Category Archives: Vietnamese American

January 12, 2013 · 2:38 pm

Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey by GB Tran

VietnamericaBoth the inside and outside covers here are exactly the same: a mostly well-ordered, three-generation family tree … except for the bottom right corner in which the youngest member – the book’s author/creator GB Tran – is desperately attempting to complete the thus-far neatly organized tree. Under one arm, Tran holds his matching portrait with his initial-ized American name slightly askew, while desperately reaching out to grab the placard that bears his full Vietnamese moniker “Gia-Bao” which is falling just out of his reach. Scattered below him are unnamed portraits that don’t seem to have a designated destination in the familial constellation.

Tran’s pictures throughout this extraordinary graphic memoir speak proverbial volumes. As the only U.S.-born member of his scattered Vietnamese family, he is clearly the ‘odd man out,’ attempting to bridge his American ‘GB’ self with his inherited ‘Gia-Bao’ heritage. Thirty years after his family fled their war-torn country, Tran joins his parents on his first journey to his ancestral home. Packed into his luggage is a high school graduation gift his father gave him – a book about the Vietnam War that got tossed in unread with his comics and PlayStation controls – inscribed with a dedication quote from Confucius: “A man without history is a tree without roots.” Now in his late 20s, death convinces Tran to meet his surviving extended family after both his grandmothers die within months of each other, each on either side of the world. “There’s a lot about your parents you don’t know,” his paternal grandmother had warned shortly before her passing. “And they won’t be alive forever to answer your questions.”

Page by page, Tran pieces together his extended family’s violent, brutal past on both sides of a moving border that divided a war-torn Vietnam and what they had to do to survive, how his parents, three older siblings, and grandmother were able to narrowly escape the devastating Fall of Saigon in April 1975, all the while interweaving his own challenging youth as the youngest son of refugee immigrants who began uncertain new lives in South Carolina and his eventual adulthood as a culturally disconnected young artist. His return ‘home’ to a country and family he’s never met is a revelatory experience, eloquently expressed through vivid, spirited panels filled with memories, dreams, regrets, hopes, and a few answers. Halfway through, Tran’s drawings are interrupted by a single page of collaged photographs that offers a momentary glimpse of his parents’ lives before they were his parents: still-young lovers who have endured so much but seem contentedly unaware of the difficulties and challenges yet to come …

So remember the identical inside and back covers mentioned above? That sameness won’t be an option by the time you reach the final page. As you read from one cover to the other, the portraits at book’s beginning will stop being of strangers from whom you can turn away …  after sharing Tran’s illuminating journey, they’ll be just like family, too.

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2010

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Graphic Novel/Manga/Manwha, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American

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December 10, 2012 · 9:04 am

Sumo by Thien Pham

SumoLast seen on bookshelves sharing cover credit with National Book Award-finalist Gene Luen Yang on Yang’s latest, Level Up, Thien Pham makes his solo debut with this slim heartbreaking-to-heart-recovering tale across continents and cultures.

“What am I doing here,” Scott wonders as he wakes to another day of strenuous training with mostly-naked behemoth men following the absolute orders of a tiny-in-comparison UCLA-sweatshirt-wearing master. Welcome to the world of sumo somewhere in Japan. After being dumped by his longtime girlfriend when his NFL career didn’t happen, Scott made a radical decision to move to the other side of the world and reinvent himself.

Now in his new life, he’s passing out regularly and tired of doing the dishes. He can cook a mean pot of nabe, the food of choice for his fellow wrestlers, although he only seems to get the leftovers. His one new friend is the master’s daughter, whose UCLA education explains both her English and her father’s sweatshirts: “Where I come from UCLA sweatshirts are like FUBU for Asians,” Scott explains to a speechless Asami. [I had to look up that acronym, and I can't give you the translation here because I'm not allowed to use that sort of language in print, tsk tsk (but hee hee ho ho!).]

With his recently dyed-to-black hair (and his new Japanese name, Hakugei), Asami notices Scott is looking more like a rikishi, a professional sumo. But he’s got to prove himself and get to the next level. The most important tournament of his career is on … “You better decide now if you want this,” his master warns, “because … if you don’t … you should leave now.”

Pham creates a simple, resonating, colorful palette for Scott’s life – a rich earthy brown for sumo, a distant shadowy periwinkle for his past, a welcoming slightly minty green for the present – which all ultimately comes together on the final pages, a collage of potential and promise.

