All posts by Susan M. Lee

Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.
 

The Gateway Author: A Conversation with Novelist Sherman Alexie

Best of In The Fray 2014. A novelist, poet, and peerless observer of American Indian life, Sherman Alexie has produced an acclaimed body of work that deals with the estrangement, poverty, and tragedy of life on the reservation. Two decades into his career, what really makes him happy, he says, is the way that a new generation of kids are picking up his books for their first real taste of literature.

Head shot of Sherman Alexie
Author Sherman Alexie. Photo by Chase Jarvis

When his first book, The Business of Fancydancing, came out two decades ago, the New York Times Book Review hailed Sherman Alexie as “one of the major lyric voices of our time.” Since his debut, the American Indian novelist, poet, and filmmaker has written two dozen books and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. A Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State — an experience that became the basis of his semi-autobiographical novel for young adults, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Alexie has also delved into film, writing the critically praised screenplay for Smoke Signals. His latest work is What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned, a collection of poems and short prose published last November by Hanging Loose Press.

Sherman Alexie spoke to In The Fray about what it’s like being an “ambiguously ethnic person,” how the first immigrant he met inspired him, and why writing groups make him flinch.

You’re often asked about growing up on a reservation. I recall reading your short story, “Indian Education,” for the first time and being blown away by it. How did your experiences growing up shape what you write about?

Oh, that early stuff is barely fiction.  Yeah, “Indian Education” … I called it fiction to give myself those moments where I could actually tell a more interesting version of what happened. I mean, there’s no doubt. I remember reading my first book after many years and laughing because I could have easily called it autobiography. So certainly early on, that’s what I was doing, as many young writers do.

One of the things I’ve been realizing lately — and having the words for it, I guess — is that I generally write about unhappiness and poverty and oppression, and all that difficult stuff, growing up on the res. But what I’ve realized is that a lot of my unhappiness has to do with the fact that I was a natural liberal. And an Indian reservation is an essentially conservative place. So, yeah, I was really fleeing conservatism of the Indian variety.

I can kind of relate to that. I come from a Korean American background, which can be conservative in many ways.

It’s fascinating because — I don’t know about your family — but because Democrats are usually the ones who are more pro-Indian, the worldview of Indians tends to be more Democratic. But at the same time, their tribalism is incredibly right-wing. The religious stuff is incredibly right-wing.

What did you surround yourself with, then, when you were on the reservation?

Books, books, books, books. And what I didn’t know then, and I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary or experience to know, is that I was really reading the work of about a dozen generations of white American liberals.

What were you reading?

Jane Austen, who is not actually American. [laughs] You know, The Great Gatsby. I should say, not white American liberals. White liberals. Shakespeare, Dickens, Whitman. Stephen King. Even travel books, encyclopedias.

Do you visit the reservation often?

Not since my dad died. He died ten years ago, and I have a hard time being home. I mean, my mom and my siblings still live there, but I meet them in Spokane. I have a lot of pain associated with the reservation. I am completely public and out about the fact that Indians should be fleeing reservations. We’ve completely forgotten that reservations were created by the United States government as an act of war. I think they still serve that purpose. It’s Stockholm syndrome.

You have said that leaving the reservation was a pivotal moment in your life. In an interview with Bill Moyers you said that you felt like an “indigenous immigrant” and a “spy in the house of ethnicity.” I love that. Can you tell me what you mean by that?

Everybody thinks I’m half of what they are. I get treated in every way imaginable, from positive to negative. People will say things to me and react to me in every way possible.

Like the question of “What are you?”

What are you? Where do you come from originally? [laughs]

What do people think you are?

Asian, Central American, South American, Puerto Rican, Italian, Cuban, Middle Eastern, Pakistani, Siberian, Russian, Slavic. It used to really bug me. It used to really anger me to not be seen as Indian. I realized that came out of this sort of insecurity — my identity was so based on immediately being perceived as being Indian. But the thing is, in order to immediately be perceived as Indian, you have to talk, act [“Indian”]. You have to wear all these cloaks. You have to conduct yourself on such a surface “Indianness” level that you become a cartoon character.

Did you feel that way when you first went off to college and left the reservation?

