my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter  

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.

Li Young-Lee, “The City in Which I Love You” (1990)

The pieces selected for this special issue represent a spectrum of diasporic Vietnamese narratives by contributors of Vietnamese descent, currently living in France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the United States. At this juncture—the half-century mark since the end of the Vietnam War—there is no single tradition of Vietnamese diasporic literature, but rather overlapping perspectives that reflect both historical circumstances and phases of migration, during and after the Cold War.

Our contributors range from late-fifties to mid-eighties in age, have attained outwardly stable lives in their settled milieu. Nevertheless, they seem to possess a duality, being at once well-adapted and perpetually untethered, which brings to mind Chinua Achebe’s trenchant observation in his lecture “Today, The Balance of Stories” in Home and Exile that while the figure of the Western artist-in-exile (i.e., Picasso leaving Spain for Paris, Rimbaud leaving France for Abyssinia, Rilke changing homes perpetually) seems romantic,

the experience of a traveler from the world’s poor places is very different, whether he is traveling as a tourist or struggling to settle down as an exile in a wealthy country. . . . Let me just say of such a traveler that he will not be able to claim a double citizenship like Gertrude Stein when she said, “I’m an American and Paris is my home.”

The “poor places” invoked by Achebe can easily apply to Vietnam, with its relentless conflicts that predated the Vietnam War. Twentieth-century Vietnam was a protracted series of struggles: the fight against French colonization and the rise of various political movements for independence, consisting of non-Communist nationalist parties and the Communist-led faction called Viet Minh, formed by Ho Chi Minh. The Viet Minh seized control of North Vietnam at the end of World War II, leading to the First Indochina War (1946–54), which culminated in the Communist victory at Dien Bien Phu and the subsequent division of Vietnam into two countries—the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and a US-backed South, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). This partition ignited the Second Indochina War, widely known as the Vietnam War (1955–75), a devastating conflict exacerbated by Cold War dynamics, which resulted in the North Vietnamese victory in April 1975 and the reunification of the country under Communist rule. Even during this so-called peacetime, Vietnam was mired in border wars with Cambodia and China for over a decade, from 1978 to 1991, before initiating a series of economic reforms that transitioned the country into a market-based economy as we know it today.

In their presumably adaptive, yet stoic and untethered states, multilingual or transnational even when they’re writing in Vietnamese, our contributors have more in common with Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, Chinua Achebe, and Ágota Kristof than with Vietnamese American writers whose English-language narratives often illuminate the hard-toiled lives of US-based refugees from the former RVN. Our contributors’ personal backgrounds, on the other hand, span both North and South Vietnam, and reflect Vietnam’s domestic problems and global migration movements that took place from the 1970s to the 1990s. For example, Thường Quán was a scholarship student representing the soon-to-be-extinct RVN when he arrived in Australia in 1974; Nguyễn Đức Tùng and Trương Vũ were boat refugees who fled Vietnam during the dark years of the postwar period, and who resettled, respectively, in Canada and the US; Thuận, born in Hanoi during the escalation phase of the Vietnam War, studied in Russia in the 1980s before migrating to France; her husband, Trần Trọng Vũ, also Hanoi-born, left his birth city for Paris in 1989, on an art scholarship to further his training at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Đặng Thơ Thơ arrived in the US in 1992 via the Orderly Departure Program, designed to provide asylum seekers with a safe alternative to illegal departures. As most of these contributors had reached adulthood by the time they left Vietnam, their cultural identities are well-established, unlike other diasporic writers and artists of Vietnamese descent whose “make-believe” roots are exuberantly or swaggeringly defined by linguistic distortions and generational ruptures.

