Buchvorstellung mit Thao Tran

In the organizer's words:

How many years of your life would you sacrifice so that your loved ones could feel freedom?

Your parents meet on a Vietnamese island. They are poor, but happy together. When an offer comes from the GDR, the father decides to work there for just a few years. He cannot yet foresee what consequences this decision will have for his family. His wife and daughter - the narrator of the novel - follow him to Germany years later. There, however, they are not welcomed with open arms. Arriving is increasingly revealed to be a fiction, but going back would feel like failure. "People like us" are those whose names no one here can pronounce properly. Who have to worry every year that their residence permit will not be renewed. They remember the songs and poems from their old homeland and yet they don't want to go back.

Thi Thanh Thao Trân talks about what it means to live in two languages and two countries. She shows what radical decisions poverty can lead us to make and what sacrifices we are prepared to make for our love.

Thi Thanh Thao Trân was born in Vietnam in 1986 and has lived in Germany since 1999. She studied cultural studies and comparative literature and art studies. Her short story collection "Where I Come From" was shortlisted for the Young Storyteller Award in 2022. In 2024, she received a working grant from the Berlin Senate, which enabled her to complete her first novel project. Trân lives in Berlin.

Free admission, just drop by!

More info can be found here: Book launch with Thao Tran - Dussmann - Das Kulturkaufhaus