Cathy Linh Che
“I find that I write into silence. My parents have been telling me their stories of Vietnam throughout my life, and it seemed to me that in movies, newspapers, literature, their voices and stories were egregiously absent. I wanted to address this absence by writing their stories—and really, my story, our Vietnamese and American and Vietnamese American story—so that they could participate in the polyphony of voices constructing the American narrative.”
“Cathy Linh Che’s poetry vibrates with the rage and ache that accompany revisionist history work. The way she takes Coppola and the exploitative Apocalypse Now to task left me agape—these poems break the grammars of male and white-centric narratives.”
“We were diligent in our portrayal,’ says a parent speaker. So, too, is this collection: diligent not toward facts but toward feeling, irony, hungry for absence and its meaning.”
“This is the book I wish I had when I was growing up. It’s the book I’m glad I have now, one that I can read to my own children. Personal and political, playful and provocative, this rhyming guide brilliantly condenses rich, complicated Asian American histories. It’s an A to Z book that isn’t the last word on Asian American cultures but rather the beginning of many conversations.”
“Che and Wu center Asian American figures and history as well as intersectionally aware concepts in this activist-leaning abecedarian....[A] hopeful, liberation-minded primer that culminates by speaking to the ‘power in knowing Asian American history.”
“To be a daughter, a survivor, and a poet are all aligned in the need “to rewrite everything,” a need that [Cathy Linh Che] navigates with brutality and tenderness, devastation and irrepressible endurance.”
“Cathy Linh Che [balances] personal traumatic experiences, widely considered indescribable, against the ethical necessity of imagining and depicting. Crucially, [she demonstrates] that history resides in the body, rather than in murky or contentious fact. Split… [transfers] experience back onto the cultures that have enabled both the violation and the silencing of particular bodies and voices.”
The daughter of Vietnam War refugees, Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books, 2014), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, the co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books, 2023). Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney’s.
She has received awards from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and MacDowell. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival.
Asked in an interview about her use of Vietnamese and English in her poetry, she responded: “When I write, my primary audience is someone who occupies my exact same language and identity space. I’m not concerned with explaining myself, because those who don’t understand Vietnamese can understand the language around it, or they can look it up. I’ve seen my parents labor over dictionaries their whole lives to decode letters from government officials––I think English-speaking audiences can do the same for my parents’ words.”
She teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as Executive Director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City
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©Jess X. Snow
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