This week, our writers bring you the latest news from the Vietnamese Diaspora, Taiwan, and the United States. The diasporic Vietnamese community has been mourning renowned poet Nguyễn Lương Vỵ; in Taiwan, Leo Ou-fan Lee and Esther Yuk-ying have released their highly acclaimed co-authored memoir; and in the United States, PEN America has announced the Longlist for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards. Read on to find out more! 

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

The diasporic Vietnamese community is mourning poet Nguyễn Lương Vỵ, who recently died of COVID-19 at aged sixty-eight. Tributes and essays devoted to his fruitful legacy have appeared online, with mentions of his March 3, 2021 funeral in Midway City, California.

Born in Quảng Nam, Central Vietnam—a hardscrabble terrain famous for its revolutionaries and poets—Nguyễn Lương Vỵ used onomatopoeic speech to create multivalent “compressions” of sound, image, and sense. Instructed in Chinese and Nôm scripts by his grandfather, Nguyễn Lương Vỵ gravitated toward Tang poetry, haiku, and Zen philosophy. These influences shaped his lifelong exploration of Âm, a Vietnamese homonymic concept that represents the motherlode of sound, voice, language, female, and night, overlapping with the Buddhist, Hinduist, and Jainist Om. READ MORE…