This week, our writers bring you the latest news from the Vietnamese diaspora, Malaysia, and France. This month celebrates children’s literature in the Vietnamese diaspora, with a host of events and literary magazine Da Màu publishing a special issue. Malaysia also anticipates an exciting month with two Malaysian-born women recently making the longlist for Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the shortlist for the Malaysian Migrant Poetry Competition due to be announced today. A second lockdown in France has instigated an appeal by publishing and bookselling unions to keep bookshops open—and the prestigious Goncourt prize has postponed announcing its 2020 winner until this happens. Read on to find out more!
Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora
October 2020 is Children’s Literature Month for the Vietnamese diaspora. The Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association (VAALA) is currently hosting its first online, month-long Viet Book Fest, which features readings by authors, followed by interactive Q&A sessions, and culminating in a Halloween celebration and book auction on October 31. About thirty families have attended each session, and Facebook live engagement has reached close to 1,000 people.
Vietnamese diasporic literature, representing “the losing side,” suffers from double marginalization since it belongs neither to the Vietnamese literary tradition inside Vietnam nor its host country’s mainstream tradition. To resist this condition, Viet Book Fest titles share an endeavor analogous to translation: how to preserve the diasporic community’s collective memory and make it resonate in a transplanted, multivalent milieu.
Tran Thi Minh Phuoc’s Vietnamese Children’s Favorite Stories teaches foundational stories—many of which are epistemological—such as how the Vietnamese came to eat bánh chưng (“offering earth cake”) during the lunar new year, and how the monsoon season originated from an ancient rivalry between the Mountain Lord and the Sea Lord. Minh Le’s Green Lantern: Legacy reconciles conflicting cultural values, where a Western-based superhero myth centering on innovation and technological prowess is rewritten to include a Vietnamese viewpoint that incorporates community legacy and compassion. The idea of non-conforming identity as a magical construction is reflected in Bao Phi’s My Footprints, where a Vietnamese-American girl learns to take pride in her two moms and her heritage, as symbolized by her embrace of the fenghuang (phoenix) from East Asian mythology and the Sharabha from Hindu mythology. Lastly, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Ellison Nguyen’s Chicken of the Sea extols peace, where the victorious King of the Dog Knights grants amnesty to the defeated chicken pirates and welcomes them with a big party.
Concurrently, the online Vietnamese literary magazine Da Màu, which also celebrates its fourteenth anniversary this October, is doing a special issue on South Vietnamese children’s and young adult literature prior to the 1975 Fall of Saigon. Da Màu’s contributors indicate that many of the popular youth titles before 1975 were translated works, from Belgian and French comic book series, such as Tintin, Astérix & Obélix, Lucky Luke, Spirou & Fantasio, or war novels such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. South Vietnamese teenagers were less concerned with questions of identity but read to either escape their social milieu or to further understand war and its consequences.
Kwan Ann Tan, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Malaysia
There is much to look forward to this next month on the Malaysian literary scene—the shortlist for the Malaysian Migrant Poetry Competition will be announced today, October 30, and the annual Georgetown Literary Festival, Malaysia’s biggest and most renowned literary festival, will take place in November.
While we wait for these exciting events to begin, Malaysian writers have been distinguishing themselves on the international stage as well. At the 10th Xing Yun Literary Awards, a Taiwanese prize that aims to promote literature and art, Malaysian journalist Lim Yin Min won a prize for Best Journalistic Work for her article on Korean comfort women, ‘The Burdens They Carry, Please Put Them Down Gently,’ while writer Huang Yi Qin won an award for best work on Buddhist scriptures with his piece, ‘Burials.’
On the other side of the globe, Grace Shuyi Liew has been named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction—Liew’s work deals largely with intergenerational traumas, Asian womanhood, and the trauma of coming to grips with a shared history. Another two Malaysian writers, Dr. Raja Rajeswari Seetha Raman and Lilian Woo have also received the Suryodaya Literary Excellence Award, an international award recognising authors for their contributions towards literature.
Finally, the release of the longlist for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation has also been released, with two Malaysian-born women on the list: Lake like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong, translated from Mandarin by Natascha Bruce, and The Way Through the Woods by Long Litt Woon, translated from Norwegian by Barbara Haveland.
Sarah Moore, Blog Editor, reporting from France
A second lockdown has begun in France starting from today, which has caused great anxiety for bookshops and libraries, which must close their doors to the public.
Following President Macron’s announcement on Wednesday evening, the French booksellers’ association (Syndicat de la Librairie Française, SLF), publishers’ association (Syndicat national de l’édition, SNE), and the writers’ council (Conseil Permanent des Ecrivains, CPE) wrote a joint statement requesting that bookshops be allowed to stay open. Whilst they acknowledge that the “click and collect” system has already been put in place in many bookshops, they highlight the importance of pre-Christmas book sales for the industry, when “more than a quarter of [the year’s] books are bought.” With books being “the present given most often by the French,” independent bookshops rely heavily on these end-of-year sales. The three groups insist that bookshops can continue to cater for their customers whilst maintaining “safe and proven hygiene requirements.”
Yet France has seen an alarming rise in new cases, deaths, and occupied ICU beds. Roselyne Bachelot, the Minister for Culture, said yesterday that closing bookshops was a “very difficult decision but indispensable for containing the virus.” But the Goncourt Academy, due to announce the 2020 winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize on November 10, has voiced its support for bookshops. Postponing their announcement to a date that will be decided according to the health situation, they affirmed their “total support for bookshops facing such a difficult new period.”
In line for this year’s Goncourt Prize are: Oulipo member Hervé le Tellier for his latest novel, L’anomalie (The Anomaly); Thésée, sa nouvelle vie (Theseus, his new life) by Camille de Toledo; L’Historiographe du royaume (The Historiographer of the Kingdom) by Maël Renouard; and Les Impatientes (The Impatient Women) by Djaïli Amadou Amal. Whilst le Tellier is widely tipped as favourite, readers will now have to wait for a winner.
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