Reviewed by Tiffany Troy

Dear Diaspora is a poetry collection in which the imagination of a Vietnamese American girl, Suzi with an i, runs wild like the cicadas as "she wonders: would they still sing on the way to death / and would it sound any different?" This fascination with the morbid is at once real and wildly imaginative. Suzi's hunger for ecstasy—something beyond the bucket list for allowance money—takes place through a discovery of her body and her identity as the daughter of refugees who have come across the double trauma of war and exile.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes: "To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion." Like Cha's Dictee, Dear Diaspora focuses on history and what it means to reckon with one's identity, the "old wound" of history. This wound is frequently depicted through the ways in which Suzi's parents (the father who disappeared and the mother who is "good at saving") differ from white American parents. Nguyen deftly creates resonances among nonfiction sections, which pay homage to the lives lost on the boat and the every-day trauma in bringing "home cash nightly, deposits a third into the Bank for Future Funds: unseen stockpile with good intentions: brooding nest egg in-case-of-emergency only." Suzi's desire for allowance and her mother's Bank for the Future Funds speak to not only a generational divide but also the experience of having once paid gold to smugglers for passage on boats where "people drank urine / licked their palms of sweat / the tide brought them in / human / cargo . . .  waiting / waiting five years / can you die of waiting / waiting / denied asylum."

This oblivion, in turn, is wrought for the readers as Suzi grows from a girl with no knowledge of the "boat people" to a woman who understands why, in some ways, she cannot escape from intergenerational trauma. Nguyen focuses on this complexity of identity by "wrecking language." This wrecking takes place across the fragmentary, lyrical sections featuring Suzi alongside the long poem, "The Boat People," which explores the humanity behind the statistics results from the fall of the South Vietnamese government to the communist North.

Nguyen builds a compelling narrative arc vis-a-vis her alter ego, Suzi, especially as it points to the complexities of identity beyond plain vanilla racism. Of course, systematic racism is omnipresent for Suzi's immediate family. We see it in the way Suzi's mother's economic mobility is limited as a manicurist working in Little Saigon, the way Suzi is called "fresh off the boat" though "She has never been on a boat" and the way Bobby Frank excitedly presses his "jeans rough against her thighs" inside the car. But much as identity is more complex than ethnicity, language is more complex than skin color. Through Suzi's eyes, we see how it shapeshifts into moods, the way "Vietnam's body curves like the letter: S: serpentine, fragile."

Nguyen draws these complexities out as she uses variations of poetic form as the container of content. The erasure of language in an English-speaking collection, the use of caesura, poetic fragments and monostiches, as well as returning titles like "Dear Diaspora" and "I Google 'Vietnam,'" similarly put the poet/Suzi at a distance from the parental figures. This fits squarely within the tradition of documentary poetry in which the variation on the form—including the very pronouncement of language—allows the poet to teach the reader how to contextualize the personal lyric within the wider context of geopolitical history.

In one particularly well-thought-out example, Nguyen places xanh (Vietnamese for both blue or green) in italics to emphasize the English transliteration from Suzi's perspective in "If I Say My Body is Grieving," but she writes bác and anh (Vietnamese for "uncle" or "aunt") without italics in "Questions I've Never Asked My Father." Creeping through the seams of this collection is a sense that Suzi has grown as a result of her disillusionment and exposure to a history that she has been shielded from as a girl. That history, as the long poem "The Boat People" points out, is so heavy because of the sheer number of lives lost and the "reeducation" forced upon officers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).

Nguyen is most successful when she inserts her advocacy within the historical context, as with Obituary 6:

XXX, 27 years old of ___, a former low-ranking officer in the ARVN, died while being re-educated from

a) malaria

b) malnutrition

c) dysentery

d) unknown

His family was not notified

By pointing to the universal suffering of the South Vietnamese victims of war through redaction and to the travesty of the re-education of former American allies in the Vietnam War, Nguyen helps the reader to understand a deeper meaning of July 4th.

An older and more mature voice asks:

when Veteran Days occur every year why don't we get to celebrate you and bac Thanh and bac Tuan and everyone else who made it to the States

Who fought in a war

Backed by the U.S.              for the same side

                                                                                       the same desired outcome

This persistent voice—across the persona of Suzi with an i and the older, more mature voice of the speaker—points to Suzi's desire to assimilate into "American" society which is, in turn, dashed by a kind of reality/reckoning that goes beyond Suzi's imagination.