by Kat Georges, Co-director, Three Rooms Press

On April 30, the world marks 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War. Much has been said about the war, films have been made, books have been written. And yet, the picture is not complete, since the vast majority of the media has been from the American perspective. Three Rooms Press has just released a different sort of publication: an anthology of short fiction that examines the impact of the war from the Vietnamese perspective, including those in the diaspora as well as authors who have lived their whole lives in Vietnam. THE COLORS OF APRIL: Fiction on the Vietnam War’s Legacy 50 Years Later, offers, according to CHA: An Asian Literary Journal, “a poignant literary tapestry . .. . The narratives, diverse in voice and vision, ultimately converge to illuminate universal human struggles that transcend time and geography.” I recently was fortunate to sit down to discuss the details of creating this astounding collection with editors Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran.

Kat Georges: What was the initial inspiration that led to the creation of THE COLORS OF APRIL?

Quan Manh Ha: Vietnam War literature published in the US is mostly written by American veterans who portray the war from their Americentric perspectives, highlighting that the war was an American tragedy rather than a Vietnamese tragedy. Since the late 1990s, the second Vietnamese American generation, most of whom were born or grew up in the US and have mastered the English language, have been promoting the voices of Vietnamese refugees in English to Anglophone readers. However, the voices of the Vietnamese who still live in Vietnam are not widely heard due to the limited number of texts in English translation. As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, I thought it was time for healing war wounds, and in order to do this, we need to listen to the voices of both sides. The Colors of April is the first anthology to place the Vietnamese in the center, promoting the dialogue about remembrance, mutual understanding, and traumatic memory, etc. We wanted to decenter the dominant Americentrism related to the war and its aftermath.

Cab Tran: Like our previous collaboration, the story collection Hanoi at Midnight, by Bao Ninh, it was Quan who approached me with the idea of doing something for the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. I think what we both recognized was that the date is important for a lot of people—Americans in general, but American veterans in particular; also Vietnamese of the diasporic community, a.k.a. “boat people” who escaped after the war, as well as the victors of the war, the communists, who united the country after the whole French and American involvement of the 20th century that had its roots in the 19th. So, I understood it was important and signed on with the project.

KG: How do the stories in THE COLORS OF APRIL contribute to your goal of being able to “bridge our differences, find common ground, nurture empathy, and seek some measure of closure?” Please cite examples of particular stories that broaden perspective of the Vietnam people and serve as storytelling vehicles to bring light to a dark world?
CT: In your usual discourse about the war, there’s this idea of “us vs. them” and “good vs. evil” and “capitalism vs. communism,” etc. It’s always binary. Fifty years have separated the Vietnamese from the West and those who have grown up inside Vietnam. Yes, the differences can give you whiplash—if you look at the themes of Vietnamese American stories like Gin To’s “Bad Things Didn’t Happen” and “A Mother’s Song” by Annhien Nguyen, the types of characters portrayed and what matters to those characters—versus, say, stories from inside Vietnam like Tran Thi Tu Ngoc’s “In Silence, In Rain” or Lai Van Long’s “Kinship,” you’ll notice a huge difference in themes, in what motivates Characters in their respective stories, in what’s cultural funny to Vietnamese American writers and what’s cultural funny to those writing inside Vietnam. But if you look deeper you’ll see that there are far more similarities—the differences culturally between America and Vietnam may be vast, but much more is shared—as in Elizabeth Tran’s “The Fish and the Banyan Tree,” a story I can guarantee you that most every Vietnamese, no matter where they live in the world, knows a little about. It’s also been a half century since the end of the war—if people can’t reconcile their differences now, three generations later, then who’s to say it’ll ever happen? The anthology also shows that, yes, the war looms large over the Vietnamese people, and it’s how most of the world sees Vietnam, but a people shouldn’t be defined by the wars they fight.

QMH: Unfortunately, many Vietnamese refugees hold a bias against the literature about the war written by Vietnamese authors at home: it is all propaganda and serves the communist government’s political ideology; thus, it is not worth reading. Many Vietnamese American literary texts, despite their popularity in the US, are censored in Vietnam, mostly due to the government’s assumption that they represent the voices of the betrayers. So how can both sides heal war wounds if these biases exist? We decided to put together this anthology to help erase these biases.