Nevertheless, our contributors’ departures from Vietnam toward far-flung regions of the world, whether achieved legally or illegally, mark them as dispossessed cosmopolitans. Experiencing both empathy and isolation in their daily encounters, they turn these experiences into artistic responses that embrace instability as their natural condition. Poet Thường Quán, whose pen name means “place of domicile,” was granted passage to Australia via a Colombo Plan Scholarship—launched by the Australian government to provide financial support to promising students from developing countries in South and Southeast Asia. This program, which facilitated an influx of nonwhite immigrants into the Australian social fabric, would gradually erode the White Australia Policy that insisted on preserving “the pure standard” of Western culture. Thường Quán’s poetry, as if to illustrate his revolving trajectory, from stateless individual after the fall of South Vietnam to established Melbourne poet and (metaphorically) back again, is imbued with an acute awareness of impermanence, or more specifically, a fear of cultural extinction. In his “Theater at Cồn Market,” the preteen moviegoers resemble fledgling artists of a hopeful, makeshift republic, their “first attempt[s] at creation” already at risk of being destroyed by censorship and violence.

The artist Trần Trọng Vũ, whose cover painting “A Partition of Chance” graces our issue, grew up making art but did not fully grasp the political dimension of his creative calling until after he came to France shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was only with a newly acquired  outsider’s perspective looking back toward Vietnam that he realized how Communist art had colonized his subconscious and blocked his critical perception during his formative years. This realization was both sobering and liberating: Trần Trọng Vũ, the youngest son of renowned poet Trần Dần, now appreciated how his father’s passionate insistence on “truth” in poetry had destroyed the latter’s literary career but effectively exempted him from all prospective forms of censorship. Trần Dần was banned from publishing for life, after disseminating “Surefire Victory” (“Nhất Định Thắng”) in 1955, an earnest, ambivalent poem in which the poet celebrates the “bright red, evil-repelling heart” of the Vietnamese Communist flag but also accuses the DRV government of failing the people. As if communing with his father’s suppressed legacy, Trần Trọng Vũ often depicts masklike yellow faces with eerie, pasted-on smiles, or men with rigid, angular bodies. His literally blocked men bring to mind the figure of Marcello Clerici (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) in Bertolucci’s The Conformist. “A Partition of Chance” thus illustrates Trần Trọng Vũ’s dual state of aesthetic communion and inexorable exile: a group of men, trapped within their geometric bodies, sit in a field of blazing sunflowers presumably listening to music. The word “partition” is a play on words: it means both a musical composition, with each part (e.g., violin, piano, vocals) in its own designated section, and the partition of Vietnam into North and South in 1954, a rending that led to Trần Dần’s soul-searching doubts about the Communist victory.

Like Trần Trọng Vũ, Đặng Thơ Thơ has a celebrated forebear. Her maternal grandfather was Hoàng Đạo—a writer, political activist, and member of the Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tự Lực Văn Đoàn)—who died of a heart attack in 1948 while traveling in China, before his egalitarian vision could galvanize a pre-partitioned Vietnam’s nationalist struggle for independence. In Đặng Thơ Thơ’s “Autumn Vanishings,” an allegorical poem that mourns various states of disappearance, a mother’s generational trauma is implicitly acknowledged—she is unable to resist the ghostly beckonings of the past, just as her child is slowly disappearing into the future by growing up and assimilating into mainstream culture. Đặng Thơ Thơ’s prose poem, with its haunting images of the son being “kidnapped” by autumn and swallowed whole by his Halloween costumes, also brings to mind Rilke’s “Costumes”—a dreamlike fable from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge about the risks of unbounded empathy—that an artist can be destroyed if they identify too much with the fates (faces) of others.

Trương Vũ seems more hopeful about art’s redemptive power. Meditating on Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return in “The Rain in Weicheng,” he solemnly yearns for a reconciliation with the self, with history, and with art, at a time when Vietnam’s dizzying economic progress still has not healed all wounds from the war. Trương Vũ feels less alone when he sees his longing for peace reflected in well-known works of literature. For example, the bridge over the Drina in Ivo Andrić’s eponymous novel is not just a bridge that connects disparate cultures, i.e., Islamic, Jewish, and Christian, but also a dream passage that brings all exiles home. Accordingly, Trương Vũ considers his many returns to Vietnam as open-ended gestures of reconciliation, even if, or precisely because, some of these journeys turn out to be “failed” homecomings. The reference to Wang Wei’s poem “Morning Rain in Weicheng” in his essay embraces both the temporal and the eternal, for the poem acknowledges separation and departure but also affirms the beauty of friendship and community.