I felt like a minority. I mean in eastern Washington, I am completely identifiable as Indian. I guess the question as an ambiguously ethnic person is, how to protect yourself. You know, you’re driving into a region and you think, “Okay, how likely am I to be confused for a member of the race that’s most hated in this region?” I think it’s the shit that white people don’t even consider. Often they don’t even think that it’s real. And it’s often the thing that makes brown people so enraged and irrational, too. So it has this double effect, you know — white people deny it, and brown people base their entire lives on it. It’s so damaging in all sorts of ways …

Also, there’s a certain kind of magic in [race]. It’s often about people trying to connect. It’s like that brown-people head nod in the airport — when you see somebody, you make eye contact with somebody who is something, and you’re something, and you may be the same something, so you do that little head nod at each other. Like, “Yeah, I acknowledge the fact that we may be of the same brown-skinned race, or maybe not, but I’m gonna nod my head just in case.”

A lot of your work is about despair, but I feel you never get a sense that your writing is didactic. You talk about these subject matters but kind of interspersed with moments of real comedy and hilarity. What is that like for you as you’re writing?

I don’t worry about it. I don’t preplan or preconsider whether something is going to feel didactic or not. And I think I have been didactic, and I’m perfectly fine with that. I have a specifically political and social ambition in my work. I’m happy when anybody reads my book, but I especially love that my career has become multigenerational, and really happy that all sorts of brown boys are into my books now. I get “This is the first book I finished” or “This is the first book I ever loved.” I hope I am the gateway book.

I don’t think there’s a typical writing process for you, is there?

Oh God, no.

Do you have any rituals or habits?

Nothing. I think ritual prevents you from writing. If you don’t have everything in place, I think that ends up being an excuse. The more complicated your writing ritual the more likely you are not to write. So no, I am promiscuous.

How about deciding between poetry and prose? Do you ever start out with a poem and later decide that it would be much better as a short story — or the other way around?

It used to be more clear-cut that way. It really came down to the mechanics of the thing I used [to write]. I started out writing on a typewriter. If the poem went past one page, it turned into a story. When I pulled that sheet out of the typewriter, it really made the distinction between poetry and prose clear to me. But now that you don’t do that, you keep writing. I think it’s far more blurred and unpredictable.

Do you read your work aloud?

Oh, constantly. All the time. I am not a formalist, a typical formalist, but I use a lot of rhyme — all of traditional forms — and repetition. So certainly the music of it is something I am very interested in.

Do you have readers or friends you show your work to?

Most of my work, I don’t. I have a few friends that see my early stuff, but by in large, no. I am pretty isolated that way. I don’t hang around, you know, a writing group. That makes me flinch. Or hanging around writers talking about writing. That makes me flinch. If I were a plumber, I wouldn’t want to be talking about plumbing all night. My friendships revolve around my other interests.

This is a broad question, but who would you say has been a big influence on your life and work?

Always teachers. And not even necessarily English or writing teachers. One of the reasons why I’m good at public speaking is my experience with the Future Farmers of America in high school. I did debate. I did parliamentary-procedure contests and debate within Future Farmers of America. It was performance. You would get a randomly chosen topic and a specific set of motions that you had to display. It was sort of theater, in a way. And you would be debating and discussing these issues as well at a mock meeting — bureaucratic theater, essentially. I’ve always been in the school plays, too. On the res, I was always the narrator and the lead role.

When you went to college that’s when you got into poetry. And you credit one of your professors at Washington State University.

Yeah, Alex Kuo. He’s a poet. He’s incredibly brilliant and extremely liberal and politically minded. He was born in China and grew up in the US, in Boston. It was my first experience — I haven’t ever put it this way before — it was my first experience with an immigrant. I’m just realizing that.

What was that like?

Well, he was the first Chinese person I knew. The first Chinese American I knew, the first poet I knew. He was this perfect combination of all those liberal things I was reading about on the res, in the form of a second-generation Chinese American.

The first class [of Kuo’s course] he assigned the work, and a week later we met. Before the second class he read five pages of my poems, and they were the first five poems I had ever wrote. He came in and he took me in the hallway. He asked me what I was doing with the rest of my life, and I said, I don’t know. And he goes, “Well, you should be a writer.”

Are there any topics or themes that you don’t want to face, or stay away from?

I stay away from specific tribal and religious ceremonies. I have characters who participate in that stuff, but I never go inside the sweat lodge, so to speak. I think it would be playing a character. And number two, Native religion is so economically exploited that I have no interest in being a part of that, either. And it’s a cliché by now, Native spirituality. It’s all that. And it’s just bad writing.

When did you start Tweeting?