KG: You two worked together on a previous project: The critically-acclaimed translation of Hanoi at Midnight by internationally renowned Vietnam-based author Bao Ninh. That book involved translating the work of a single author. In The Colors of April, 28 different authors appear, including 12 from Vietnam.

CT: The anthology was a whole different kind of beast. For myself, going into the anthology project, I thought it would be easier since roughly half the book would be from writers submitting in English. The Bao Ninh project was more about translation—and we were fortunate enough to have access to the author if needed—so that was super helpful. It was hard, but there were far fewer moving parts. The anthology, however, could be a logistical nightmare. I’ve also never served an editorial role in any capacity beyond helping friends read submissions for literary journals. I’m not a big email person because I’ve never had employment that required me to check it all the time—that changed during important stretches of getting the anthology together and in good shape. Also, deadlines were new. With the Bao Ninh project, we were basically finished by the time we sought a publisher. The anthology was very much in flux, not only with making publisher deadlines but also the fact that April 30, 2025—the 50th anniversary of the end of the war—wasn’t something we could just push off to a later date. Some things I learned as an editor: Deadlines are important; writers will keep editing as long as you let them, and even if you tell them to stop they’ll keep editing until you just say “no”; correcting formatting issues were a pain; also spellings of words, as different writers had different preferences for all sorts of words; and deciding which words to translate into English and which to keep in the original Vietnamese; overall, just keeping the anthology’s language consistent from story to story was a Herculean task.

KG: In your introduction to The Colors of April, you relay the belief that: “In the end, it is the stories we tell that bind us as a people. Only through the power of narrative can we bridge our differences, find common ground, nurture empathy, and seek some measure of closure—a way to transcend war and the suffering it brings, as storytellers have done since the beginning.”

CT: As somebody who teaches fiction workshops and is first and foremost a writer himself, I am a big believer in the power of storytelling. It’s one of the oldest forms of communication we as a species have to pass along information to others. By “storytelling,” I don’t mean just fiction, or even just writing, because we were telling stories long before we invented writing. Cave paintings are a great example. All stories come from the oral tradition. How long? Who knows, because unlike writing, speech isn’t permanent. At least way back in prehistoric times when we sat around the primordial fire. Even when writing was invented, mostly for tax purposes and the census—it quickly became a way to preserve stories. Gilgamesh, widely considered the first story to be written down in cuneiform, is exactly the way it was told 5000 years ago.

KG: To me, the book represents not only stories on a common theme, but a window on an extraordinary cross-country community achieving new literary heights. The perspectives are unique, the language throughout is compelling and beautifully expressive. Can you speak to us about the fine literary qualities of these stories:

CT: Each story is unique. Some speak directly to the war, others obliquely. Quan came up with the title and I think it sums up the project pretty well—The Colors of April. April 30th might be the anchor, but from there, we hope for readers, it’s only a starting point to a multitude of voices and narratives about things that are intersect and intertwine in interesting ways. There’s what we would call “literary” in the Western sense, stories about the individual set against others, against society, against themselves, and there are also stories that are “literary” in a non-Western sense, stories that forgo much of the individual to speak to larger thematic issues. These latter stories sometimes feel like they are less focused on the characters than they are larger racial, nationalistic, and moral questions with few simple answers.

KG: How did the two of you decide who would translate which story? What are some of the specifics of Vietnamese to English translation that are most stimulating?
CT: So our process is that Quan does the initial translation, or if he’s not the translator, then whoever does it is noted at the end of each story. So the stories come to me in various forms, what I like to call the “raw” English version. From there, I make at least a half dozen drafts, each one sounding slightly better than the last, and consult with Quan on anything problematic. Several stories—as you know—had some serious narrative issues that needed to be resolved. Once a story is close to its final English version, both Quan and I take turns editing it down, cutting out anything unnecessary, until what’s left feels like the core of what the writer was trying to get at.

QMH: Normally, a story or a novel doesn’t go through a rigorous editorial process in Vietnam as it does in the US before it is published. Therefore, we acted as both the translators and the editors. Cab is well trained in creative writing, so he was able to detect issues/problems that needed to be fixed in order for the translation to make sense to English-speaking readers.

