The quiet boom in self-published Vietnamese diaspora memoirs

Trinh Vu never planned to write a book. She planned to write down her father's boat story for her kids, so it wouldn't disappear the way so much else had. Eighteen months later, that document was 40,000 words long, and she published it herself as an e-book rather than spend years querying agents for a story she suspected publishers would call "too niche."

She's not alone. A loose, largely unconnected wave of second-generation writers has been self-publishing family memoirs directly to Kindle and other e-book platforms over the past several years, skipping traditional publishing almost entirely. Most of these books will never appear in a bookstore. Many sell only a few hundred copies, mostly to extended family and old family friends. Almost none of that seems to matter to the people writing them.

"The math never made sense as a business," said Vu, who works full-time in logistics and wrote most of her book on her phone during her commute. "But my dad is 74. If I waited for a publishing deal, there was a real chance he wouldn't be alive to see it finished." That urgency — capturing a shrinking generation of firsthand refugee accounts before they're gone — comes up again and again among these writers, many of whom describe the book less as a literary project than as a race against time.

A few of these self-published memoirs have found unexpectedly large audiences anyway, boosted by word of mouth in Vietnamese American Facebook groups and community newsletters. Vu's has sold around 1,200 copies, a number she still finds hard to believe. "I didn't write it to sell copies," she said. "I wrote it so my kids would have something to hand to their kids. Everything past that is a bonus."