We Should Never Meet
Stories
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Compelling, moving, and beautifully written, the interlinked stories that make up We Should Never Meet alternate between Saigon before the city's fall in 1975 and present-day "Little Saigon" in Southern California---exploring the reverberations of the Vietnam War in a completely new light.
Intersecting the lives of eight characters across three decades and two continents, these stories dramatize the events of Operation Babylift, the U.S.-led evacuation of thousands of Vietnamese orphans to America just weeks before the fall of Saigon. Unwitting reminders of the war, these children were considered bui doi, the dust of life, and faced an uncertain, dangerous existence if left behind in Vietnam.
Four of the stories follow the saga of one orphan's journey from the points-of-view of a teenage mother, a duck farmer and a Catholic nun from the Mekong Delta, a social worker in Saigon, and a volunteer doctor from America. The other four take place twenty years later and chronicle the lives of four Vietnamese orphans now living in America: Kim, an embittered Amerasian searching for her unknown mother; Vinh, her gang member ex-boyfriend who preys on Vietnamese families; Mai, an ambitious orphan who faces her emancipation from the American foster-care system; and Huan, an Amerasian adopted by a white family, who returns to Vietnam with his adoptive mother.
We Should Never Meet is one of those rare books that truly takes an original look at the human condition---and marks the exciting debut of a major new writer for our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This graceful, spare debut collection of eight loosely connected short stories follows the lives of four Vietnamese-American orphans, three of them evacuated from Vietnam in the weeks before the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War in an effort called Operation Babylift. Huan, Mai, Kim and Vinh live in Orange County, California's Little Saigon. Beautiful, troubled Kim and her gang-member boyfriend, Vinh, are victims of a faulty foster-care system; studious Mai fares slightly better, though her vegetarian hippie foster parents never go so far as to adopt her. Huan is the lucky one, adopted by parents who love him even when he "sneer that they treated him like a charity case, their trendy Vietnamese baby." The stories of the four orphans alternate with tales of the wartime journey of one baby finally revealed to be Huan from an orphanage in the Delta valley to an adoption center in Saigon and on to the U.S. Phan unswervingly captures the cruelty of children who have themselves been cruelly treated and the grief, denial and alienation created by loss, yet allows Mai and Huan to come to an uneasy peace with their pasts on a trip to Vietnam as adults. The tales of wartime Vietnam are less immediate than the present-day stories, but this is a wrenching, poignant collection laced with pity and horror.
