Le Thi Diem Thuy photo

Le Thi Diem Thuy

Lê Thi Diem Thúy left Vietnam on a boat with her father in 1978 and grew up in San Diego, California. In 1990, she moved to Massachusetts and enrolled in Hampshire College. After graduating in 1993, Thúy traveled to Paris to research French colonial picture postcards made in the early 1900's.

Today, she is an author and performance artist based in Northampton. She recently finished a one-year Radcliffe fellowship and has been on the road performing her one-woman show "Red Fiery Summer."

She is currently working on a new novel entitled The Bodies Between Us.


“Words made faerie tales.”
Le Thi Diem Thuy
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“I don't know how time moves or which of our sorrows or our desires it is able to wash away.”
Le Thi Diem Thuy
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“In the fall of the year I turned sixteen, I jumped out of my bedroom window and ran away. The night’s black roads wound like long stretches of river. … The streets ribboned out in all directions. I lifted first one foot and then the other, ready to run down all of them”
Le Thi Diem Thuy
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“In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country and a homeland are one and the same: nu’o'c.”
Le Thi Diem Thuy
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“I go about things in an oblique way. It's like a sidelong glance. This doesn't mean I don't like the sharp stab of directness—only that what I like more are all the moments, leading up to that moment of directness or that expression of rage . . . how long rage was silenced before it exploded and at what cost.”
Le Thi Diem Thuy
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“If one morning in the Spring, a stranger came and said to me, Your mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, lover, friend, is dead. From a b-52, napalm bombing, search and destroy mission, air attack, Tet offensive, My Lai massacre, failed escape, I would not scream but make of my body a net, a tarp, stretched taut across the sky, the sea, over every village and hamlet. Prepared to catch everything from the sky, shade everything on the ground, rain water and receive you, war, with arms outstretched.”
Le Thi Diem Thuy
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“When I grow up I am going to be the gangster we are all looking for.”
Le Thi Diem Thuy
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