by Alisa Anh Kotmair
Kiều found me some 30 years ago in a bookshop, and followed me across continents since. Tracing Kiều is about opening that encounter to others – letting the poem find each of us in new ways today.
That first meeting was chance (or was it fate?). A bilingual edition of the Tale of Kiều caught my eye in a campus bookshop and followed me from Baltimore to Berlin, where I have lived for nearly as long. Later, discovering the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha, I read the poem differently – thinking about speaking “nearby” not “about,” and her critiques of framing, fetishization, language, and power. That lens helped me articulate my layered identities – an Amerasian born of America’s war in Vietnam, a US expat in Europe, discovering Vietnam through Germany – through writing, movement, images, and people I met along the way.
On a later journey to Vietnam (over land from Berlin by train and bus), a friend in Hanoi taught me bói Kiều, the practice of opening the poem at random for guidance, and pressed a pocket Truyện Kiều into my hand. My Vietnamese has never been strong enough to grasp Nguyễn Du’s original, but the poem stayed with me as a kind of mirror – imagined, projected, fragmented – of a resourceful individual navigating hardship and ambiguity, a life traced through shifting constellations of people and place.
As Z. M. Quyen has notedd, Kiều’s story has long worked at larger scales, intertwined with Vietnam’s language, history, and culture. Written in chữ Nôm (around 1805), and later widely circulated in quốc ngữ , the poem has been read across imperial, colonial, war, socialist, and reform eras. It has sparked debate, helped promote literacy, and colored everyday speech and practice. Beyond bói Kiều, traditions like vịnh Kiều (composing new poems in response to its scenes or characters) or lẩy Kiều (weaving verses into new contexts); bình Kiều (offering commentary and critique) show how people “play” (trò Kiều) with the text, moving it through time and context, keeping it alive through conversation.
That spirit is at the heart of Tracing Kiều. We are building an international, cross-media anthology reimagining Kiều’s verses and themes through lived diaspora perspectives. The project will expand into an exhibition, public programs, and a digital platform. The title nods to both Thúy Kiều, the poem’s heroine, and to Việt kiều (“overseas Vietnamese”) – read broadly to include those of mixed heritage, adoptees, third-generation diaspora, and marginalized voices within Vietnam itself.
Not everyone meets Kiều in the same way. For some in the diaspora, the poem is a distant or imagined inheritance; for others in Vietnam, it might feel overly familiar, tied to mandatory school lessons or a canon no longer called into question. Tracing Kiều takes these differences as a starting point — turning them into a playful challenge: open the poem, see what finds you, and let that encounter spark something new.
Berlin is where Tracing Kiều takes root — not only because I live here, but because the city holds both personal and collective histories. In 1999, I exhibited at Gap Việt Nam, the first major exhibition of Vietnamese artists at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Today, Berlin is home to a thriving, multigenerational Vietnamese community that is international, diverse, and still growing. It is also a city marked by its own divisions and reunifications, a history that in some ways parallels Vietnam’s.
Why Kiều, why this project, why now?
Kiều’s arc of displacement, resilience, reinvention, and return speaks across cultures and resonates with particular force in the Vietnamese diaspora. Its metaphorical language and vivid characters offer rich ground for thinking through fate, compromise, and agency – and for tracing how we live with them.
An anthology brings these perspectives onto equal footing, in dialogue that can echo, challenge, and surprise. From there, the project will grow into an exhibition with locally rooted public programming and a digital platform for long-term documentation and extended reach. The Tale of Kiều offers a frame that is historically rooted yet supple, open to play and reinterpretation.
The diaspora now spans multiple generations and geographies, and this project gathers those layered experiences into a creative tapestry. Recognition of Vietnamese diasporic creativity is growing around the world as more voices find mainstream platforms, making now an apt moment to convene this conversation.
In 2025, Vietnam marked three milestones: 150 years since the first widely circulated quốc ngữ edition; 50 years since the end of the war, which, as Eric Nguyen of diaCRITICS notes, marks the start of the Vietnamese diasporic story; and Nguyễn Du’s 260th birthday. Together, these anniversaries invite us to read Kiều forward and welcome new work into conversation with a living classic.
What we are looking for
We welcome creative work in many forms – short fiction, poetry, essays, visual art, performance, installation (2D documentation for the anthology), and hybrid media. Submissions may be new or existing pieces, experimental or traditional, in English, Vietnamese, or other diaspora languages.
Our invitation is simple: open The Tale of Kiều. See what finds you – as it once found me. Then answer back in your own voice. Multiplied across geographies, genres and generations, those answers form the conversation we hope to build.
Join Tracing Kiều
- Express interest: October 1, 2025 → mail@tracingkieu.net
- Final submissions: December 2025 / January 2026 (deadline flexible)
- Full call + PDFs in different languages: tracingkieu.net/call
