15 Canadian Books to Read on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War by Vinh Nguyen

It’s difficult to believe that half a century has elapsed since the end of the Vietnam War. The war, to me, and perhaps to many others who remember it, seems both far and near. A distant memory and a not-too-long-ago reality. During the latter part of the twentieth century, the war was a world-shaping event, and today, its political, environmental, and human legacies continue to be felt.

I’ve spent almost two decades of my career as a literary scholar trying to understand the war and its afterlives. Recently, I’ve written a speculative memoir, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse, that draws on personal experience, historical research, and imaginative fabulation to reflect on my father’s mysterious disappearance at sea while seeking asylum. The book was a way for me to reach the truth of desire and dream the lives that could have been.

I was inspired by the rich body of literature about the Vietnam War produced in Canada. The list I’ve compiled here is only a small sampling of the diverse works by and about Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian diasporas. These books show the war’s significant imprint on Canadian society as well as narrate the incredible experiences of living in the wake of violence.

what we all long for

by dionne brand

vintage canada

Dionne Brand’s quintessential What We All Long For is also the first “Vietnamese Canadian” novel. The first, that is, to render a Vietnamese refugee family in Canadian fiction with such poetic precision and attention to history. I read Brand’s novel as an undergrad—who had not encountered any Vietnamese characters in English books—and it floored me. Twenty years later, it still resonates as an enduring classic of colliding histories, intersecting desires, and divergent futures in a multicultural Canada

the girl in the picture: the kim phuc story

by denise chong

Penguin canada

The iconic black-and-white image of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, the little girl burned by napalm, is given story and context in Denise Chong’s The Girl in the Picture: The Kim Phuc Story. Via extensive interviews with her subject, Chong details Phan’s rural childhood, youth in wartime Vietnam, studies in Moscow, asylum-seeking in Canada, and peace activism later in life. This is a fascinating account of a woman swept up in—and resiliently surviving—the grand forces of history.

precedented parroting

by barbara tran

palimpsest press

Barbara Tran’s magnificent debut poetry collection Precented Parroting contemplates birds, photos, and memories to ask difficult questions about diasporic family, race, and being. Each poem in this collection takes flight as a song that will ring long beyond the page. In Tran’s expert hands, the themes of war and migration are given subtle treatment in unique metaphors, images, and line-breaks, foregrounding, first and foremost, the process of an artist finding her place in the world.

landbridge: life in fragments

by Y-Dang Troeung

alchemy by knopf canada

There’s a photo of Pierre Elliot Trudeau embracing baby Y-Dang Troeung as the last of the 60,000 “Indochinese” refugees resettled in Canada in 1980. Through a lyrical voice, and utilizing autobiography, criticism, and history, Troeung examines this moment, and many others, that shaped the lives of millions of Cambodians in the wake of war. Troeung wrote this poignant and urgent book on her deathbed; it is not so much a memoir as it is a kaleidoscopic memorial to life, family, motherhood, genocide, illness, and love.

found

by Souvankham Thammavongsa

mcclelland & stewart

Souvankham Thammavongsa is best known for her prize-winning collection of short stories How to Pronounce Knife, but before her meteoric rise to fame she’d been writing poetry for nearly two decades. In Found, her magnum opus, Thammavongsa contemplates the contents of a scrapbook her father kept in a Thai refugee camp and then discarded years later in Canada. What she builds, through poems precise and crystalline, is a miraculous portrait of a life so ordinary and so historical, so small and yet so epic

Ru

by kim thúy

Vintage canada

Ru’s power lies in its purity. Told in short, poetic vignettes, Kim Thúy’s tale is a classic immigrant narrative of resilience and triumph. The author weaves together tender observations with violent histories, self-discovery with social transformations, loss with beauty to create a heartfelt and hypnotic story. This autobiographical novel is a love letter to Canada and to all the people who uplifted Kim Thúy and her family as they transitioned into new lives.

