it. Young Americans, of all backgrounds, who may not have read anything about the war other than three paragraphs in a textbook, will benefit immensely from being transported to mountainous hamlets that sent their young off to war, and the orphanages that took in the mixed-race offspring of foreign soldiers and local women. The stories also transcend the period and explore love, motherhood, youthful ennui, and wanderlust.
Amongst the book’s 28 stories are several that contain expected themes: war is miserable; grief eclipses winners and losers; physical and emotional traumas get passed down, and reconciliation is not just possible but essential for healing. As long as the world continues to hurtle blindly into barbaric conflicts, these lessons need repeating. The translated stories by Vietnamese writers including Nguyễn Minh Chuyên, Trần Thị Tú Ngọc, and Nguyễn Thị Kim Hòa, are particularly suited for readers who only know war from news links and entertainment media and have yet to encounter it via a singular, intimate literary vantage point. These stories allow the reader to imagine what they would do in such conditions, and by extension, discover the shared humanity of all those caught up in war.
Other stories upend familiar narratives or add less common voices to the discussion. Nguyễn Đức Tùng’s dreamy ‘A Jarai Tribesman and His Wife’ underscores how Vietnam and its diaspora consist of more than just Kinh people and challenging times compound the inequities ethnic minorities endure. Similarly, a Mexican American deserter is at the center of Lưu Vĩ Lân’s ‘M.I.A, M.O.W; P.O.W, P.O.P,’ which further complicates Hollywood-esque re-enactments of the American battlefield experience. In the collection's most exuberant story, ‘Bad Things Didn’t Happen,’ by Gin To, readers are taken behind the facade of Vietnam's migratory mega-wealthy and exposed to the outlandish dysfunction of beauty queens, shopping sprees, and extramarital affairs.
Dismantling the American dream is a recurring theme in The Colors of April that holds revelatory potential for readers outside the Vietnamese diaspora even more than for those within it. ‘A Mother’s Story,’ is a heartbreaking look at a downtrodden first-generation Vietnamese American who suffers botched surgery, poverty, and abusive relationships in pursuit of uniquely American concepts of success as defined by Paris by Night stardom. Meanwhile, the sharp, smart prose that helped Viet Thanh Nguyen win a Pulitzer Prize is on full display in ‘The Immolation.’ The story brings to life the poor, angry California youths who struggled to come of age in a new country while their parents were occupied tending to their own wounds and fighting their own demons. Several other works investigate the motivations of young Việt Kiều moving to Vietnam to find themselves, their histories or perhaps just an easier way after growing exhausted by America.
The 50th anniversary of the war’s end is ushering in a great number of books addressing it and, while I will continue to explore and champion works beyond war, it’s a good opportunity to acknowledge and reflect upon the significant impact the war has had on literature.
“I am not an eloquent storyteller and my story is clearly messy and erratic. Besides, my story could, at best, reveal only a tiny part of the whole, like drips or smudges bleeding into other shades in an abstract painting,” the narrator reports in Phùng Nguyễn’s ‘Oakland Night Question.’ He was speaking about his own experiences in a small village in southern Vietnam, but the same could be said about Vietnam’s war legacy 50 years later, as is referenced in the anthology’s subtitle. No amount of books, collections, movies or plays could ever add up to complete the entire abstract painting. But the more one sees, the more one understands, which, in addition to having value in and of itself, helps lead one to peace and acceptance. The Colors of April adds some beautiful hues to the artwork.
The Colors of April will be released by Three Rooms Press on March 25, 2025. Pre-order information is available here.
