San Diego authors turning the page on literature about Vietnam War, Vietnamese diaspora

When DC Comics approached La Mesa-based author Minh Lê about writing a superhero comic, it was a childhood dream come true. But as he sifted through the Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman universes, inspiration was elusive.

Then, he had a lightbulb moment. Or, rather, a lantern moment. A Green Lantern moment.

"I couldn't quite find my entry point into the story until I laid on Green Lantern," Lê said. "It was a character that I was familiar with growing up but wasn't one that I really resonated with. But then when I looked at it this time, there was something different about it. I was like, 'OK, so there's this character with this really strong willpower, and they always wear this magical green ring.' And I was like, 'Why does that sound so familiar now?'"

It took a beat for him to figure it out.

“I was up late at night writing one day, and I realized I'm writing this story about a kid who gets a jade ring from his grandmother. And I was like, 'Wait a minute. I have a jade ring for my grandmother,'" Lê said.

That ring is the accessory he now dons when he writes about the adventures of 13-year-old Tai Pham, the first Vietnamese American hero in the Green Lantern universe. The inspiration for his epic comics comes from his real-life hero: his grandmother. She may not have worn a superhero cape on her back, but she did carry her family to safety when the war in Vietnam took a turn for the worse.

“It's really rewarding to write a refugee story as a superhero story because, for me, that is one of the most heroic things you can do," said Lê, who even wrote a character inspired by his grandmother.

Lê is not the only author of Vietnamese descent using literature, cartoons and comics to document his family's history and turn the page on whose stories are centered.

“Like a lot of people, I had questions about my origin story and sort of existential questions, like why am I here? How did I get here?” author and artist Thi Bui said.

Five decades since the fall of Saigon, literature from Vietnamese voices is on the rise, including those with ties to San Diego. Lê is based in La Mesa. American Book Award winner Bui settled in San Diego with her family after they escaped Vietnam, following the surrender of the South Vietnamese army.

While Lê folds his family's story into fantastical realms for kids, Bui wrote and illustrated a graphic memoir, telling her family's true story, in what has now become required reading for some high school and college classes.

“A big, epic, multigenerational family story in the foreground and in the background, a very epic, multidecade story of a country coming out of colonialism” is how Bui described her memoir, "The Best We Could Do."

"It's so great to have like so many books coming out, so many films, poems, songs, all kinds of cultural production that are coming out that I can't keep up with them all. It's a great problem to have," Bui said.

As an emerging writer, Bui was looking for voices that represented the reality of the Vietnamese experience, both during the war and the diaspora that followed and landed her family in Southern California.

“I realized after some time that I just had to make what I was looking for,” Bui said.

Wednesday, April 30, marks 50 years since the fall of Saigon. In just six months in 1975, some 50,000 Vietnamese refugees came through Camp Pendleton. Many stayed local, building robust communities in San Diego and Orange County that have continued to grow in the intervening decades.

"You have now a generation to identify as Vietnamese American. What does it mean for them to be Vietnamese and American and at the same time Vietnamese American?” said Professor Joseph Ruanto-Ramirez, who teaches Asian American Studies at Southwestern College and is a Filipino refugee himself.

Ruanto-Ramirez said literature, art and film are novel touchstones for his students to learn about history and experiences different from their own.

"There is a growing Vietnamese American community here. There's a lot of youth who are now having that discussion of what did I learn, what didn't I learn, what do I need to unlearn?” Ruanto-Ramirez said.

He assigns books from the likes of Lê and Bui, hoping they will inspire conversations at home. As the generation who brought their families to the United States ages and members of Bui's generation push their parents to be open, books about their experiences during the war, stories from a previously underrepresented perspective, are reaching audiences.

“I actually have a shelf of like a lot of my Vietnamese author friends and heroes because this is a shelf that wouldn't have existed when I was growing up,” Lê said.

Bui and Lê both attribute the rise in literature from Vietnamese voices to a publishing industry that's opening its doors and finding space on the shelves for those stories. Some, like Bui's, are then finding themselves on bestseller lists.

“It feels a bit like a golden era for Vietnamese literature in the diaspora and in Vietnam,” Bui said.

For Lê, it's all about unmasking history to show other refugees there is a (green) light at the end of the tunnel.

“I think when you think about the refugee experience, so much of it is that transition from something traumatic to something hopeful," Lê said.

Watch a on YouTube.