| lê thi diem thúy | |
|---|---|
| Born | Lê Thị Diễm Thúy 12 January 1972 Phan Thiết, South Vietnam |
| Occupation | Writer, performer |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable work(s) | The Gangster We Are All Looking For" |
Lê Thị Diễm Thúy (pronounced lay tee yim twee) is an award-winning poet, novelist, and performer. Her pen name is lê thi diem thúy. She was born in the South Vietnamese village of Phan Thiết on January 12, 1972 during the heart of the Vietnam War.
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In 1978, Le left her homeland alongside her father in a small fishing boat.[1] They were picked up by an American naval ship and placed in a refugee camp in Singapore. She would eventually resettle to Southern California with her father. They lived in Linda Vista, San Diego[2] in decaying 1940's-1950's Navy housing which they shared with fellow Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian 'boat people' immigrants displaced by war. Le's mother and sister joined them two years later via a camp in Malaysia. Two of Le's siblings drowned during her childhood; her eldest brother drowned in the ocean in Vietnam when he was six while a sister drowned in a Malaysian refugee camp. Le adopted the name of her deceased sister after her father mistakenly reported her name when they were rescued at sea. She has four surviving siblings, two of which were born in America.
Le took her inspiration for writing from her love of fairy tales. I wanted to write because I loved fairy tales. Reading a book of Grimm fairy tales, she recalls, I felt transported. Things happen very suddenly in fairy tales: A man puts on a cloak and vanishes. I could relate to that. Once I was somewhere and then I was here, and everything had vanished. I didn't take it as fantastic. I thought it was real.[3]
She moved to Massachusetts in 1990 to enroll in Hampshire College where she concentrated on cultural studies and post-colonial literature. She chose the school because of its individualized, multidisciplinary curriculum and her desire to get as far away from San Diego as possible.[3] In 1993 Le traveled to Paris to research French colonial postcards from the early 1900s—images of Vietnamese people taken by French photographers. Some of the images she collected would later appear in her performance work. It is in France, that she solidified her identity as an American and English as her preferred language. Being in France and not hearing English every day, she says, helped clarify how I hear English and carry it inside me.[3]
On her return to Hampshire, she wrote poems, prose and pieces of dialog that would form the foundation for her senior thesis and first solo performance work Mua He Do Lua/Red Fiery Summer. After graduation, she traveled the country from 1995 to 1997 performing Red Fiery Summer play in community spaces and formal theaters. In 1996, she was commissioned to write her second solo performance work entitled the bodies between us, which was subsequently produced by New WORLD Theater.
In the same year, she published a prose piece entitled The Gangster We Are All Looking For in Massachusetts Review. It was rerun in Harper's Magazine later that year, where it caught the attention of literary agent Nicole Aragi, who urged lê to expand the work into a novel.[3] The unfinished book was picked up in 1999 by publisher Alfred A. Knopf.
In 1998, while working on her book, Le returned to her birthplace Vietnam for the first time in 20 years with her mother. Her trip made her appreciate the how much her parents had suffered when they settled in America. It was profoundly sad for me, she says. The most powerful thing was this [extended] family. I must have been related to 200 people there. I realized how isolated my parents must have felt, the extent of what they had lost and had never been able to regain.[3] Her mother returned to Vietnam permanently in 2001 after she was diagnosed with cancer. She is buried in her home village of Phan Thiết. Le's father moved back to Vietnam in 2003.
Le was cited by the New York Times as one of its "Writers On The Verge," shortly before her novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, was published by Knopf (2001) to glowing reviews. Her work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Harper's Magazine, and The Very Inside anthology, and among her awards are Fellowships from the Radcliffe and Guggenheim foundations.
Her powerful solo performance work includes Red Fiery Summer and The Bodies Between Us, which have been performed throughout the United States (at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Vineyard Theater, among others), as well as in Europe. While the former piece reflected many stories later included in The Gangster..., Le is currently basing her next novel on the latter.
I go about things in an oblique way. It's like a sidelong glance. This doesn't mean I don't like the sharp stab of directness—only that what I like more are all the moments, leading up to that moment of directness or that expression of rage . . . how long rage was silenced before it exploded and at what cost.
Le is a Vietnamese American poet and performance artist who lives in Massachusetts. Born in South Vietnam in 1972 she left the country by boat in 1978 with her father and eventually settled in southern California. the rest of her family followed a few year later. le thi diem thuy wrote about her experiences in the memoir, THE GANGSTER WE ARE ALL LOOKING FOR.[4]
Uno, Roberta. "lê thi diem thúy." Asian American Playwrights: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Miles Xian Liu. California: Greenwood Press, 2002, p. 170.