DVAN Book Launch in Los Angeles | The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora
Join us in celebrating the Los Angeles launch of The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora, the first and only book to gather the voices and perspectives of Vietnamese diasporic authors from across the globe, with Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Lan Cao, & Le Ly Hayslip.
The Cleaving brings together Vietnamese artists and writers from around the world in conversation about their craft and how their work has been shaped and received by mainstream culture and their own communities. This collection highlights how Vietnamese diasporic writers speak about having been cleaved—a condition in which they have been separated from, yet still hew to, the country that they have left behind.
Composed of eighteen dialogues among thirty-seven writers from France, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, Australia, Israel, and the United States, the book expands on the many lives that Vietnamese writers inhabit. The dialogues touch on family history, legacies of colonialism and militarism, and the writers’ own artistic and literary achievements. Taken together, these conversations insist on a deeper reckoning with the conditions of displacement.
About the Speakers
Editors
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). She is also a member of the organization’s Editorial Committee. Isabelle is a Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Isabelle is the author of This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature and numerous academic essays. She co-edited Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora and The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora from UC Press. Isabelle received a BA in Cultural Anthropology and a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.
Lan Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism, coeditor of Troubling Borders: Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, and cowriter of Departures: An Introduction. Dr. Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, examines Vietnamese films across history and across several institutional and community-oriented sites. Her book of poems, Nothing Follows, was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2023. She is a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, The Refugees, The Committed, and Simone. He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then six-year-old son, Ellison, and is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. His next book is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2025. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.
Contributors
Lan Cao was born in Saigon. She attended Mount Holyoke College and Yale Law School. Lan’s first novel Monkey Bridge was published Viking Peguin. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times: “Cao has not only made an impressive debut, but joined authors such as Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee in mapping the state of exile and its elusive geographies of loss and hope.” She is also the author of The Lotus and the Storm and co-author of Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter.
Le Ly Hayslip is an internationally known Vietnamese-American author, philanthropist, peace activist, and speaker. She grew up in Ky La (now known as Xa Hoa Quy), Vietnam during the American-Vietnam War. She wrote two best-selling memoirs—When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace, based on her painful and ultimately triumphant journey from a traumatizing childhood in war-ravaged Vietnam to her new life in America. Having grown up in Central Vietnam as a woman, Le Ly shares a perspective that is unique when it comes to the Vietnam War. She received raving reviews for both books, including from The New York Times and The Washington Post. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places was included in the 1990 edition of Reader’s Digest’s Today’s Best Nonfiction. Her memoirs, having been published in 17 different languages throughout the world, are now used in several universities as course material to study women in history, the American/Vietnam War, and other topics. In 1993, the books were adapted into the film “Heaven & Earth,” directed by the award-winning director Oliver Stone and starring Hiep Thi Le and Tommy Lee Jones.