Vietnamese for uptight

I am the author of six books in English, but none in Vietnamese. Like nearly all overseas Vietnamese writers, I'm banned inside Vietnam. A Hanoi friend, poet Phan Huyen Thu, managed to get a story of mine published in Vietnam seven years ago, but other than that, nothing. All of my Vietnamese writing, more than two hundred poems and a dozen stories and essays, appear online, mostly at the Australia-based Tiền Vệ, the Germany-based Talawas, and the US-based Da Màu. Before I learnt to write directly in Vietnamese, I was translated into Vietnamese by various people, including Phan Nhien Hao, who is putting together a collection of my stories, Thư Lạ [Strange Letter], for a California publisher. When they suggested I do the cover illustrations, I sent them two felt-tipped pen drawings, which they promptly rejected. "Although we're a small publisher, we still hope to sell books," they explained.

Here is a cover drawing that was accepted, for my American book, Borderless Bodies:



And here's a samizdat cover I did for Saigon poet Ly Doi:

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