Oh, and that final page handprint with the two kanji characters? That’s Hakugei, Scott’s new moniker … literally ‘white whale.’ Hmmm … I’m just translating here …

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2012

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Graphic Novel/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Vietnamese American

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August 15, 2012 · 10:22 am

Ru by Kim Thúy, translated by Sheila Fischman

* STARRED REVIEW
The recipient of international accolades – including Canada’s coveted Governor General’s Award (2010) for its original Canadian debut in French – this extraordinary first novel unfolds like ethereal poetry. The enigmatic title means “a small stream and, figuratively, a flow, a discharge—of tears, blood, of money” in French; in Vietnamese, it’s a “lullaby, to lull.” Made up of spare vignettes that flow through decades, this autobiographical narrative reveals a girl’s journey from wealthy privilege in Vietnam; her reinvention as a war refugee in Canada; her return to her birth country, where she is considered “too fat to be Vietnamese” – not because of her stature, but because “the American dream had made me more substantial, heavier, weightier”; and her own overwhelming motherhood.

Verdict: Interwoven with glimpses of cousin Sao Mai who was Uncle Two’s princess, of a father “who always inspired the greatest, most wonderful happiness,” of Aunt Seven’s mystery son raised by Aunt Four, and of young cousins and what they innocently did on the streets to survive, this is much more than another immigration story. For readers in search of intricate, mesmerizing narrative, Ru will not disappoint.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, August 15, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012 (United States)

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Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Memoir, .Translation, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American

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April 9, 2012 · 3:33 pm

Sông I Sing: Poems by Bao Phi

April is National Poetry Month. Every once in a long while, even a poetry-dullard like me has a poetic WOW!-moment. Certainly I’m not alone … Bao Phi is a nationally-lauded performance poet, twice winning the Minnesota Grand Poetry Slam and twice winning poetry slams at Nuyorican Poets Cafe in NYC. He’s appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry (season 3, episode 6), and was a National Poetry Slam finalist in 2000. His poem, “Race,” was selected in The Best American Poetry 2006.

Given his credentials, that Sông I Sing is Phi’s first collection is somewhat surprising, as welcome as it is. [He did previously debut three chapbooks Last Name First (2005), The Way We Pay (2004), and Surviving the Translation: Collected Poems from 1993-2002 (2002).] Dedicated “for my Asian American people,” Phi’s work is racial, historical, political, sociological … most of all, even when he’s subdued and thoughtful, Phi is angry – powerfully, elegantly, justifiably angry.

Of the four sections, each prefaced by the words of a fellow ethnic writer (Lac Su, Julie Otsuka, Pablo Neruda, Joy Harjo, David Mura), the second and longest proves most resonating for its simplicity and complexity both. Titled “The Nguyễns,” Phi opens with a quote from Julie Otsuka’s astonishing When the Emperor Was Divine: “Who am I? You know who I am. Or you think you do … I’m the one you call Gook. I’m the one you don’t see at all – we all look alike …”

In the section’s 14 poems, all share the common Vietnamese name Nguyễn, they might have had a few similar experiences, but none of them ‘look alike’: Vu Nguyễn from Sacramento wants his revenge against Chavis Johnson “for pushing me down in ninth grade / and calling me gook”; Kaylee Nguyễn from Chicago who, as a chef, wants to tell you “that when I see the wilted attempts at vegan Vietnamese cuisine / made by white people in co-ops / I think of Britney Spears in an áo dài”; John Nguyễn who is serving out his ROTC in Iraq who insists, “let no one say I fought this war to make a better world / for our unborn children”; Katrina Nguyễn from New Orleans who “never heard my own name more often … [b]ut no one sees me”; Dotty Nguyễn from Dallas who pleads “Ask me anything, just don’t ask me / To stop calling you my mother”; and Vinh and Linda Nguyễn sharing a fire escape reminisce about going “to that f**ked-up poetry show / even when I told you I felt like watching spoken word / was like paying five bucks to get punched repeatedly in the face / and say thank you – .” Despite the anger, Phi surely knows how to laugh, too …

This week in DC is not unlike a Bao Phi-celebration. With the annual AAAS (Association of Asian American Studies) Conference in capital residence, you’ll have multiple public opportunities to see, hear, experience Phi in livetime:

All you need to do is choose one … or more.

