self-explorations represent a woman constructing
and revealing herself at the limits of experience.
Bibliography
Chao, Lien. “From Testimony to Erotica: The Split
Subject in Evelyn Lau’s Prose.” In Beyond Silence:
Chinese Canadian Literature in English, edited by
Lien Chao, 156–184. Toronto: TSAR, 2001.
Alex Feerst
lê thi diem thúy (1972– )
Pronounced lay tee dyim twee, lê thi diem thúy
(the lower case is a preference, “lê” being the family
name) was born Lê Thi Diem Trang in Phan Thiet,
South Vietnam. In 1978 lê and her father fled Phan
Thiet by fishing boat. Eventually they were rescued
by an American naval ship and sent to a Singapore
refugee camp to await resettlement. While on the
U.S. ship, lê’s father wrote Thúy, the name of her
older sister, instead of Trang on lê’s paperwork.
Lê’s mother quickly rectified the mistake when
she joined the family two years later in San Diego.
However, Thúy died during her flight from Viet-
nam with her mother, drowning in a Malaysian
refugee camp. To honor her memory, lê kept her
older sister’s name. Since her older brother also
died off the coast of Vietnam, lê became the oldest,
but always felt the “presence” of her older siblings,
a loss that is reflected in her writing.
Once lê resettled in San Diego, she picked up
English quickly, using fairy tales as a means to
escape and as inspiration to become a writer. In
1990, lê began college at Hampshire College in
Massachusetts, a move that was partly prompted
by a desire to distance herself from San Diego. At
Hampshire, lê pursued her artistic desires of per-
formance and writing while focusing her academ-
ics on cultural studies and postcolonial literature.
When she returned to Hampshire after a 1993 re-
search project in France, lê began to write various
pieces, which eventually culminated in her perfor-
mance of “Red Fiery Summer.” In 1994 lê gradu-
ated and performed her show across the United
States, portions of which culminated in her first
novel, The GANGSTER WE ARE ALL LOOKING FOR.
Lê’s second performance, “the bodies between us,”
is currently being transformed into her second
novel. Lê’s poetry and prose has appeared in vari-
ous publications including Watermark and Best
American Essays 1997.
Lê’s writing has been praised for its style and
content, and lê was named “Writer on the Verge”
by the Village Voice. Her work has been called pow-
erful and poetic in its portrayal of Vietnam beyond
the war. In 1998 lê and her mother returned to
Vietnam, where all of her ideas and her parents’
feelings of isolation and loss came to the fore. For
the first time, lê truly realized what she and her
parents had lost, and she felt “profoundly sad.” In
2001 lê and her mother again returned to Vietnam,
and her mother, stricken with cancer, lived out her
final days with her family in Phan Thiet.
Tina PowellLee, Chang-rae (1965– )
Named one of the 20 best American writers under
40 by the New Yorker in 1999, Chang-rae Lee is the
author of three critically and popularly success-
ful novels: NATIVE SPEAKER (1995), A GESTURE LIFE
(1999), and ALOFT (2004).
Born on July 29, 1965, in Seoul, South Korea,
Lee immigrated to the United States with his par-
ents and sister in 1968. His father’s white-collar ca-
reer as a psychiatrist sheltered him from the kind of
hardscrabble immigrant life Lee portrays in Native
Speaker, and he experienced a comfortable upward
trajectory from New York’s Upper West Side to the
affluent suburbs of Westchester County, then to
boarding school at Philips Exeter and college at
Yale. Although he was often one of only a few non-
white children in his school or neighborhood, Lee
reports having little trouble making friends, while
admitting to toying briefly with the idea of West-
ernizing his name. After graduating from Yale, he
took a job as an equities analyst but left Wall Street
a year later to write full time. He earned his M.F.A.
at the University of Oregon, where he wrote Na-
tive Speaker. This novel, published when he was
29, established him on the literary scene and was
followed by appointments to the creative writing160 lê thi diem thúy