KG: Quan. you have four books releasing in the US this year, including The Colors of April, Light Out and Modern Vietnamese Stories, 1930-1954, translations of Vietnamese stores of the 1st half of the 20th century; No Man River (May 2025), a translation of Duong Huong’s renowned novel; and a translation of the memoir Face to Face with the CIA. How has your work on The Colors of April informed your work on the other books? And, by the way, that is an incredible line up.

QMH: Unlike Cab, a member of the Vietnamese diaspora, I am not. I was born and grew up in Vietnam and came to the US for graduate studies when I was 22. Thus, both my family and I have nothing to do with the boat-people experience, refugee camps, or life in exile in the US. So all the books that I have translated are written by Vietnamese authors living in Vietnam, although I do teach and research Vietnamese American literature in Montana. Because The Colors of April amplifies voices from both sides, those who left and those who stayed, it is different from my other books. Also, because this is an anthology, we are able to celebrate multiple voices and authors, rather than just a single author. Some of the stories I selected depict characters that are rarely seen in previous translated books: mixed-race Amerasians, Vietnamese women who were in love with American GIs, siblings who fought on different sides, Vietnamese Americans returning to Vietnam to live or to find their roots, etc.

KG: The press in Vietnam seems to have embraced this book, even though it is currently only available in English. What do you think is causing the growing interest in The Colors of April in Vietnam?

CT: I think mostly curiosity about what Vietnamese American writers have to say about the war. Also, since it’s such a rarity to also include writers inside Vietnam—maybe there’s some pride in that among English-speaking readers in Vietnam that both kinds of Vietnamese writers are included, not just the typical American viewpoint or the typical translation, even though there are few of either to be honest. I also think the book coinciding with such an important historic date for the country plays a role in the public taking interest, whereas if it came out last year or next year, maybe not so much.

QMH: Because the book does not promote hatred, resentment, or anti-communist sentiments. The stories address war wounds, healing, repatriation, reconciliation, the refugee experience, etc.

KG: What was the most rewarding part of working on this book? What kinds of challenges came along, and how did you overcome them?

CT: There were a lot of rewarding parts to working on this book, but one of the most rewarding, from an editorial standpoint, was to see the galleys as a single PDF with the cover and back cover attached for the first time. It’s not quite like holding a physical book in your hand, but you know at this stage the hard work is done.

QMH: Trying to find stories that address different themes and issues was a challenge. Oftentimes, when people have collective memories, they tend to write about similar things, and we have to find various aspects of the war and its aftermath for this book.

KG: The Colors of April includes stories by some of the greatest storytellers of our time, such as Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, PEN/Beyond Margins Award winner Andrew Lam, Lannan Foundation Award winner Barbara Tran, and Whiting Award winner Vu Tran. How were you able to include such a stellar lineup?

CT: This is a Quan question. Because Quan is more keyed into the academic side of things, and most of these writers are also academics—he was the one who put out the initial solicitation email to writers across the board. I was able to snag the others, somewhat younger and less published Vietnamese Americans like Gin To, Annhien Tran, and Elizabeth Tran.

QMH: The Vietnamese American academic and creative writing communities are small. We all know or know about one another. I met Viet Thanh Nguyen when I as a PhD student. I later wrote an academic article on his story “The Immolation,” which is included in the book. I have also met Andrew Lam and published an article about his story “Slingshot.” The same with Vu Tran. So when I reached out to them, they graciously allowed me to reprint their works and I am very grateful for their contributions.

The Colors of April is available wherever fine books are sold including Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and your favorite indie bookstore on request. You may also purchase it directly from Three Rooms Press here.

To get a better sense of what The Colors of April is all about, included below is a reprint of the introduction by Cab and Quan. Enjoy!

Introduction to The Colors of April

© Copyright Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran

Fifty years have passed since the end of the war that has come to define Vietnam in the eyes of the world. Even now, the war remains deeply personal and politically divisive among the Vietnamese; no family was untouched by its haunting shadow, no one unmoved by its carnage or apocalyptic vision of hell on earth. Yet, it is never war that defines a country or its people, but the stories we tell each other, those we hand down from generation to generation—stories which we take and shape and make our own to pass down in turn.