The will of heaven: a story of one vietnamese and the end of his world

by nguyen ngoc ngan

Nguyen Ngoc Ngan’s memoir The Will of Heaven: A Story of One Vietnamese and the End of His World has long been out of print, but I put this on the list because it deserves to be read. Nguyen is a global celebrity in the Vietnamese diaspora; before his retirement in 2022, he was a beloved MC for decades on the variety show “Paris By Night.” In his riveting memoir (with E. E. Richey), Nguyen provides an invaluable first-hand account of life in postwar Vietnam, which led him and his family to undertake a heartbreaking escape journey. Find it however you can.

a thousand times you lose your treasure

by hoa nguyen

Wave books

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hoa Nguyen’s mother was a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese troupe. In A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, Nguyen’s spectacular poetic talents are on full display as she bends language and resists easy narrative to make experience yield its promised treasures. These poems shimmer and delight in their ordering of place, biography, and history.

the forbidden purple city

by philip huynh

goose lane editions

Philip Huynh’s The Forbidden Purple City gathers nine short stories that intricately sketch Vietnamese diasporic experiences. Sometimes absurd, often touching, and always wise, these beautiful stories place Vietnamese characters in unique situations that draw out the complicated depths of their personalities, histories, and desires. Moving across geographies, from Vancouver to New York to Huế, each of these narratives demonstrate the aliveness of being “Vietnamese” in the twenty-first century.

three funerals for my father: love, loss and escape from vietnam

by jolie phuong hoang

tidewater press

Hoang’s Three Funerals for My Father: Love, Loss and Escape from Vietnam is told via two interlocking perspectives: the author’s and the ghost of her father. This is a poignant memoir about family separation and rebuilding new lives in the wake of war and migration. Hoang writes in direct and sincere prose, and her story will resonate with those who’ve been displaced and scattered across the globe.

guerrilla nation: my wars in and out of vietnam

by Michael maclear

In 1969, Maclear was the only Western correspondent allowed inside North Vietnam. Maclear’s engrossing book Guerrilla Nation: My Wars In and Out of Vietnam chronicles the incredible years he spent covering a nation scarcely understood at the time. From Ho Chi Minh’s funeral to the first bombing of Hanoi to a look into POW prisons, Maclear’s clear-eyed accounts are invaluable historical records. This book is snapshot of both world history and the jagged contours of early Canadian journalism.

dogs at the perimeter

by madeleine thien

vintage canada

In Dogs at the Perimeter, a disappearance unravels a non-linear, fragmentary narrative of memory and recovery. The book’s narrator is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, and it is through her recollections that readers begin to sense the horrors of war and ethnic cleansing, the persistent haunting of the past, the intricacies of the mind, and the inner fortitude of the human spirit. Thien is a master at weaving together threads that connect personal experience to historical trauma to political potential. This novel is one of the most powerful works of Canadian fiction.

the time in between

by david bergen

mcclelland & stewart

David Bergan’s The Time in Between is about various returns. A traumatized veteran who committed a life-altering act as a teenage soldier comes back to Vietnam seeking clarity. His children follow when he goes missing and they become entangled with the haunted past. Vietnam becomes a country of nostalgia, longing, and disillusionment for these foreigners who are lost to themselves and to each other. Bergen’s taut prose and keen character observations give this novel a captivating aura.

a perfect bowl of pho

by nam nguyen

playwrights canada press

Nam Nguyen’s electrifying A Perfect Bowl of Pho is a full of unbridled energy. The meta-theatrical play is the perfect mixture of musical, parody, history, humor, criticism, romance, politics, and coming-of-age. Nam (playwright and character) is unconstrained by genre or identity as he uses all his precocious faculties to cobble together an entertaining and astute reflection on delicious pho and all the intangibles we crave. This book will make you laugh and cry in the same moment.

dream of me as water

By david ly

anstruther books

The central metaphor in David Ly’s poetry collection is water. In Vietnamese, the word for water—nước—is the same as the word for “country, nation, homeland.” In tight and accessible poems, Ly takes on the slippery notion of belonging, showing us what it takes to stay afloat and to dream. These are love poems to the self, touching on race, queerness, and identity without ever letting them overwhelm the poet’s crystal-clear voice.

Vinh Nguyen is an educator and writer. He is the author of The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse and Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. Vinh edits for nonfiction for The New Quarterly.