Nobody tells you how hard translation actually is. Not the mechanical kind — swapping words between languages — but the real kind. The kind where you have to ask yourself, repeatedly and honestly, whether what you wrote in one language can carry its full weight in another.
Why it had to be done
I wrote this book in English. I live in Vietnam. Those two facts sat next to each other for a long time before I did anything about them. And then one day it became obvious — not as an opportunity, but as a responsibility. I had spent years here, absorbed into this culture, fed by its food, shaped by its people. The least I could do was try to give something back in a language they could hold.
That's where it started. Not with a plan or a publishing strategy. With a feeling that the work wasn't finished until it existed here, in Vietnamese. An obligation to my second home!
What nobody warns you about
Translation is a different kind of hard work. With writing, you wrestle with your own thoughts. With translation, you wrestle with someone else's — even when that someone is a version of yourself. Every sentence I'd written in English had been shaped by a particular rhythm, a particular tone. Directness. Bluntness. The refusal to soften things unnecessarily.
You can't just translate words. You have to translate intention — and that requires understanding the people you're speaking to.
Vietnamese carries things differently. The culture is layered, contextual, deeply relational. What reads as honest in English can read as abrupt if you're not careful. So every chapter had to be rethought — not rewritten, but re-felt. The truth had to land the same way, even if the words taking it there were entirely different.
From manuscript to bookstore
And then there were the practicalities. The publisher conversations. The back and forth over formatting, covers, licensing. The particular patience required when you're working across languages, time zones, and different ideas of what "finalised" means. There were moments where I wasn't sure it would come together. There were weeks where the finish line seemed to keep moving.
But it did come together. Tay Trắng Khi Đến — the Vietnamese edition — will be available in bookstores in Vietnam within months. I'm still adjusting to that sentence. Something I wrote, in a language I was born into, will sit on shelves in a country I chose — translated, printed, and waiting for readers I haven't met yet.
I'm excited in a way that's hard to describe. Not the loud kind of excited. The quiet kind — the kind that sits with you early in the morning before the city wakes up, and feels like something being completed.
This site — and what comes next
Building this website was part of the same impulse. A book is a one-way conversation — it speaks, you listen. But I wanted more than that. I wanted to hear back. From readers in Hanoi and Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City. From anyone, anywhere, who picked it up and felt something move.
This site is that space. The contact form, the blog, the bilingual design — all of it built so that the conversation doesn't end when the last page does. Every message I receive here goes into what I'm already turning over for the next book. Every piece of feedback shapes what I write next and how I write it.
The first book took a lifetime of lessons. The second will be built, in part, from what you tell me. So — tell me something.
— Dan P. Dustwell, Ho Chi Minh City