Maybe it’s been a year and a half. It’s entertaining. It’s a monologue. It’s so funny. Some people get so mad that I don’t have conversations with them. They get all Twitter fundamentalist: “There are these rules!” It’s another forum for me to put ideas that people can agree with or not, but I have no illusions about whether I am going to change anybody’s mind about anything.

I saw that your book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was banned recently in a school in West Virginia. Do these actions ever surprise you or piss you off?

I support all the people who fight these bans, but on the individual level, all they do is benefit me. It’s a lot of free publicity. The philosophy, you know, is dangerous. The people who try to ban one book, they’re not trying to ban a book. They’re trying to ban imagination.

When do you know that you’re absolutely done with pieces of your work?

When my publisher tells me that they have to have to be turned in. It’s really deadlines. I abandon things. I turn them in because I have to.

Is there anything else that you want to accomplish still as a writer?

Hopefully to get better. I want to write a book that surprises me. And in doing so, surprises everybody else. Something I never thought I was going to write about, or was capable of doing. I don’t even know what that is. Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.

 

Better Living through Empathy: Emily Bazelon Stands Up to Bullying


Emily Bazelon began reading about the way young people treat each other online in the most apt location: the Internet. The mother of two adolescent sons, Bazelon was interested in how using technology to bully peers made the experience different for contemporary youth. She was deeply curious about how her own children’s lives were affected by bullying, and decided to write a book to aid a generation of parents who grew up without social media or texting.

Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy chronicles Bazelon’s visits to homes, schools, and the office of social media giant Facebook to understand the new face of bullying. Her research identifies strategies to reduce the harmful practice in teens’ lives and promote a culture of empathy.

In this interview, Bazelon spoke with In The Fray about how the Internet has transformed bullying and why Americans have only recently begun addressing the problem in young people’s lives.

Although bullying has been around for centuries, how did the Internet create a new incarnation?

Prior to the Internet, if you were a target of bullying, you would get a break from the harassment when you came home from school. You had a chance to put yourself back together. The social media aspect of bullying can be really devastating because Facebook and Twitter make kids feel like bullying is happening 24/7. Also, there’s a sense that a lot of other kids are witnessing your humiliation, and that is really difficult for targeted kids to deal with.

Are all bullies the same?

There are different types of bullies. One type is physically dominating, the old-fashioned big kid who steals your lunch money. Another type is what we often think of as “mean girls” — though they can be boys also. These bullies use a particular kind of harmful aggression in order to score social points. They are mean to become more popular, and they’re often the hardest for adults to spot because they’re clever at manipulating people and disguising their behavior.

Then there are kids who are both bullies and victims. These kids tend to have the biggest emotional problems, and they all struggle socially. They end up doing the dirty work for the mean kind of bullies. It’s important to understand the distinctions and figure out which intervention makes the most sense for each kid.

How does bullying in the adult world affect adolescents?

Adults are modeling a culture of enormous conflict and aggression for kids. When they watch [characters on] Jersey Shore, and see the uncivil way people comment anonymously online, they learn people can be incredibly cruel. Kids absorb that from adult culture, and it makes it seem like it’s okay for them to talk and act in those same ways.

Why is it important to show that bullying isn’t just about victims versus offenders?

Almost all kids are capable of empathy, but kids who act like bullies are cutting themselves off from those feelings. I wanted to understand why this behavior is going on and what motivates it. It’s only when we understand kids’ detrimental behavior that we are able to help them stop doing harmful things.

A recent study shows that, twenty years after childhood, the people who were bullied, or people who were both bullies and victims, are more likely to have depression, anxiety disorders, and suicidal thinking. That is the best evidence we have of bullying having long-term, adverse psychological consequences, and it underscores the importance of taking this problem seriously.

Facebook has put various methods in place to oversee cyberbullying. Should they be doing more to regulate what is happening on social media?

I was struck by the enforcement challenges in addressing cyberbullying. For example, Facebook has a rule against bullying, but millions of complaints come in every week, and they have a relatively small staff to monitor those complaints. This raises questions about what Facebook’s responsibility is to enforce their own rules.

Also, Facebook cares a lot about building brand loyalty among teenagers and doesn’t want to do anything that’s seen as uncool. But it wouldn’t be that hard for them to have an early warning system, or even respond more quickly when schools complain.

What role do school administrators and teachers play in preventing bullying?

Schools can effectively reduce bullying if teachers and administrators take the issue on. Adults are really crucial and set the tone of the school. They can help kids by leading the way, setting a good example, and responding when they see bullying. We still have the problem of adults turning a blind eye.

