Trần Văn Dĩnh
Trần Văn Dĩnh (1923-2011), a native of Vietnam, served in the Vietnamese diplomatic corps in Thailand, Burma and Washington D.C. A professor of international politics and communications, he taught at Temple University, where he chaired the Department of Pan-African Studies for several years. Prof. Van Dinh published two novels and several books on Vietnamese history, international Buddhism, communications and Third World independence movements. He contributed hundreds of articles to professional publications as well as to The New York Times, The Nation, and other journals.
books
Blue Dragon, White Tiger
The year is 1967. Tran Van Minh, a Massachusetts professor recruited by the CIA, is sent home to Vietnam in the midst of war. While teaching at Hue University, Minh becomes more sympathetic to the Viet Cong—and increasingly skeptical of America’s military involvement. Over the span of a decade and across three continents, Minh joins a communist sleeper cell, works underground at a Vietnam People’s Army/North Vietnam command post, and flies to Paris as a delegate of the National Liberation Front. As the country of his childhood changes before his eyes, he must find a way to live beyond its shores—and the past it holds. Reprinted for the first time in over 40 years as part of Ink & Blood, Kaya Press’s collaborative imprint with the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, Blue Dragon, White Tiger is the first Vietnamese American novel written in English and published in the United States, reprinted here with an afterword by Sydney Van To.
praise
It was rare to find Vietnamese writers in the United States speaking about this war, or to hear any Vietnamese voices at all in mainstream America. [. . .] Literature plays an important role as a corrective to this ignorance. [. . .] Thinking back to Tran Van Dinh, I wonder if he was lonely as the only Vietnamese novelist in America of his time. —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
“[Tran Van Dinh] . . . presents evocative and moving scenes of family and cafe life and lyrical descriptions of Hue and Vietnamese cuisine . . . a people [come wholly alive], and this is an achievement. The author has provided an illuminating insider’s view of his native land; one hopes other works are forthcoming.” —Julius Lester, The New York Times
“Long before Americans knew they were involved in a war in Vietnam, I was seeking out the Asian voice, the Vietnamese voice . . . Tran Van Dinh’s work leaves much room for reflection while telling his story against the background of the war and, what is more important, within the texture of Vietnamese culture. It is a story that challenges the intellect and the imagination.” —Bonnie R. Crown, World Literature Today
“Tran Van Dinh writes with authority . . . Blue Dragon, White Tiger . . . is a valuable book for America which cannot risk forgetting Vietnam, which, if it should, will wander into the twenty-first century with the vulnerabilities of an amnesiac.” —John Balaban, After Our War
“Tran Van Dinh’s powerful first novel is a shattering experience. Capturing and conveying—perhaps for the first time in English—the true magnitude of the tragedy of that war, the book provides a rare portrait of the struggle between traditional Vietnamese culture and modern Vietnamese revolution, as perceived by a rare and gifted insider: spring and tenderness versus winter and force; the Blue Dragon and the White Tiger . . .” —W.D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie
“There was of course another Vietnamese side in the war, and though little, if any, of postwar literature by former citizens or soldiers of the Republic of Vietnam is published in Vietnam, a great deal is being published in the United States and in Europe, where a diaspora of millions of overseas Vietnamese (Viet Kieu) are living. Its writers are producing wonderful work . . . Tran Van Dinh’s Blue Dragon, White Tiger: A Tet Story, is about a National Liberation Front fighter who grows disillusioned after victory and escapes to the United States.” —Los Angeles Times