While Trương Vũ’s idea of homecoming is informed by both his reading life and his personal experiences, Nguyễn Đức Tùng’s reconciliation concept takes on an almost mythical aspect. The unnamed typist in his story—with the near-magical power of transforming family relationships, anxieties, and recriminations into official documents of long-lasting impact, or swiftly dissolving their oppressive power—represents a graceful arbiter of the social order, perhaps not unlike Quan Âm, the goddess of mercy in Vietnamese folklore. In Nguyễn Đức Tùng’s wistful universe, a family member’s embrace of “false” ideology, akin to a youthful infatuation with a beautiful singer, does not have to be a seismic rupture of family ties, but is instead deserving of understanding and forgiveness when viewed through the shifting lens of time.

Thuận, perhaps to counter Thường Quán’s and Đặng Thơ Thơ’s fear of extinction, affirms a writer’s faith in possibilities. In this sense she resembles Trương Vũ and Nguyễn Đức Tùng. Treating her novels as fluid texts, Thuận wrote most of them initially in Vietnamese, then restructured them in French—before having them reincarnated in other linguistic forms. Similarly, her unnamed narrator in “Calculations” achieves a sort of freedom in her lack of commitment, for while she is torn between her father’s career expectations and her own desires, her indecision reflects a conscious resistance to being co-opted by any hegemonic force.

Reading the selections for this issue, I’m reminded of Rilke’s haunting lines in the The Sonnets to Orpheus III:

[A]t the shadowed crossing
of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo. . . .

While an existential quality permeates all five pieces, such as the acknowledgment of evil (“Theater at Cồn Market”), futility (“Calculations”), mortality (“Autumn Vanishings”), difficult homecomings (“The Rain in Weicheng”), and loss of innocence (“The Typist”), if Rilke’s “temple for Apollo” represents the forces of history that can oppress the artist, then the artist’s creative expression, even if it begins as a breath or a whisper, can lead to “the crossing of heart-roads” that dismantles the temple.

The “crossing of heart-roads” can also be acts of translation—not unlike Andríc’s bridge over the Drina. This special issue has come into being with a team of women and nonbinary translators. Like the six contributors, our backgrounds transcend politics, generations, and geographical borders. I left Vietnam as a seventh grader shortly before the collapse of the RVN in April 1975; Quynh H. Vo, literary scholar and translator of Đặng Thơ Thơ’s “Autumn Vanishings,” grew up in postwar Vietnam and immigrated to the US for her doctoral degree in English. Phương Anh, translator of Thuận’s “Calculations” and our youngest team member, was born during Vietnam’s economic boom and is a recent university graduate based in the UK.

We deeply appreciate Susan Harris and Nina Perrotta, and the entire WWB team, for your wonderfully perceptive approach and steadfast support toward “Untethered States” during its gestational period, and for facilitating its propitious launch on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

Beyond the communal efforts for this special issue, other bridge-building challenges remain for Vietnamese literature in translation, due to existing ideological barriers, lack of governmental support for a vital translation market, and logistical difficulties in reaching reclusive authors. The linguistic and cultural nuances of Vietnamese, a tonal language with distinct regional dialects and a rich history of idioms and allusions, can also prove treacherous for diasporic translators lacking contextual knowledge or grassroots resources. Nevertheless, with the robust support of vanguard literary magazines, a nurturing network of dedicated translators, editors, and publishers (e.g., Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, Texas Tech University Press, Kaya Press, and UK-based Major Books, among others), the future promises a continuous emergence of diverse Vietnamese perspectives.