In this expansive anthology, more than two dozen authors frame the Vietnamese experience through their own lens, each portrait capturing vividly the nuances of a history shared, then silenced by war, and now reclaimed. Among the contributors are a Pulitzer Prize winner and writers who are publishing for the first time, their stories standing together without regard for nationality, religion, politics—so long as they are Vietnamese. The stories vary as much in tone and style as they do subject matter. From the gritty realism of “Oakland Night Question” to the surreal quality of “What the War Left Behind”; the elegiac “Night” to the playful banter of “Bad Things Didn’t Happen”; the narratives here contend with Vietnam’s war-torn past and the ways we plumb the depths of memory to reconcile with it. These stories also wrestle with questions of identity, cultural inheritance, and how storytelling empowers a people to reclaim what has been lost to time and war. Individually, each story stands on its own, but together they show how the literal and ideological oceans that once divided the Vietnamese—separating those who left from those who stayed—are now finding common shores.

Since that April morning in 1975, Americans, Vietnamese of the diaspora, and those who remained in Vietnam have all grappled with the legacy of the war in different ways. For U.S. servicemen, their families, and the American public who watched the war unfold from their living rooms, the war’s dramatic conclusion was for some a bitter pill. For many more, a squandering of resources and a tragic waste of human lives. In Washington, as political and military disasters piled up, the writing on the wall was clear: the war could not be won at the cost of more American lives.

In the years that followed, media narratives saturated public consciousness by repackaging and selling the war as a great American tragedy, complete with heroes and antiheroes struggling to do the right thing in the face of insurmountable odds—stories tailored for an American audience. Vietnam became little more than a backdrop, a stage for the American drama to play out on, with the Vietnamese themselves reduced to extras in the background, totally expendable, portrayed either as bloodthirsty communists from the North, who held little regard for human life, or as sympathizers from the South, subservient to the Americans, and valuing life only marginally more than their communist counterparts. The Vietnamese depicted across American media during the postwar decades were about as complex as a betel nut. But gradually, Americans have begun to seek out other perspectives on the war, gaining a more nuanced picture and greater understanding of the Vietnamese people.

For children of the diaspora, there is a whole generation of Vietnamese Americans who have grown up knowing little about the circumstances of their citizenship—why their grandparents fled Vietnam on overcrowded boats not meant to cross oceans, or why everyone, after making it Stateside, decided that Orange County, California, was as good a place as any to start over. But even the third generation after the original “boat people” are now reconnecting with their roots and the country that once held contempt for their parents and grandparents.

The Vietnamese who remained bore witness to the war’s legacy in ways that neither Americans nor refugees could: battlefields and rice fields littered with the dead, millions of acres of land laid waste by napalm and dioxin—the latter a weapon of genocide which continues to cause birth defects three generations after the war. Now those who stayed are also learning about the trauma carried by those who left. Only by sharing stories can we hope to foster a deeper awareness for the struggles of the other. In the end, it is the stories we tell that bind us as a people. Only through the power of narrative can we bridge our differences, find common ground, nurture empathy, and seek some measure of closure—a way to transcend war and the suffering it brings, as storytellers have done since the beginning.

Long before numbers and written language, there were storytellers. These early narrators knew how to wield words to bring light to a dark world, create order out of chaos, and turn abstract ideas into tales of wisdom that even children could understand. These stories preserve cultures, a people’s very soul, and as long as we keep telling them and listening to them, there is no fear that the past will fade from memory. So let us go back to the beginning, before war and its endless suffering, before time itself existed, when memory was but a pale fire in the din of our primitive brains. Back to those timeless words: Once upon a time…

Once upon a time, so the legend goes, the Dragon Lord Lạc Long Quân, guardian of both the natural and supernatural worlds, rose from the belly of the sea to meet the fairy goddess Âu Cơ—divine healer, giver of life, and the most sublime being in heaven and on earth—who descended from her mountain sanctuary. From the terraced highlands of Sa Pa to the mangrove forests of the Mekong, from the Trường Sơn Mountains to the beaches of Đà Nẵng—though worlds apart—somehow the dragon and the fairy found each other and fell in love. Their union gave birth to one hundred children, known as the “children of the dragon and the fairy,” and from these one hundred children, descended the ancestors of the Vietnamese people.

We are defined not by the wars we fight, but by the stories we choose to tell.

—Cab Tran & Quan Manh Ha