There are too many good Vietnamese books to recommend, let alone read.
If you search around online, you’ll find some pretty good lists to steer you to works translated from English and written by diasporic writers. There are also a few publishers who focus on the genre, such as Curbstone Press’ now-completed Voices From Vietnam series, which featured several Saigoneer favorites, including An Insignificant Family by Dạ Ngân and The Cemetery of Chua Village by Đoàn Lê. The newly established Major Books recently released Water: A Chronicle by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư and the first English version of Making a Whore by Vũ Trọng Phụng.
Popular works by authors like Bảo Ninh, Ocean Vuong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai are recommended, rightfully so, all the time. But what if you are looking for something a little stranger, lesser-known, or quixotic?
Saigoneer has assembled a list of quirky, off-kilter, or overlooked books to supplement the familiar titles for you. While unlikely to occupy a bookshop’s limited selection of Vietnamese literature, they can all be tracked down and are very much worth the effort.
1. McSweeney’s 78: The Make-Believers
This doesn’t look like a book*. The Make-Believers arrives in the form of a cardboard cigar box with a lid featuring seven brooding figures smoking cigarettes. Opening it reveals a back lid depicting three more writers, also smoking cigarettes, as well as three pieces of literature. The smokers are all members of DVAN, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, a multi-genre collective. In 2023, ten members met in France for a writers residency, and this collection, edited by Thi Bui and Vu Tran, captures the spirit and conversations of their time together and serves as an introduction to the group and Vietnamese diasporic writers, in general.
When the music industry was operated via physical CDs put out by record labels, an occasional sampler disc would be released with a track or two from each artist on a single label as a means of introducing the cohesive sound or ethos shared by the label as a whole. The main 182-page The Believers book functions much this way for DVAN. Self-described as spanning “from highbrow to lowbrow, proper to naughty, logical to absurd, and painful to funny,” it's a great way to acquaint yourself to the energy, styles, and concerns of some of the diaspora’s most accomplished writers.
A heart-wrenching story of regret tinged with ghosts set in Đà Lạt by Vu Tran; a collection of politically charged poems by Bao Phi; and a snapshot of life within early 2000s American rave culture by H’Rina DeTroy are amongst the standouts. The box, beautifully illustrated by Thi Bui, of The Best We Could Do fame, also contains a hilarious glossary of broken Vietnamese as understood by Doan Bui; and a separate collaborative poem with lines from each resident assembled by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, DVAN’s co-founder along with Viet Thanh Nguyen. Like the best label samplers CDs of the 2000s, not every piece will be your jam, but at least a few will play on repeat inside your head, and you’ll have an easy way to get an overview of a larger scene.
*Technically, this is a special edition of a literary journal, but it features a book-length selection of short stories, essays, and poems, and literary journals deserve more love.
2. Wetland Plants of the Mekong Delta
Did you know the Mekong Delta is home to 698 different species of plants? You can read the names of each one, marveling at the pretty sounds such as Ipomoea triloba and Digitaria setigera in Wetland Plants of the Mekong Delta. After a brief but instructive 40 pages introducing the region’s water and soil characteristics and the plants that occupy the region, you'll find a listing of the scientific name and group type for all 698. Then, it's page after page of gorgeous, glossy photographic plates of plant species. Numerous images of different plant parts — such as stamen, flower, fruit, pistil and leaf — are presented along with a sentence of notable characteristics and their habitat.
Intended mainly for scientists and researchers, Wetland Plants of the Mekong Delta may function best for average readers as a coffee table text. The photos do feature the Vietnamese names along with scientific ones, making it perhaps the most niche vocabulary study tool available.
And if you’re like me and draw pleasure and inspiration from plants, having the a verticle cross section of a Canalavia lineata in reach is a particular gift. Saigoneer’s favorite botany illustator, Phan Thị Thanh Nhã, contributed several works to the text. It's a travesty that all our daylight hours are not adrift in a melaleuca peat swamp, but at least we have this book brings tidings from those magical realms. And next time we visit, we will be able to identify a few plants, much to the chagrin of any non-plant nerds you are traveling with.
3. Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City | Haydon Cherry
Few people associate fun with academic texts, but this work by Hayden Cherry offers a thrilling opportunity to picture turn-of-the-20th-century Saigon like no other work. Pushing back against conventional efforts to understand history through significant dates and powerful figures, Cherry identifies six regular individuals to explain what average life was like in the colonial capital.
Relying on archival documents, including police records across several languages, he provides conjectures for what decisions were made by a prostitute, a Chinese laborer, a rickshaw puller, a Catholic orphan, an incurable invalid, and a destitute Frenchman. Readers are left with an overarching understanding that, within the turbulent time period, much was beyond the control of society’s lower and middle classes, while happenstance and the whims of the elite reverberated across the populace.
Even though 1900s Saigon was only a few generations ago, the time period feels utterly impenetrable compared to the present landscape. While it is a quick and light read, as far as academic texts go at least, what I appreciate most about Down and Out in Saigon is how intimately it renders the realities of living then. It can be difficult to imagine yourself as a colonial authority or a rich landowner, yet when entering the experiences of ordinary citizens, it's possible to envision yourself there and thus discover Saigon anew. It’s bold to say, but to best understand Saigon today, you should pick up this book and go back 130 years.
4. Parallels | Vũ Đình Giang
This list could use a novel, and this is a strange one! Parallels by Vũ Đình Giang, translated by Khải Q. Nguyễn, upends expectations from the beginning. Perspective shifts between characters and epistolary interludes while surrealism creeps in through a series of bizarre behaviors, such as attempts to drown the sun in a crude sluice made with cleaning supplies or plans to murder an adopted puppy. And just when you get the sense the book is content to list on via a nonlinear series of depictions of urban ennui, violent incidents whose veracity cannot be questioned take place. It becomes a revolting examination of humans’ propensity for evil.
Parallels is frequently presented as the first modern homosexual story published in Vietnamese. Hearing that, in a relatively conservative environment, you might expect the book to take a restrained, understated approach to discussing gay sex, but it’s graphic and intertwined with violence. These lurid elements, combined with the experimental writing style is a perfect contrast to many of the popular novels that adhere closely to conventions and deliver near-Disney-esque levels of family-friendly entertainment. It’s nice to be reminded that not all books that make it from Vietnam to the world play it safe, and some have the potential to shock and challenge as well as entertain.
Read Saigoneer’s full review of Parallels here.
5. The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam | Michael G. Vann and Liz Clarke
Do you like to learn about the selfish cruelty of colonialists and root for the oppressed Vietnamese who employ trickery to outsmart them? Want to do it while looking at colorful illustrations? The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt, an entry in Oxford University’s Graphic History series, which tells intriguing and largely unknown stories with a comic style, is one of those elusive works that is as educational as it is enjoyable.
The core of the book’s pleasure rests in the story itself. France’s empire-building involved “modernizing” Hanoi in western terms, and the transporting of Parisian elements resulted in some unintended consequences. Plague-carrying rats ran rampant via the newly constructed sewer system that connected to the private dwellings of rich French residents. Colonial officials responded by offering a bounty on the rats as issued per submitted tail (dealing with an entire corpse was deemed undesirable by authorities). Inevitably, locals would simply cut the tails off rats so their revenue stream would continue to breed and even open rat farms outside of the city.
The graphic novel provides a great lesson in hubris and unintended consequences that applies to contexts far beyond colonial Vietnam. But it should be particularly interesting if you are interested in the nation’s history as its filled with asides and anecdotes, including the story behind the statue of liberty that once stood in Turtle Lake. Clever layout decisions, such as including rendering Vietnamese dialogue red-bordered speech bubbles and French in blue to show how the two groups lived side-by-side yet maintained only a minimal understanding of one another, enhance the experience.
Following the graphic novel, there are extensive prose sections that delve into the primary sources used, offer historical context for those not familiar with Vietnamese history and, most interestingly, a “making of” discussion that reveals how the book was envisioned and completed, offering a powerful guide for how to find and tell stories that make history engaging, which is something Saigoneer can certainly get behind.
Read Saigoneer’s article about The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt here.
