History and postmemory in contemporary Vietnamese literature

In this paper we argue that there are many ways in which history is embedded in a country’s fiction—many of them offering questions rather than answers about a country’s creative practices. In Vietnam it seems inevitable that the war against America and her allies would shape the nation’s creative writing. But is this the case? And what of the ways in which later generations have reacted to the war? In Vietnam and Australia this shared history has played out differently, not least in a postmemory dialogue between a generation who remembers too much and a generation who remembers too little.