Why we’re building this.

I grew up in a house full of books I couldn’t read. My mother kept a shelf of Vietnamese novels in the hallway — thin spines, yellowed pages, covers with watercolor landscapes I could never place on a map. She’d reference them at dinner the way other parents reference weather: casually, as if everyone had read them. I hadn’t. I couldn’t. My Vietnamese was good enough for grocery runs and arguments, not for literature.

For years I looked for English translations. The few I found read like government documents — technically accurate, emotionally flat. The humor was gone. The silences were gone. The way a Vietnamese sentence can hold three generations of meaning in a single particle — gone. I kept thinking someone at a university press or a nonprofit would fix this. Nobody did.

So I started BroadCastBooks. Not because I had publishing experience — I didn’t — but because the gap between Vietnamese literary culture and the English-speaking diaspora felt personal and unnecessary. My mother’s favorite novel is about a family in the Mekong Delta who keep a promise across fifty years. She has tried to explain it to me at least a dozen times. Each time she gives up halfway through and says, “You have to read it.” I want to. I want my cousins in Houston and my niece in Melbourne to be able to, as well.

BCB exists to commission translations and narrations that preserve what actually makes these stories matter: the emotional grammar, the rhythm of a sentence that sounds like a lullaby even when it’s about war, the jokes that only land if you understand the weight of what’s not being said. We start with Vietnamese because it is the literature I grew up overhearing. We choose titles the way a good bookseller does — one at a time, with conviction and care.