Author Bio
• Birth—January 2, 1972
• Where—Phana Thiet, South Vietnam
• Education—B.A., Hampshire College
• Awards—Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships
• Currently—lives in western Massachusetts, USA
Le Thi Diem Thuy (pronounced lay tee yim twee) is an award-winning poet, novelist, and performer. She is the author of the 2003 novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Born in the South Vietnamese village of Phan Thiet during the heart of the Vietnam War, Le left her homeland in 1978, alongside her father in a small fishing boat. They were picked up by an American naval ship and placed in a refugee camp in Singapore.
She and her father would eventually resettle in Linda Vista, in San Diego, California, where they shared in decaying 1940's-1950's Navy housing 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 in the ocean in Vietnam when he was six, her sister 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.
She moved to Massachusetts in 1990 to enroll in Hampshire College where she concentrated on cultural studies and post-colonial literature. 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."
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 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 Le to expand the work into a novel. The unfinished book was picked up by Alfred A. Knopf and published in 2003 to glowing reviews.
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. 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.
Her mother returned to Vietnam permanently in 2001 after she was diagnosed with cancer. She is buried in her home village of Phan Thiet. Le's father moved back to Vietnam in 2003.
Shortly before publishing The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Le was cited by the New York Times as one of its "Writers On The Verge." 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, including Red Fiery Summer and The Bodies Between Us, 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 reflects many stories later included in The Gangster, her next novel will be based on Bodies. (From Wikipedia.)