Recto, title page. This Is All I Choose To Tell. Emily Dickinson could have written that.
It’s in her common measure, scanning as do the hymns she and I sang in our churches of the Connecticut river valley:
It’s all I have to bring today. The way to read a letter’s this. Emily. This is all I choose to tell. Isabelle.
Look left, verso, where the list of titles in the series Asian American History and Culture overflows to fill two back pages.
Contemporary Chinese America. The Racial Logic of Politics. The World Next Door.
Doorstops. The five titles I sampled run north of 200 pages at the shortest, twice well above 300.
This Is All I Choose to Tell doesn’t reach 200 numbered pages. It’s a driver's manual rather than a mechanic's.
About what? This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature.
Here we have again a prosody. Look left again at the facing page filled by 1 third of the titles already published in the series.
Attractive title, semicolon, substantive subtitle, all racked up like ships and their origins in an epic poem.
This book is part of an invading fleet. Each title is the work of a captain whose standing is assured by all those chiefs reviewing and supporting one another.
An epic catalogue. All of them published by Temple University, founded by the minister Russell Conwell who struck it rich with his sermon advising all to dig for gold at home.
He gave it all away again to a night school for self-help which has ever since addressed the needs of immigrants and their social workers.
This well-read copy is from the University of North Carolina, home of the first university press, where we collect them all for any to consult in the open stacks or borrow with a driver's license.
That is all I choose to tell today. Next time the book comes up in the rota I will tell you who the author, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, says she thinks she is.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of Viet Nam letters is a thumbnail version of a photograph of me speaking on a Veterans Day with the novelist David A. Willson.