The most important thing a school can do is figure out which problems are worth addressing and come up with a strategy. Isolating the problem makes it more manageable and allows the school to throw more resources toward the kids who are acting out.

The second step is giving kids the tools to regulate and express their emotions. Some families do this intuitively and don’t need a curriculum, but other families are doing less in this domain, and the schools have to figure out how to do more.

Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.

A man paddles across the Yamuna River, India's most polluted. (Andrew Blackwell)

Dirty Planet: A Conversation with Journalist Andrew Blackwell

ITF speaks with Andrew Blackwell about his new book, Visit Sunny Chernobyl, a travel guide to the most polluted places on the planet. Even sites ravaged by radiation and industrial waste, he argues, can still be places of “nature, wildness, and beauty.”

A man paddles across the Yamuna River
A man paddles across the Yamuna River, India’s most polluted.

Journalist Andrew Blackwell traveled to seven of the most polluted places on the planet: from the nuclear disaster zone of Chernobyl, to the smog-ridden city of Linfen, China, to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In his new book, Visit Sunny ChernobylBlackwell details his often humorously grotesque experiences hanging out in these past and present eco-disasters. In The Fray culture editor Susan M. Lee talked with him about his travels, the unique charm of the globe’s dirtiest corners, and the myth of pristine nature in an age of climate change. (Disclosure: Andrew Blackwell is president of ITF’s board of directors.)

You were inspired to write this book by a trip to India that you took years ago.

I heard how polluted Kanpur was supposed to be. It had just been named the most polluted city in India by the government. And it certainly lived up to that expectation. But I learned, after the fact, that I really enjoyed my time there — strictly as an interesting place to visit. So I had this flash: I just realized that, almost because they were polluted, there were all these places around the world that you would never really bother to visit, that you were missing out on because they had this stigma of pollution attached to them.

Did you have any expectations of what you would find, before you started out on your trips?

I thought the destinations would be a lot grosser than they were. As I went along, I realized I was in danger of not getting enough grossness in, and doing my due diligence for a book about pollution. Fortunately, I ended up being fazed by the Yamuna River in northern India in the last chapter. There was no way to say that it didn’t smell really, really gross. But otherwise, the visceral sensory experience of the locations was not nearly as intense or offensive as I expected. But that might have something to do with my message, which was not to find the grossest place but to find places that were the ultimate examples of a particular kind of environmental problem. And that didn’t always line up with the place being unpleasant.

Andrew Blackwell aboard the brigantine Kaisei
Andrew Blackwell aboard the brigantine Kaisei, en route to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

What did you enjoy the most on these trips? What were the highlights?

In almost every case, it was experiences I had with people I met. I think that’s often true either about reporting or about travel. It’s less about whether you saw this or that building and more about the kinds of people you met.

In Chernobyl, my guides Dennis and Nikolai and I are drinking and totally wasted. And I see they are thinking, “Oh, he’s not joking — he really wants to see what’s fun and interesting about this town, not just what the horror story is.” People do respond to your curiosity and sincerity. Like the time with the sadhus [ascetic, nomadic Indian monks]. I’m with these guys and they’re wearing robes and paint and we’re camping in the countryside and they’re completely taking care of me and feeding me. They were so friendly and solicitous, almost to a degree that they drove me insane. That was a special experience.

What were some of the challenges you encountered in writing about the world’s most polluted places?

Some of the regular problems of traveling, such as: I don’t speak Chinese and I don’t speak Portuguese. On a topical level, while these places are real and their [environmental] issues are all real — and I certainly don’t want to be thought of debunking these issues — they’re often hyped. Maybe not by serious journalists, but at a popular level. A lot of the time, I did go into each location expecting it to be more spectacular. What I realized was that the story was more subtle and much harder.

But I think it ended up making the book stronger in the end — that struggle became a theme in the book. For example, that popular image of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a solid mass is not true. But it’s still a powerful image that persists, even in the minds of people fighting the problem.

A smokestack disappears in the haze
A smokestack disappears in the haze surrounding Linfen, China. The city is notorious for having some of the worst smog in the world.

In the book, there seems to be a recurring theme of problematic ways of viewing nature, even by modern environmentalists. Could you talk a little about these alternate views of nature?

Inside the U.S., in the environmental movement, there is this foment right now with traditionalists, who draw their spiritual energy as it were from an idea of “pure nature” and restoring as much of the environment to a pure, pre-human phase as possible. That’s not the literal goal, but that is sort of the ideal that drives their entire enterprise.

