Rendezvous before New Year

Rendezvous Before New Year by Dong Yen (Dong Song, 2026) is the author's third short story collection, comprising two novellas: the titular "Rendezvous Before New Year" and "The Hunchback's Carrying Pole." The title story is an ambitious, genre-blending work rooted in the trauma of April 1975 and the fall of South Vietnam. Seven South Vietnamese Special Forces soldiers, out of ammunition and facing defeat, detonate grenades together in a final act of brotherhood - only to be whisked away by a spaceship into a time-traveling odyssey through multiple dystopian future worlds. The science fiction framework, reminiscent of H.G. Wells and Ursula K. Le Guin (both cited as influences), allows the author to explore questions of identity, memory, exile, and geopolitical fate with an ambitious sweep. The imagery is at times genuinely striking - soldiers adrift in "shadow time," carrying personal GPS watches to one day reunite, serves as a powerful metaphor for the Vietnamese diaspora experience.The second story, "The Hunchback's Carrying Pole," is quieter and more grounded, following a family caught in the violence of the French-Vietnamese War. A mother's relentless search for her mysteriously disappeared son is framed as a kind of time-travel into the immutable past - a melancholy meditation on grief and loss that cannot be undone.