diaCRITICS

25/03/2026

"I was 11 when cancer took my mother and never gave her back."

Paired With: Bún Bò Huế & the Taste of EnoughFor When You Need to Feed a VillagePlay Song: “Heal the World” by Michael Jackson Amuse-Bouche: The Hunger That Never Leaves Hunger isn’t just about food.It’s about what we’ve been denied—what we crave yet never quite satisfy. My mother an...

19/03/2026

In "Mothernoia", a daughter measures the distance between what her mother wants her to be and who she sees herself as.

I am haunted by the quiet suspicion that the woman before me is devising my murder. At the moment, we’ve resorted to a game of silence. But she is cunning, calculated, waiting with the prowess of a snake, for when I should inevitably misstep, eager. And when a rock is lodged sharply in the tender

12/03/2026

As a mythical giant in both Vietnamese pop and experimental music, Ngọc Đại has built a prolific yet deeply controversial career, earning him the nickname "Đại điên."

In a new essay, choreographer and writer Anh Vo delves into the work and artistry of “soldier-turned-avant-garde composer” Ngọc Đại.

In order to find a new musical language and new forms for songs, I had to deny the official environment of the Vietnamese Government. My goals are: Break the prejudices about musical aesthetic; Mock the taboo in the language of music. My attitude is not to compromise in any way. - Composer Ngọc Đ...

06/03/2026

"In a city-state obsessed with efficiency, Singlish is a grammatical sin, awkward and excessive, despite often being more succinct than English. Singlish stutters, it bends syntax to mood, it is often funny, often tired, often too much. To the technocrat, it appears unserious. To the nationalist, embarrassing. But to many of its speakers, it may be home."

Simi[1] Salah[2] English? There is a particular unease to writing about Singlish in English. Not because the two are incompatible, far from it, but because to write about Singlish in the formal register of Standard English is to risk staging the very hierarchy we hope to interrogate. This paradox is...

25/02/2026

"'I Am Not Mad' is a translation of the Vietnamese poem, 'Tôi Không Giận' by poet Lê Sông Văn, poignantly inspired by the life of Renée Nicole Good, an award-winning poet and mother who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026.

"Lê Sông Văn draws specifically from the tragic irony of Good’s final words to the officer, 'I’m not mad at you,' by stepping into a liminal space where the physical body dissolves into the metaphysical. While the imagery of bullets and triggers evokes a landscape of state violence, the poem swiftly transcends the geopolitical to seek a poetic and lyrical transfiguration, turning a lethal projectile into a “bird-wing hole” that allows the wind to sing through flesh. Within the tradition of poetry of witness, Lê Sông Văn does not merely document trauma; she transfigures it, stripping the bullet of its destructive intent and returning it to the sky as a creature of flight."

Read Lê Sông Văn's "I Am Not Mad," translated by Đặng Thơ Thơ on diaCRITICS.

Photo by bahar.

23/02/2026

Read a new poem by Brandon Vu.

when you were youngyou were living the sameday in the refugee campuntil you found yourself carryingbaggage from saigon to california you hung on to words toprotect yourselfand i flinched every timeyou raised your voice at home youasked me to take outthe trash and i asked you to repeatyourself in eng...

17/02/2026

Chúc mừng năm mới! Read a new Lunar New Year poem by Võ Đức Quang.

Alief, Houston TX I carry you through chinatownon lunar new year's eve— softly the karaoke bars dieas hostess girls fly to their nests. Andsoju buddies stumble in a line back to their sports carsexhausted red and blue. But I carry you—a k-pop songsweet not loud or long, we sit outside morii caf....

10/02/2026

Read a new poem by attic moon.

mother and father thoughtthey escaped the whistling missilesbut found it hitched a ridea parasiteclawing out of their stomachs and into their throatsbursting through their mouthsto roar at each other under the tabletheir arguments, war itselftheir bombs shake the house underneathbà nội’s tablei...

05/02/2026

“On Healing Land, Birds Perch” investigates the afterlife of an infamous photo.

During my freshman year of high school, while working on a history assignment, I came across a photograph of the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk protesting South Vietnam’s regime in 1963. The American photographer Malcolm W. Browne won 1963 World Press Photo of the Year f...

29/01/2026

"My father, elderly veteran of the American War in Vietnam who, 50 years ago, along with my mother and older siblings, saved my life as the other side shelled the airport with rockets trying to kill us as we tried to escape our own country, had just called me and asked me, in Vietnamese, not to leave my house, here in Minneapolis where we both still live, because government men are in the streets shooting people left and right."

I bought my tickets for the theatrical re-release of The Lord of the Rings movies last year. This was before I knew that life on the weekends would be: clean your house, feed your cat, scoop litter…

20/01/2026

Read a new poem by Antoinette Luu.

Until age seven, all the boats you knew barrelled througha technicolour sea, a Barbie swinging from the ropeor a pirate of the Caribbean with thatfantastic plastic glow, that airbrushed sea spray. Then history said refugees smuggled gold in their rectums, made banksof their bodies only to have them....

06/01/2026

Vũ Đình Giang’s “Parallels” is not for the faint-hearted.

Parallels by Vũ Đình Giang (English translation by Khải Q. Nguyễn), the first Vietnamese q***r novel to be translated into another language (the French translation by Yves Bouille in 2014), is not a novel for the faint-hearted; nor is it a novel for the easily distracted. The novel follows th...