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2011

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March 15, 2012 · 3:26 pm

Flesh by Khanh Ha

Flesh, a turn-of-the-20th-century debut novel set mostly in Hanoi, begins and ends with gruesome beheadings. Bearing witness to both executions is Tài, a poor teenage village boy quickly forced into manhood.

In an effort to reclaim his father’s severed head and finance an auspicious burial, Tài spends the next year on an odyssey of discovery about his betrayed bandit father, their troubled family, and his own unsure self. Indentured to a geomancer who sells his contract to a wealthy Chinese merchant, Tài glimpses the backstreet Hanoi life of opium dens, desperate coolies, and the lawless rich … where his first experience of falling in love incites his own vengeful violence.

Verdict: Written in cowboyish twang filled with “yup,” “ain’t,” “em,” “gonna” – possibly meant to simulate the vernacular of the day – the novel never quite loses its anachronistic feel. One more edit might have trimmed some of the meandering passages and extraneous characters, but the fast-paced story pushes briskly to the finish. Readers who enjoy epic sagas set in faraway lands will find absorbing satisfaction here.

Review: “Fiction Reviews,” Library Journal, March 15, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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February 21, 2012 · 11:44 am

Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch is one of those mega-award-winning Canadian authors (with more than a dozen titles) who hasn’t crossed over our shared border (just yet!) with the same success. She’s best known for her historical novels for younger readers about what must be one of the most difficult subjects ever – children and war. Her latest, which debuted far north last fall, hits U.S. shelves next week (March already!). Airlift is Skrypuch’s first narrative nonfiction, the true story of Son Thi Anh Tuyet and her last days in her native Vietnam and her first days with her Canadian family.

Tuyet can’t remember life before she came to live in the Saigon orphanage with all the children, babies, and nuns. Her only memory of “outside” are occasional visits of a woman with a young boy, who may or may not have been her mother and brother. “‘After a while, they stopped coming.’”

On April 11, 1975, Tuyet is frantically packed into the back of a van with babies and toddlers strapped into makeshift boxes headed to the airport. She is one of 57 children on what will turn out to be the last Canadian airlift operation to save orphans from a war-torn Saigon on the verge of collapse. As an older child of 8 with a leg weakened by polio, Tuyet is convinced she’s been brought only to help care for the younger children; as long as she remains useful, perhaps she will not be sent back to the orphanage.

Her remarkable journey – filled with unfamiliar faces, words she cannot understand, a future that seems so uncertain – lands her with a family of her own. “‘You are my daughter,’” her new mother assures her even before she can understand the words, “‘Not my helper.’” “Grass … swing … play,” her new father teaches her. And “‘sister,’” her new siblings call her with comforting hugs and kisses.

Enhanced with documents and a surprising number of photographs, Airlift is a touching, multi-layered experience. The strength of Skrypuch’s storytelling shows strongest in the smallest details: Tuyet’s wonder at discovering that stars are real things in the sky, her knowing better than the adults that to quiet the screaming babies is to place them close together, her doubt about “dads … [who] didn’t seem very real [as] she had never actually seen one.”

In the ending “Author’s Note,” Skrypuch explains how her initially intended novel became Tuyet’s narrative: ” … I was going to piece together a story of one orphan based on the experiences of many. But as I recreated these experiences from my research, an interesting thing happened. In small flashes, Tuyet bagan to remember more. … When Last Airlift was complete, Tuyet was overwhelmed by the fact that it was, in fact, her own story that had been reclaimed.”

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2012 (United States)

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Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Biography, .Nonfiction, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American

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October 19, 2011 · 12:46 pm

Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai

Half-way through reading this debut autobiographical novel-in-verse, I had a lively conversation about the cover with a delightful new friend who happens to be a bonafide kiddie-book expert. We had just finished sharing our shock over the recent fiasco surrounding the one-too-many finalists for the 2011 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (Chime, not Shine), and what came up almost immediately after was this cover …

Our verdict on said cover in the most neutral terms (other words were exchanged) was that it was incongruous with the contents. The pink and purple background, the spindly, cartoonish figure of the little girl, her right hand upraised just so … we both readily agreed that the other novel-in-verse about the 10-year-old Vietnam War survivor (how many could there be?) was much better packaged: all the broken pieces by Ann E. Burg. Both titles together, by the way, make for illuminating companion texts in exploring the post-Vietnam War refugee immigrant experience.

