Nine years ago, I posted some exciting news about Vietnamese SF in translation on my website: A Kickstarter had been created to bring two works of Vietnamese fiction to the Anglophone world, including one work of magical realism, The Young Die Old. Here we are, in 2026, and Major Books has indeed published this work, which delves into Vietnamese culture and history through the lens of a village balanced on the edge of fantasy and reality.

The Young Die Old isn’t the only work of Vietnamese magical realism that we have in English, though. Two collections were published by Curbstone Press (part of Northwestern University). In 1998, we received Behind the Red Mist by Ho Anh Thai, translated by Nguyen Qui Duc, Regina Abrami, Bac Hoai Tran, Phan Thanh Hao, and Dana Sachs. The three speculative stories included in the volume explore life during and after the Vietnam War, especially family ties, bureaucracy, and the horrors of war. Here, a man literally turns into a goat after watching too many pornographic movies, another man’s Vietnamese features are replaced by those of a white American after living in the US for a short time, and yet another man time travels in an effort to make sure that his parents do, indeed, get together so that he can be born. Another collection from 2005, The Cemetery of Chua Village and Other Stories by Doan Le, translated by Rosemary Nguyen, Wayne Karlin and Tuong Doung, included four speculative stories filled with ghosts, clones, and other examples of transformation from an author determined to give readers a window onto post-war Vietnam from the perspective of everyday people. In these stories, ghosts gossip and plot, people turn into flies when being blocked by a bureaucracy while trying to find housing, and a man discovers a step-brother is actually his father’s clone.

With The Young Die Old, Nguyễn Bình Phương, one of Vietnam’s foremost contemporary writers, brings us a book that slides back and forth along the continuum of fantasy and realism, where carnal desires mix with anxieties about a Nghê (a mythical lion-dog from Vietnamese culture), and family members fight with one another until they must band together to protect themselves from other villagers. Phương drops us into Phan Village without letting us have too much time to learn about one character before introducing us to another. We learn about various villagers and their backstories at such a speed that stories seem to slip into one another and overlap. When Phán’s grandfather is dying, for instance, we are viewing the situation from Phán’s perspective until we are suddenly in the grandfather’s mind, remembering a man named Chan digging a pond.

Dreams, too, are crucial to the tapestry of this novel, uncovering hidden desires and stunning their own dreamers with their intensity and imagery, not considered during the dreamers’ waking hours. At one point, we learn that “One morning, by a log fire, [one man’s] father blurted out, ‘Last night I dreamt about an old man flying a dragon through the village!’” (p. 197). While listeners to these dream stories seem surprised at times, especially when dragons or other strange creatures appear, they don’t seem completely thrown. After all, as the author himself says in the interview with the translator, Khải Q. Nguyễn, at the end of the book, “every people have their own magical literature. Vietnam also has its own folklore, which is magical and fantastic … The atmosphere and the supernatural haze in The Young Die Old don’t come from Latin America.” They are rooted in Vietnamese culture.

Transformation, a key component in fantastical literature and a common trope across cultures and languages, is central to The Young Die Old. People grow old, but also the reverse—see the story on page 205 of the old woman who regresses in age until she becomes a child, all in front of the man who is following her. A banyan tree gathers up the corpses of people who have disappeared and died elsewhere; every so often, one can look inside the banyan tree and find those people. In his interview with the translator, Phương references Kafka, presumably in order to nudge his readers to think about his and other literature outside of clear genre boundaries. Kafka, Phương admiringly notes, wrote for himself without the need for others to read his works. For Phương, it seems, art must follow the path that unfolds before it, and if that means that a mythical creature helps a father and son reconcile, then so be it. The very physical kicks and punches are forgotten in the face of a Nghê, and all of the martial arts that the son knows must be reconsidered when it comes to something otherworldly.

A focus on sound, or the lack thereof, further informs this novel, as Phương alternates his chapters with, for instance, “Chapter One” and “Soundless One.” The “Soundless” chapters focus on a single man and his vague traveling companions on a buffalo cart. According to the translator, this character, known only as “the Man,” may be returning to his village from the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. While the countryside unfolds before him on the buffalo cart, the Man drifts back and forth between the present and the past, while the driver sings bits of songs and the other travelers throw out philosophical musings and random, unexpected declarations. Nguyễn argues that we readers “are like the Man in Soundless … the only thing we can do is to ‘flow’ in the present, like the characters in the buffalo wagon, without a hint of where we’re heading to.” After all, the Vietnamese language, as Nguyễn explains, itself has almost no tenses; one “speak[s] in the present tense, although there are words for where actions take place in the timeline, to be added before verbs to indicate tenses, yet we can do without.”

Here is precisely where the knowledge of how a particular language works can give us a deep understanding of how its literature operates on the level of style and plot. What does it mean for a language to center itself in the present and flow outward to the past and future? How does this make the stories written in this language different from those written in another language with a different structure? And what happens when Vietnamese, for instance, is translated into English? How does a translator maintain this particular approach to time in a language that treats it very differently?

What of the thick, gorgeous imagery with which Phương opens various chapters? Chapter Five, for instance, treats us to a scene so visually compelling, it’s as if the author has turned the immaterial tangible: “Winter came, dropping its veil over the landscape. Gusts of wind took away remaining leaves in the forests. The sky hung low, about to fall, gigantic clouds ripe with water … The cold squeezed humans and animals into sorrowful ragged piles.” Phương is at his very best when offering these vibrant pieces, and it is absolutely no surprise that he is a poet as well as a prose writer.

The Young Die Old offers us so much: a crucial window onto Vietnamese literature (a country about whose creative output we hear so little), an alternative view of time and the fantastic, and an opportunity to learn about the lives of those living in a post-war country that continues to be haunted by the brutalities and destruction of its recent past. We should support a publisher like Major Books, which seeks to bring even more Vietnamese literature into English and hope that more speculative fiction from that country will appear in the coming years. This will enhance our understanding of the speculative fiction being written in Asia in general, where Korean, Japanese, and Chinese SFT have been on the rise since the 2010s. The Vietnamese voice should be welcomed by all of us who are curious about what motivates writers in that country and what they have to tell us.