Co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and Asian American Studies Program.
Registration is required for this virtual event.
A young woman, torn between two cultures, belonging to neither. A family, torn apart by a war they had no choice about. Kiều, who calls herself Kim because it’s easier for Europeans to pronounce, knows little about her Vietnamese family’s history until she receives a Facebook message from her estranged Uncle Sơn in America, telling her that her grandmother, her father’s mother, is dying. The two brothers haven’t spoken since the end of the Vietnam War. Minh, Kiều’s father, supported the Vietcong, while Sơn sided with the Americans. When Kiều and her parents travel to America to join the rest of the family in the California for the funeral, questions relating to their past—to what has been suppressed—resurface and demand to be addressed.
Khuê Phạm is an award-winning Vietnamese-German journalist and writer. A graduate of the London School of Economics, she worked as a producer for NPR’s Berlin bureau before becoming an editor at the weekly Die Zeit. In 2012, she co- wrote We New Germans, a non-fiction book about second-generation immigrants in Germany. Her debut novel Brothers and Ghosts was loosely inspired her own family in Berlin, California, and Vietnam whose journey she traces over five decades. She’s a founding member of PEN Berlin and part of this year’s jury for the International Literature Prize, the German equivalent of the Booker International Prize. Read more at khuepham.de/English.