As the lunar new year of 1975 begins, 10-year-old Hà rises early to be the first to “tap my big toe / to the tile floor / first.” She realizes she’s disobeying her mother who warned the night before that one of her three older brothers “must rise first / this morning / to bless our house / because only male feet / can bring luck.” That decision will haunt the rest of her year, one filled with momentous changes both wrenching and redeeming.

As Saigon falls, Hà’s family boards an old navy ship and leaves their homeland forever, eventually arriving in the U.S. sponsored by a kind man (a “cowboy” without a horse) in Alabama and his not-at-all-friendly wife. Life in the new country is an enormous adjustment for all, but especially for young Hà who must navigate the cruel intolerance of her new schoolmates.

While the immigration story is familiar, Thanhha Lai‘s ability to conjure the most evocative details give her sparse verse lasting gravitas: the irresistible fried dough Hà stealthily buys at the open market at the cost of one gram less pork, 1/8 of a bushel less of spinach, and a quarter cube less tofu than what her mother trusts her to bring home; the white handkerchief which holds together Hà’s mouse-bitten doll with arms wrapped around her brother’s beloved dead chick, that comprise the precious bundle thrown into the sea as “Last Respects” in honor of a South Vietnam that no longer exists; the bewildering spelling rules of an impossible new language in which “Knife becomes knives” and ”it makes more sense / for moldy to be spelled molde” because “Whoever invented English / should have learned / to spell”; the loving next-door neighbor who nurtures Hà with words, hugs, and patience, who eventually gifts Hà a small part of her faraway Vietnam in a book of photographs sent by her late soldier-son.

Indeed, Lai’s smallest moments prove to be the most powerful.

Before I close, I will confess I had a few word-eating revelations about that cover (the cartoony aspect still bugs me): that’s Hà’s beloved papaya tree of her youth, which she holds on to as she bears witness to the destruction of her homeland, the encroaching bombs causing the evening sky to light up in ironically spectacular colors just before everything will be obliterated into smoky darkness …

Tidbit: In my old age, I’m sooo reminded of that smoldering final shot of the first half of Gone with the Wind with Vivian Leigh/Scarlett O’Hara turned away from the camera, facing the impending night sky, crying “As God is my witness, they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again …!!” Thank goodness young Hà isn’t such a drama queen …!!

Readers: Middle Grade

Published: 2011

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Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, .Fiction, .Poetry, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American

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October 14, 2011 · 1:04 pm

Freckleface Strawberry: Best Friends Forever by Julianne Moore, illustrated by LeUyen Pham

For those who missed the perennial chart-topper on the list of “Top ten most frequently challenged books of 2010” during the recent Banned Books Week 2011, feel free to click here.

That’s your eyebrow-raised warning right up front that even though these two delightful protagonists both have families, one of those families is described thusly: “I have two moms and a little brother and a dog.” So if two penguin daddies get your feathers all ruffled, then oh so sadly, Freckleface Strawberry Helen and Windy Pants Patrick will not be your best friends … although what a loss of something truly adorable and oh so loving that would be to miss these Best Friends Forever.

In the third installment of the Freckleface Strawberry series by THAT Julianne Moore and the wonderfully artful LeUyen Pham (click here for the first two), the initially not-so-compatible twosome have become best friends. Turns out they have so much in common being utterly different. They’re both “usual sizes” – too little and too big! They both prefer skipping lunch in the cafeteria – Freckleface prefers a hot dog cart and Windy Pants Patrick is chummy with the falafel vendor. And they’re both really good at looking out for each other.

But one day at school, the boys give Windy Pants Patrick a hard time about only playing with a girl. And maybe Freckleface is just fine playing jungle-gym monkeys with just her friends of the female variety.

Thank goodness both kids realize all too quickly that going to the museums and reading books without the other isn’t nearly as much fun. And maybe ball-playing monsters are what both Freckleface Strawberry and Windy Pants Patrick really want to do, and only with each other! “Which is why they were best friends. Forever.”

Pham once again brings the buddies to brilliant, bubbly life: the exuberance they share with each other can hardly be contained on the page, just as their disappointment over missing one another seems to be dripping off the page. Any way you look at it, the ‘awwww’-factor couldn’t be higher!

Here’s to opposites attracting … and their forever-lasting friendships.

Readers: Children

Published: 2011

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Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Vietnamese American

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May 31, 2011 · 10:25 am

Dogtag Summer by Elizabeth Partridge

I admit it: more than a few pages now have drying leftover droplets. Elizabeth Partridge, whose last title was the multi-award-winning Marching for Freedom, sure knows how to make a jaded old reader go sniff, sniff.