Then you have these modernist folk, who believe that that is an impossible ideal: holding that ideal actually will leave you to miss out on all kinds of opportunities and will waste your time and energy on causes that aren’t worth it and harmful. They also believe that, yes, ideally it would be great to have that idea of purity and wildness at the center, but we are so far past that being the reality that there has to be something else motivating environmentalism. And what that is, is a recognition that human civilizations are part of nature and that there is no way of knowing what it means to have a pristine environment — and that it doesn’t exist anyway in an era of climate change.

Also, it’s just another form of separation. We’re still seeing nature as separate from human civilization, and that has been half the problem right there. And so the goal really is to find an integrated idea of what a healthy environment is.

The destroyed Chernobyl nuclear power plant
The destroyed Chernobyl nuclear power plant, with a view of the steel and concrete “sarcophagus” built to contain Reactor No. 4, which is still dangerously radioactive.

So you’re sort of trying to demystify these polluted places as well as the idea of pristine nature?

Yeah, exactly. There are people out there doing some interesting work on showing ways in which places that are thought of as pristine aren’t. And I’m working from the other end, by finding places that are considered to be horror stories and “anti-nature” and saying it’s also still a place that has nature, wildness, and beauty.

Do you think that your background had anything to do with your desire to write about environmental and industrial issues?

I don’t know what comes from my family or what just comes from me. But my brother was trained as a scientist. Now he works doing visualizations at the California Academy of Sciences. My dad is an engineer. His dad was an engineer. And I have a cousin who’s a geologist. So science has always been special to me.

I grew up mostly in Seattle, but before that our family lived in Japan for three years. I lived in Japan for first, second, and third grade. And we also did a lot of traveling in the summer since we were in Asia. We went to Indonesia, Singapore, and a number of other places. That was a really formative, great experience. Just that a place can be bizarre and strange and can be welcoming and fun. I think Japanese culture especially, at least thirty years ago, was extremely safe — and people were friendly, probably because I was American and different and had blond hair.

If you could have included other places, which ones would they be?

I wanted to go to the oil fields in the Niger Delta. Two things kept me from doing that. The two or three people I talked to sort of were cautious. You want to make sure you’re in safe spots. And also I didn’t want half the book to be about oil-related locations. I wanted a better spread.

I really wanted to see ship breaking in India or Bangladesh — these incredible beaches where they tear ships apart. The world is just a candy store for this stuff.

Interview has been condensed and edited.

An oil tanker
An oil tanker carrying twenty million gallons of crude oil approaches Port Arthur, Texas.

Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.

 

Across Oceans, Haunted by Memories

The Truongs and the Vos escaped war-ravaged Vietnam, but years later, the wounds of unspoken trauma and regrets have not healed. In a story that spans three decades across three countries, Aimee Phan’s debut novel describes the secret history of two families and the shared pain that both unites and divides them.


Spanning three decades across three continents, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong is a story of the fierce love, betrayal, anger, heartbreak, and forgiveness that can only exist between family members. Aimee Phan’s debut novel follows three generations of the Truongs and the Vos, two Vietnamese families tied by marriage. The novel illustrates how decisions made by one generation can cast a high, consequential shadow over the next generation, and explores the difficult balance between fulfilling our duty to family and keeping our sense of independence and identity.

Phan’s protagonist, Cherry Truong, is a second-generation Vietnamese American. After getting into a California medical school, Cherry disobeys her family’s wishes by deferring medical school for a prolonged visit to Vietnam to reconnect with her estranged brother, Lum. This is the first major act of rebellion in Cherry’s coming-of-age story.

Lum, who has a gambling addiction, was banished overseas by his family after he accidentally endangered Cherry’s life. Cherry goes to Vietnam to reunite with her brother, but she also has another purpose: Cherry is on a fact-finding mission to uncover her family’s past. Thus begins a narrative journey into the history of the Truongs, Cherry’s paternal side of the family, and the Vos, her mother’s side.

Set against a backdrop of historical events in the post-Vietnam War era, Phan’s story shows the pain of displacement. The year is 1979, four years after Saigon has fallen to North Vietnamese forces. The Truongs are attempting to escape Vietnam, aided by their middle son, Yen, who is waiting for them in France. Daringly, the Truongs set out to flee Vietnam by boat. But the Truong family patriarch, Hung (Cherry’s paternal grandfather), splits up the family. Hung had agreed to buy ship tickets to Malaysia, where the family could apply for political refugee status. However, he is unable to buy a seat for his daughter-in-law’s mother, Kim-Ly Vo (Cherry’s maternal grandmother). The family ends up in a refugee camp in Malaysia, while Kim-Ly stays in Vietnam.

