There is something about Vietnamese children's literature that gets you in a way you never fully expect. You pick up a story about a kid making a to-do list on a windy day, or a boy sent to live with a stranger in the countryside who drives a pink truck of all things, or two sisters spending an entire summer trying to heal without ever saying the word grief out loud. And somewhere between the first page and the last you realize the story was never just for children. It was always for the part of you that still remembers what it felt like to be small in a very large world and not quite sure where you belonged in it.
Ten stories that all begin somewhere different but end up in the same place, which is the understanding that growing up does not mean leaving your childhood behind. It means learning to carry it with you. We see a village river you promised yourself you would trace all the way back to its source one day. And then a grandmother's house with lights that always seemed to glow a little warmer than anywhere else. The sound of wind that your mother always said was a good omen, which meant happiness was never really gone, just hiding somewhere nearby waiting for you to notice it again.
We built Viet Bookstore because we kept asking ourselves the same question. What would it have meant to have these books growing up? To be a Vietnamese kid in a country that wasn't Vietnam and still find yourself completely, honestly, on the page in front of you? We don't want the next generation to have to ask that question. We want them to already have the answer sitting on their shelf.
If you are raising kids in the diaspora and trying to keep them connected to something they were not born inside of, this collection is for you. If you are an adult who has not thought about your own childhood in a long time and suddenly feels the pull of it reading this, this collection is also for you. Vietnamese stories have always been worth reading. They have just not always been easy to find, and that is the exact problem we are here to solve.
The full collection is now live on vietbookstore.com and we ship internationally because Vietnamese stories belong everywhere Vietnamese people are.
Check out our young adult collection at: https://vietbookstore.com/collections/young-adult-fiction-in-vietnamese-language/young-adult
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