Mekong Review

Tag: Vietnam

Street cries

Phạm Thu Trang

Street cries in Vietnam are more than simple calls of commerce; they form an urban soundscape—a way of sensing time, place, and season.

Those who left on those who stayed

Will Nguyen

Claudia Krich’s Those Who Stayed: A Vietnam Diary is an invaluable primary source for those studying regime change, documenting firsthand the disintegration of the South Vietnamese government and the coalescence of a byzantine military administration in its wake.

Far and away

Connla Stokes

Andrew Lam had never set out to be the preeminent chronicler of the global Vietnamese diaspora, but realised that “when I spoke up for those that couldn’t, I found my tongue”.

My brief career as a propagandist

Andreas Pohl

“Apart from illustrating how invested the authorities still are in shaping the official story of Vietnam’s wars of liberation, my experience at Thế Giới also revealed an almost religious faith in the power of the written word.”

Vietnam’s Latin script

Thiện Việt

The adoption of chữ Quốc ngữ, the Vietnamese alphabet that has officially been in use for over a century now, was a notable part of Vietnam’s effort to pull itself out of China’s orbit.

Literary censorship

Thiện Việt

With little transparency, top-down literary censorship in Vietnam is complex, capricious and contingent upon those implementing the ‘rules’.

Cracks in our memory

Khải Đơn

Not many Vietnamese books keep track of the experience of living under suffocating communism in the North or keeping up with the get-rich-quick sentiment dominant in the South. Thuận’s Elevator in Sài Gòn captures this with nuance and peculiarity.

Gimme some truth

Nick J. Freeman

Susann Pham’s Vietnam’s Dissidents is a bold piece of empirical work and a welcome and timely addition to the literature on contemporary Vietnam.

Party membership

Thiện Việt

One does not need to understand communist ideology to become a member of the Communist Party of Vietnam. “All you need to do is to pass their test,” said one state employee.

Mekong apocalypse

Michael Buckley

A sordid saga of greed, corruption, desperate despots and out-of-control dam-building corporations—propelling the rapid demise of the Mekong River.

A professional amateur

Brendan Ryan

It’s hard to pin down exactly how to describe Đinh Nhung and what she does. Her work has spanned art installations, photography, curation and the compilation of lexicons of queerness in Vietnam.

Personal embodiments

Will Nguyen

Through his maternal grandfather’s life and his own experiences, Will Nguyen reflects on how personal stories are documented in Vietnam, and the relationship between the diaspora and mainland Vietnamese.

Choosing family

Lam Le

The ‘white saviour’ narrative is a common trope in transnational adoptions. In Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family, Erika Hayasaki tells the story of three Vietnamese adoptees, and unpacks dominant assumptions about power, privilege and the meaning of family.