The Return to Viet Nam

"Equal parts conjuring, critique, and memorial, the passages in The Return to Viet Nam portray the entrenched hauntings of not only war but also cultural, national, and racial purity, as Hidle inverts shame with an elegiac rawness that holds a truthful mirror to the cultural value of racial purity within Vietnamese societies at home and abroad. By poetically portraying her own multiple transgressions of not belonging both 'here' and 'there, ' Hidle's book reveals lifelong commingling of guilt and pride, deprivation and abundance, sacredness and profanity, loyalty and disobedience, rejection and rootedness." -Julie Thi Underhill, multidisciplinary scholar-artist-activist, author of "Ghosts," "Corner Shore," and "The Gift Horse of War"

Jade Hidle holds an MFA in creative writing from CSU Long Beach and a PhD in literature from UC San Diego. She is a faculty member in the Letters Department at MiraCosta College. As a featured writer for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network’s website, diacritics.org, she contributes articles on topical issues in Vietnamese art and culture, as well as essays about her experiences growing up as a second-generation, mixed-race Vietnamese in Southern California. Her work has also appeared in the New Delta Review, International Journal of Comic Art, Spot Literary Magazine, Beside the City of Angels: An Anthology of Long Beach Poetry, Word River, and The Ethnic Studies Review.