An Early Voice of the Vietnamese Diaspora in Vietnamese-American Literature

In Blue Dragon, White Tiger: A Tet Story (1983), Tran Van Dinh's characters represent particular political and philosophical positions that defined various factions during the American War in Vietnam. This article examines these characters and their interactions with Minh, the protagonist, who must find his way through the maze of these political and philosophical positions as he seeks a satisfactory, humanistic place for his own poetic nature. Tran's work is a novel of ideas-ideas that have proven acceptable to audiences in the United States but unacceptable to government censors in Vietnam. Tran's primary contribution to Vietnamese-American literature is this novel's effective depiction of the intellectual forces at play in Vietnam during the American War.