Fifty Years After The Vietnam War – Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

On the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, three authors discuss the challenges of telling the stories of their parents and lovers, examining love, loss, and identity across genres and generations. Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The 14 pieces in Andrew Lam’s Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreak through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. Almost a century after Gertrude Stein invented a new autobiographical literary form, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein’s project with The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam, a candid chronicle of her partner’s life journey from Việt Nam during the war, and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American.
Buy Becoming Ghost – Che
Buy Stories from the Edge of the Sea – Lam
Buy The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam – Lin

Authors

CATHY LINH CHE is a writer, multidisciplinary artist, and the author of Becoming Ghost: Poetry (Washington Square Press) and Split. She also co-authored the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History with Kyle Lucia Wu. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. Che teaches as core faculty in poetry at the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and is the executive director at Kundiman. She lives in New York.

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