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fear must have rippled through society as Vietnamese veterans
returned home and began to start families. And I realized, they
should. And as someone who could read Vietnamese, and who
had some knack for writing in English, I reasoned if I didn’t
make it happen, maybe no one
else would.
So I launched a plan with
a professor of literature from
VNU named Nguyen Lien to
collect and translate all the
Vietnamese short fiction and a
few seminal nonfiction essays
about suffering from dioxin
exposure. We received a grant
from the William Joiner Center
for the Study of War and Social
Consequences, and we went to
“What started
out for me as an
obligation has
transformed into
something that
gives me great
fulfillment.”
work producing Family of Fallen Leaves, which the University of
Georgia Press published in 2010. Since then, it’s been acquired
by libraries all over the United States and has been adopted in
many university courses. Of course, it didn’t make the bestseller
list. But at least it’s out there now. It exists, in English, ready to
be found by any American who ever wonders what that part
of our history entails, ready to make them really feel what that
horror was like for the Vietnamese.
And for me personally, the project opened up a whole new
sense of purpose and possibility. What Americans don’t know
about Vietnam is an endlessly rich field to work in, and while I
always thought my career would involve writing about Vietnam
to help bridge that cultural divide, now I realized I could keep
writing about Vietnam but also be a conduit through which
Vietnamese writers could reach American audiences directly,
representing themselves with their own voices.
It was with this sense of appreciation for voices, and
particularly new ones, reflecting new perspectives, that Lien
and I began our current project to extend Americans’ sense of
Vietnam by translating stories from young Vietnamese writers
who have been influenced more by globalization, cable TV, and
hip-hop than guns and grenades. Through my work on the New
Voices from Viet Nam project, I’ve met young writers from all over
the country, and seen with new eyes the country I thought I’d
already come to know so well.
It’s also with this project that I’ve come to relish the joy of
translating. The work unfolds and refolds like origami. As the
The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation
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