Co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and Asian American Studies Program.
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
More information forthcoming.