lê and her father left in 1979 by boat and spent time at a Singapore refugee camp, before settling in Southern California. Her memoir of these childhood events is The Gangster We Are All Looking For (New York: Knopf, 2001).

lê turns her family's story of immigration from Phan Thiet, South Vietnam into powerful dramas that raise larger questions of memory and identity with her performance art.

lê's desire to embody her father led her to the stage. She explains, "I wanted to bring [him] forward—his gestures, tone of voice, way of walking, through my own body and voice. I didn't want to mimic him so much as to express his presence."

Her solo performances, Red Fiery Summer and the bodies between us, have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, the International Women Playwright's Festival in Galway, Ireland, and the Third New Immigrants' Play Festival at the Vineyard Theater in New York City, among other venues. She was selected by the Village Voice as a "Writer on the Verge" and is presently at work on a novel, based on the bodies between us.

lê believes each piece needs to find its form, its way of being in the world. "With performance, it has to do with utterance; with the sound and the shape of a word spoken aloud and how this sound travels through the body of the person speaking," says lê.

Red Fiery Summer began as a prose piece, a series of poems, and some monologues. The narrative she relates is interrupted by voices reflecting on war and its aftermath. The presentation addresses the gaze returned by incorporating projections of French colonial postcards of Indochina. These harrowing images serve both as a window onto the past, and as a way of involving past as present in the performance's narrative. She states, "Objects and images become the subjects and the liveliness at the borders . . . inform—perhaps even disrupt—what was being framed at the very center of the photograph."

Conversely, the bodies between us started out as a performance and led to a written project. Says lê, "It's as if the characters from the performance walked off the stage and out of the theater, and I followed them and wrote down what happened."

With all of her work, lê disengages passionate, terrifying stories, gently and melodically, creating a tension and allowing her audience to experience words left unstated. She comments, "I go about things in an oblique way. It's like a sidelong glance. This doesn't mean I don't like the sharp stab of directness—only that what I like more are all the moments, leading up to that moment of directness or that expression of rage . . . how long rage was silenced before it exploded and at what cost."

An excerpt from lê thúy's performance:

If one morning in the Spring, a stranger came and said to me, Your mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, lover, friend, is dead. From a b-52, napalm bombing, search and destroy mission, air attack, Tet offensive, My Lai massacre, failed escape, I would not scream but make of my body a net, a tarp, stretched taut across the sky, the sea, over every village and hamlet. Prepared to catch everything from the sky, shade everything on the ground, rain water and receive you, war, with arms outstretched.

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.