Caroline Vu was born in Vietnam and lived in Saigon as a child during the Vietnam War. She emigrated to the United States in 1970 prior to moving to Canada. Vu now lives in Montreal where she is a family medical doctor. One of her short stories is included in The Marginal Ride Anthology.
Fiction
Catinat Boulevard
Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2023.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Beginning in Saigon during the Vietnam War and ending in present day New York, Catinat Boulevard tells the story of two friends Mai and Mai Ly. While Mai flirts with American GIs in rowdy bars along Catinat Boulevard, Mai Ly joins the communist resistance in the jungle. The story also follows Nat, Mai’s half Vietnamese-half African-American son abandoned in a Saigon orphanage.
Awards and Honours
2023 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction–Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards (Finalist)
2024 Fred Kerner Award (Canadian Authors Association)(Finalist)
Fiction
Palawan Story
[Aylmer, Quebec]: Deux Voiliers Publishing, 2014.
PS8643 .U2 P34 2014
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Under the cover of darkness, Kim, a young girl, is put by her mother on a crowded fishing boat to escape Vietnam. The derelict boat drifts for two weeks on the South China Sea before reaching Palawan, a refugee camp in the Philippines. There, an American immigration officer mistakes Kim for a sponsored orphan with the same name and sends her to America. In the US, Kim tells her unsuspecting adoptive family the orphan stories they want to hear. While she succeeds in inventing vivid details for her assumed identity, there is a missing page in her own past. The boat trip out of Vietnam is a total blank, and she fears the worse. Years later Kim returns to Palawan as a volunteer doctor. Still haunted by what may have happened on the boat, she begins to record the stories of the other refugees. Through them, she seeks to unblock her suppressed memories.
Awards and Honours
2014 Concordia University First Book Award–Quebec Writers’ Federation (Finalist)
2016 Fred Kerner Award (Canadian Authors Association)(Winner)
Fiction
That Summer in Provincetown
Toronto: Guernica, 2015.
PS8643 .U2 T43 2015
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Daniel, a young French-Vietnamese man, lies dying in a Montreal hospital. Spurned by his family for contracting AIDS in Provincetown, Daniel spends his last months in despair. Only his cousin Mai stays by his side to record the darkest of family secrets. From French Indochina to present day North America, this novel follows three generations of a Vietnamese family as they endure their own folly and the whims of history.
Links
Caroline Vu personal website
Publisher Deux Voiliers Publishing
Publisher Guernica
Article from The Concordian, posted by Belinda Anijar 28 Oct 2014