MANOA Vietnam 2002

Two Rivers features new fiction, poetry, and essays from Vietnamese and Vietnamese American writers guest-edited by Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung. One generation after the end of the Vietnamese-American War, the United States is home to over a million Vietnamese. Their contribution to America’s vitality has never been greater, and their views about the war, their resettlement, and the future never more diverse. A period of reexamination, reflection, and new dialogue has begun on both sides of the Pacific; the writing in this collection highlights some of the strongest and most thoughtful literary voices of this time.

Other new work in the volume includes poetry by Korean poet Ko Un, Chinese poet Shi Zhi, and Americans Leonard Nathan, John McKernan, Joseph Millar, and Bradajo; and prose by Juan Carlos Onetti, George Evans, and Virgil Suárez. The art consists of a set of antique postcards depicting Viet Nam.


Two Rivers features new fiction, poetry, and essays from Vietnamese and Vietnamese American writers guest-edited by Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung. One generation after the end of the Vietnamese-American War, the United States is home to over a million Vietnamese. Their contribution to America’s vitality has never been greater, and their views about the war, their resettlement, and the future never more diverse. A period of reexamination, reflection, and new dialogue has begun on both sides of the Pacific; the writing in this collection highlights some of the strongest and most thoughtful literary voices of this time. Other new work in the volume includes poetry by Korean poet Ko Un, Chinese poet Shi Zhi, and Americans Leonard Nathan, John McKernan, Joseph Millar, and Bradajo; and prose by Juan Carlos Onetti, George Evans, and Virgil Suárez. The art consists of a set of antique postcards depicting Viet Nam.	TWO RIVERS: New Vietnamese Writing from America and Viet Nam Summer 2002 (vol. 14, no. 1) 186 pages
“[Nguyen Duy:] The ‘new’ in poetry isn't the same as the ‘new’ in fashion or fad. When it's new, it appears of its own accord. It can neither be produced on order nor prohibited on order. What's new in poetry results from the coming together of what's new in the individual's spirit and the spiritual life of the time. Vietnamese poets living abroad can act as a bridge between Vietnamese poetry and world poetry.” —from “Coming Full Circle: A Conversation with Nguyen Duy” by Nguyen Ba Chung “The canvas cover above the pickup’s bed had somehow flown open, and the small clams from one of the bags had been scattered on the road. I can easily imagine Chung stopping his truck next to the precarious cliff to refasten the cover. He might have even tried to look, in the darkening light of the evening, for the clams that had spilled onto the bed of the pickup or onto the road. The tv reporter would never understand how someone could take such a risk just because of some worthless clams.” —from “Catching Clams at Lake Isabella” by Phung Nguyen “Autumn is like an old immigrant in old clothes Forlorn and complaining about changes I am not garrulous, it’s just that I can’t keep a secret The hopelessness of unions makes me want to hear Sounds of leaves falling on the chest Of a man lying under a tree With a hand grenade inside his pants pocket” —from “Autumn Song” by Phan Nhien Hao “Some nights, when in the dark he was thinking of the two thousand pesos, or the way to get them, and of the scene in which they would be sitting at a reserved table at Scopelli’s one Saturday with his face serious and a little joy in his eyes, he began to tell it to her; he began by asking her what day she wanted to depart; some nights when he was dreaming her dream, waiting to fall asleep, again she would talk to him of Denmark. Actually, it was not Denmark but a part of the country, a very small bit of earth where she had been born, had learned a language, where she had been dancing for the first time with a man and had seen someone she loved die.” —from “Esbjerg, on the Coast” by Juan Carlos Onetti
About the guest editors: Kevin Bowen served as a soldier in Viet Nam from 1968 to 1969. He is the cotranslator of Distant Road by Nguyen Duy, A Time Far Past by Luu Le, and Mountain River: Vietnamese Poetry from the Wars, 1948-1993. Bowen is also the author of two books of poetry: Forms of Prayer at the Hotel Edison and Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong. He is the director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Nguyen Ba Chung is a poet, translator, and essayist. He was born in 1949 in Kim Thanh District, Hai Duong Province, and moved to Saigon with his family in 1955. In 1971, after attending the Faculty of Letters in Saigon, he came to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in American literature at Brandeis University. He has been a research associate at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston since 1996 and is the author of four collections of poetry in Vietnamese and the cotranslator of numerous volumes into English.