Between Two Tongues: Southeast Asian American Writers Are Making the Untranslatable Their Superpower
There's a word in Tagalog — gigil — that describes the overwhelming urge to squeeze something unbearably cute. There's no clean English equivalent. You either know the feeling or you spend three sentences explaining it. For a growing wave of Southeast Asian American writers, moments like this aren't frustrations to smooth over. They're the whole point.
Across the country, a generation of authors, poets, essayists, and memoirists with roots in Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Thailand, and beyond are doing something that feels both deeply personal and quietly political. They're writing in English — the language of their American lives, their school years, their careers — while deliberately holding onto the parts that don't translate. And in doing so, they're building a literary tradition that refuses to shrink itself for anyone.
The Gap Isn't a Bug. It's the Feature.
For a long time, the dominant expectation for immigrant writers in America was assimilation on the page. Write clearly. Translate fully. Make it accessible. The audience is assumed to be someone who has never tasted bánh cuốn or sat through a three-hour family karaoke session that somehow becomes a therapy session.
But something has shifted. Writers like Ocean Vuong, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Bao Phi helped crack that door open. Now a younger cohort is walking through it with a lot more noise — and a lot more pride.
They're writing poems where Khmer words sit untranslated in the middle of an English stanza, trusting the reader to feel the texture even if they can't decode the definition. They're writing memoirs where the narrator's grandmother speaks only in Ilocano and the author doesn't italicize it, doesn't footnote it, doesn't apologize for it. The untranslatability itself becomes the emotional payload.
"When I write in English about something my mom only ever said in Vietnamese, there's already a loss baked into the sentence," says one emerging Vietnamese American poet based in Houston. "I've stopped trying to fill that gap. Now I write into it."
Colonial Histories Don't Stay in the Past
What makes Southeast Asian American literary voices particularly layered is that the linguistic displacement didn't start at the airport. It started centuries earlier.
French colonialism reshaped Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian languages and literatures. American military presence left its own marks across the region. Spanish colonization fundamentally altered Filipino culture and language. For many Southeast Asian American writers, writing in English isn't just navigating an immigrant experience — it's navigating a postcolonial one, where English arrived before they did, sometimes violently.
This awareness shows up on the page in complicated, interesting ways. Some writers deliberately code-switch mid-sentence as a form of resistance, a refusal to let English have the last word. Others excavate colonial-era texts and rewrite them from inside out, reclaiming narratives that were once told about their communities rather than by them.
A Filipino American essayist based in Los Angeles describes her process as "reverse archaeology" — digging through English-language archives about the Philippines to find what was erased, then filling those silences with her family's oral history. "The colonial record exists," she says. "I'm just adding the footnotes they forgot to write."
The Memoir Boom Nobody's Talking About Enough
If there's one genre where Southeast Asian American writers are making serious noise right now, it's memoir and personal essay. The form is perfectly suited to the experience — it's built for contradiction, for holding multiple truths at once, for asking questions that don't resolve neatly.
In writing workshops from Seattle to Atlanta, Southeast Asian American participants are increasingly showing up with manuscripts that don't fit the standard immigration narrative arc. There's no clean journey from struggle to triumph. Instead, these books sit in the mess of it — the shame of losing a heritage language, the grief of parents who worked too hard to explain themselves, the strange humor of being the cultural translator at every family gathering before you were old enough to drive.
Publishers are slowly catching on, though "slowly" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The commercial appetite for Southeast Asian American stories has grown, but it still tends to favor certain kinds of stories — trauma narratives, refugee journeys, war memory. Writers who want to write about the mundane intimacy of diasporic life, or about joy, or about the second and third generation's complicated relationship with a homeland they've never lived in, are still fighting for shelf space.
That's part of why independent presses, literary journals, and online platforms have become so important to this community. Places like Kartika Review, DiaCRITICS, and a growing number of Substack newsletters run by Southeast Asian American writers are creating the infrastructure that the mainstream hasn't fully built yet.
When English Becomes the Foreign Language
Here's the twist that doesn't get talked about enough: for many of these writers, English is also where they feel most displaced.
Growing up bilingual or in a multilingual household often means belonging fully to neither language. Your English carries an accent your classmates noticed. Your Vietnamese or Tagalog or Lao carries gaps from years of speaking it only at home, only with family, only in certain emotional registers. You learn to talk about feelings in English because that's what therapy and school and television taught you. But you learned love and loss and obligation in another language first.
Some writers describe English as the language of their ambition and heritage language as the language of their gut. Writing literary work means constantly negotiating between the two — and sometimes, the most honest sentence is one that lives in both at once.
A Lao American poet in Minneapolis puts it simply: "My poems are always a little bit homesick for a language I'm not even fluent in anymore. That homesickness is the whole poem."
What This Means for the Literary Landscape
The emergence of this literary generation is doing something important beyond the individual books and poems being produced. It's expanding what American literature is allowed to sound like.
For too long, the American literary mainstream treated multicultural voices as a subcategory — interesting, valuable, but adjacent to the "real" conversation. What Southeast Asian American writers are insisting on, through the work itself, is that their linguistic complexity, their postcolonial inheritances, their untranslatable emotional vocabularies are not special interest content. They are American literature, full stop.
And for readers in the diaspora — the ones who grew up code-switching at the dinner table, who know exactly what gigil feels like, who have had to explain their lunch to a classmate more times than they can count — these books are doing something that good literature always does at its best.
They're making you feel less alone in a language that was never quite yours to begin with.
Know a Southeast Asian American writer whose work deserves more attention? Tell us about them — we're always looking for the next voice to spotlight.