In the refugee camp, the Truongs prepare for their journey to France, but the daughter-in-law, Tuyet (Cherry’s mother), convinces her husband, Sanh, that they should part ways with his family. This decision stems from guilt as well as love. Some years prior, Kim-Ly had tried to marry her daughter to an older and unappealing American officer. This marriage would have essentially guaranteed the Vos safety in America. Tuyet defied her mother’s scheme and ran off with Hung’s son, Sanh (Cherry’s father), instead. This was a blow to the Vo family, which suffered immensely during and after the war. Tuyet’s oldest brother died in a North Vietnamese forced-labor camp. After disappointing her mother yet again by leaving without her for Malaysia, Tuyet is desperate to rectify their relationship. She refuses to go to France by way of Manila, and seeks to immigrate to America, as her mother originally wished. Eventually, Tuyet and Sanh, along with the Vos, end up there, while the rest of the Truongs settle in France.

Later we discover that Hung had chosen not to get a ticket for Kim-Ly on the boat, as he had been holding out spaces for his mistress and illegitimate children. This one selfish decision alters the fate of the Truong and Vo families forever.

‘Our Mistakes Don’t Dictate Our Lives’

Aimee Phan mugshot
Aimee Phan. Julie Thi Underhill

Phan deftly weaves her narrative back and forth through the past and present, and through three countries — France, America, and Vietnam. She describes how her characters grapple with displacement and assimilation, and explores their lives with an impressive level of emotional nuance. They have been shaped by both the tragedies they experience, Phan suggests, and their responses to these tragedies. At one point, Cherry remembers a fable about how “everyone has choices taken away from them,” and how “despair is pushed into our lives … [and] we can only control how we recover.” The experiences of Cherry’s family members parallel the fable. In the face of the great hardships experienced by the Truongs and the Vos, Phan shows us how the family members find different ways of coping — guilt, blame, anger, the displaced expectations of others.

In America, Phan introduces us to the world of Little Saigon, in southern California, where Cherry’s mother, Tuyet, is still atoning. She escaped the refugee camp, but it took her five years to get her mother out. In Little Saigon, Kim-Ly has invested in a successful beauty salon enterprise and has been loaning money to other Vietnamese families with interest. But she will not let Tuyet forget her transgressions.

While the Vos try to adjust to their new life in America, on the other side of the Atlantic the Truongs are pursued by their own past. In France, Yen’s wife, Trinh, suffers from a mental breakdown. Trinh is haunted by her experience in the refugee camp, but she will not seek help because she feels the need to protect her family from the truth.

Trinh is not the only Truong overcome by past traumas. Hung’s wife, Hoa, has been verbally and physically abused by her unfaithful husband. Hung insists that he has done his duty as a father by sticking with his family and not running off with his lover. However, his treatment of Hoa seems to reflect his frustration with losing his chance at happiness. Hoa endures her husband’s abuse and floats through her life without much complaint. When Trinh laments that a “family curse” befell them when they left Vietnam, Hoa replies, “Everyone suffers. We are not special.” When Hung later develops dementia in his old age, Hoa wonders if his illness “was not a tragedy, but rather nature’s way of correcting their relationship.” In one of Hung’s few lucid moments, she confronts him about his infidelities and tells him that his indiscretions will die with him. Hoa accepts misfortune but longs for catharsis.

Phan explores the family members’ relentless desire for reconciliation, and how this is often hampered by memories of the past. Many of the characters seem to remember too much; some, like Trinh, are almost imprisoned by their traumatic memories.

Cherry, who has a photographic memory, wants to make sense of why her family members keep hurting each other. She discovers old letters from her mother, Tuyet, to Kim-Ly, and catches a glimpse of the love letters from her grandfather, Hung, to his mistress. She uncovers some of her family’s secrets and finds proof of past indiscretions.

Yet, despite these revelations, Cherry realizes she is no closer to understanding why her family’s anguish runs so deep. She asks her brother if he thinks it might be better for their family to forget its past, to have “the worst memories erased.” Lum’s reply gets to the core of Phan’s novel. “The things our family did to each other, what we did to each other, they don’t make up who you are,” he says. “Our mistakes don’t dictate our lives.”

Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.