From an article by Dana Kessler in Tablet Magazine:
Vaan Nguyen is the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who were among the so-called Boat People who fled Vietnam by sea in the late 1970s. After failing to find refuge in the Philippines, the family was given asylum in Israel by then Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Born in Israel in 1982, Nguyen grew up in Jaffa. Today she is an up-and-coming Israeli poet, championed by some of the country’s leading critics.
Her debut collection, The Truffle Eye, first saw the light of day six years ago, as a stand-alone pamphlet handed out with an issue of the literary journal Maayan. The journal is now publishing the collection—together with a handful of few new poems—as a proper book.
Nguyen was familiar to Israeli audiences before her collection was published. Her story—or at least the part of it that is connected to her past, her family, and her roots—served as the basis for director Duki Dror’s 2005 documentary, The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, in which Vaan joins her father on a journey back to Vietnam in an attempt to reclaim the family’s confiscated land.
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