Blue Dragon, White Tiger: Recovering Vietnamese Diasporic Literature and Reclaiming History

ADMISSION:
Admission is free. RSVP beginning Tuesday, September 2, at 10 a.m.

RSVP

DESCRIPTION:
Marking 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, and celebrating the republication of Blue Dragon, White Tiger by Trần Văn Dĩnh—the first novel by a Vietnamese writer to be published in English—novelist Catherine Dang, poet and filmmaker Cathy Linh Che, and Australian novelist André Dao will read from Văn Dĩnh’s novel and present their own work.

The readings will be followed by a conversation about displacement, memory, and how Vietnamese diasporic literature reshapes our perception of Southeast Asia’s history, U.S. imperialism, and the global impact of war, moderated by Pulitzer Prize–winning author and USC professor Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Bios:

The daughter of Vietnam War refugees, Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost and Split, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. She is also a co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney’s. She has received awards from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and MacDowell. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery, won the Short Film Jury Award for Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as a member of the core faculty in poetry at the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as executive director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City.

André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Prize. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Dao was awarded the 2024 Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin, and Liminal. He is the cofounder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia. His work for Behind the Wire includes a Quill Award–winning article for The Saturday Paper and the Walkley Award–winning podcast The Messenger. He coedited Behind the Wire’s collection of literary oral histories, They Cannot Take the Sky.

Catherine Dang is the author of the novels Nice Girls and What Hunger. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, she currently resides in Brooklyn.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature at USC. His novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books include Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has been interviewed by Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Seth Meyers, and Terry Gross, among many others. He is also the author of the bestselling short story collection The Refugees.

Related Event:
Blue Dragon, White Tiger: Co-Writing Workshop
Wednesday, October 22, 2025, at 2 p.m.
Student Union, Asian Pacific American Student Services Office, STU 410
For more info, click HERE.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices. Organized by Neelanjana Banerjee (Kaya Press), Kaitlin Hsu (Kaya Press), Peter Limthongviratn (Asian Pacific American Student Services), and Sydney Van To (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network).

Photo (André Dao): Leah Jing McIntosh
Photo (Catherine Dang): Joseph Dammel
Photo (Cathy Linh Che): Jess X. Snow