On the last day of seventh grade, best friends Tracy and Stargazer look forward to an unplanned summer. Their one goal – Stargazer’s “brain wave” – is to build a Viking funeral ship. How fitting that this turns out to be the summer of Tracy’s ghosts.

After five years of her American life, loved and nurtured by her adoptive parents, Tracy’s Vietnamese past encroaches, memories that take her from here to there. Her protective grandmother who raised her and her absent but adored mother who worked to support them in an American army base are back to remind her of her final months in her native, war-torn homeland. There she was con lai, meaning “half-blood,” her American GI father’s genes imprinted in her light hair and round eyes. Here she is asked if she speaks English, “Looking at me like they were trying to remember if they’d seen people like me in some National Geographic article.”

While searching for tools in her father’s workshop with Stargazer to build his ship, the two find an army ammunition box with a U.S. military dogtag inside. They’re caught by Tracy’s father, cold and angry at their curiosity. Not only have they broken the lock on the carefully hidden ammo box, but Tracy’s father is suddenly forced to confront his own memories and nightmares from his own tour of duty in Vietnam.

As more of Tracy’s frightening past returns, the more her father withdraws into his own unfinished traumas. Her mother can only look on helplessly, frightened by their silence. Delicately, gently … but so very painfully, father and daughter must somehow find a way to bring past to present, and re-entwine their futures back together as a family.

Partridge is a masterful storyteller, weaving in just enough history, war gore, and hippie politics to underscore how the victims of war are not just the body bags shipped home. At book’s end, she includes a detailed appendix in Q&A format that further explores historical context, psychological consequences such as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), the leftover hapa children fathered by U.S. military men disparagingly referred to as con lai or bui doi (literally, “children of the dust”), the anti-war movement, dogtags, the post-war adoption of Vietnamese orphans, and more.

And Partridge’s final message? In spite of collateral damage (and Partridge doesn’t shy away and offer perfect endings), families – of all backgrounds, ethnicities, and beliefs – can emerge and grow, even out of the death and destruction of war.

Tidbit: In Partridge’s acknowledgements, she includes a dear friend (shrinking the world once again), Deann Borshay Liem, who made the phenomenal transracial adoption films, First Person Plural and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee. As I get a small mention in the credits for First Person (totally undeserved, but so gave me that ‘gawwww’ feeling of gratitude), I’m feeling a wee bit included, too.

Readers: Middle Grade

Published: 2011

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Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, .Fiction, Hapa, Vietnamese American

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May 10, 2011 · 1:11 pm

Level Up by Gene Luen Yang, art by Thien Pham

National Book Award-finalist Gene Luen Yang‘s latest title is a collaboration with a fellow high school teacher Thien Pham: their obviously convivial partnership is evident even before their comic begins. “Dedicated to our brothers Jon and Thinh, both of whom work in the medical field, for being the good Asian sons,” their shared bubble announces at the top of the copyright page. How can we not chuckle along with that signature Asian self-awareness?

By implication, ‘bad Asian sons’ Yang and Pham spin a touching tale of Dennis Ouyang, a young man who must ultimately “level up” to gain control of his own life. At age 6, Dennis first glimpses video games. Yet in spite of his instant fascination, he watches but never plays out of respect for his struggling immigrant father who has had to “eat much bitterness” to provide for his family. Not until his father dies two weeks before Dennis’ high school graduation does he actually pick up a game controller … and then he can’t seem to stop. What he might lack in self-control, Dennis makes up for in pure, limitless gaming talent.

By junior year of college, Dennis’ academic probation becomes expulsion. But divine intervention (in the form of four helpful halo-ed cuties) materializes just in time to save his disastrous academic career: he’s not only reinstated, but he’s soon on his way (of course!) to med school.

Yet being the good son doesn’t necessarily make Dennis happy. Will he remain the filial son whom his bitter-eating father so longed for? Or will he frivolously become the ultimate gamer?

Level by level, Yang and Pham delve deeper into Dennis’ story – his troubling relationship with his late father, his interactions with his disappointed mother, his new friends with even more opinions on how he should live his life …

In addition to all the fun and games (literally!), Dennis’s story is also a potent examination of the intricacies of the uniquely Asian American parent/child relationship. Move over, Tiger Mother … prepare to meet true Destiny!

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2011

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Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Graphic Novel/Manga/Manwha, Chinese American, Vietnamese American

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