February 15, 2021
In this decades-spanning novel, a family of Vietnamese refugees makes a home in New Orleans. Hương, who's pregnant, arrives in New Orleans in 1978 disoriented and overwhelmed but clear on one thing: She must get in touch with C�ng, her husband, who was inexplicably left behind when she and their young son boarded the boat that carried them away from Vietnam and the encroaching Communist regime. As she, her son, and her new baby settle into the Versailles Arms, an apartment building on a polluted bayou populated entirely by Vietnamese refugees, she sends letter after letter to their old addresses in Vietnam and constantly replays the moment of their unexpected parting in her head. "How had C�ng's hand slipped? she kept asking herself. That was the only explanation. The only possible one." It's only when C�ng sends her a brief postcard back--"Please don't contact me again" is the jist of it--that denial gives way to grief and a steely resolve to protect her two sons, no matter what. Over the following years, the novel moves fluidly among each of the family members' perspectives: Tuấn, her elder son, grows from a boy gentle with animals to a teenager trying to prove his toughness to the members of a Vietnamese American gang called the Southern Boyz. B�nh--or Ben, as he insists on being called, never having known Vietnam--loves to read, slowly realizes that he's gay, and eventually embarks on a transoceanic voyage of his own. Hương begins dating a kind car salesman named Vinh, but all three family members are haunted by C�ng's absence. Hương tells the boys early on that their father is dead, a lie that plants the seeds for familial rupture later on. Debut author Nguyen movingly portrays the way adopted homes can become as cherished and familiar as ancestral ones (Hương on New Orleans: "She realized this had become her city, the place she lived but also a place that lived in her") but also the truth that new loves can never quite heal old wounds. Seeing her sons, so like their father, growing away from her, Hương thinks: "It's always like she's losing him again--to the world, to life, to fate." An engrossing, prismatic portrait of first- and second-generation Vietnamese American life.
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March 29, 2021
Nguyen’s captivating debut spans three decades to chronicle the lives of a Vietnamese refugee family. In 1978, Hư
ơ
ng arrives in New Orleans with her two sons, five-year-old Tuấ
n and infant Bì
nh. They settle in the Versailles Arms project on the eastern outskirts of the city, where the hurricane alarm reminds Hương of the war, and she mails tape recordings to Cô
ng, the husband she left behind. Her messages receive no reply until finally, in a terse postcard, Công urges her to forget him. Hương tells her sons their father died, and over the years, the boys grow to follow different paths. In 1991, Tuấn falls in with a Vietnamese gang, the Southern Boyz. The next summer, Bình, who insists everyone call him Ben, takes refuge in books and a romance with an older white boy. A couple years later, Ben finds Hương’s old letters to Công and confronts her, shattering their increasingly fragile bond. As the characters spin away from each other, Nguyen keeps a keen eye on their struggles and triumphs, crafting an expansive portrayal of New Orleans’s Vietnamese community under the ever-present threat of flooding, and the novel builds to a haunting conclusion during Hurricane Katrina. Readers will find this gripping and illuminating. Agent: Julie Stevenson, Massie & McQuilkin.
Starred review from April 1, 2021
While the story arc might sound familiar--other-side-of-the-world refugees who endure challenging lives in the U.S.--Nguyen's gentle precision nevertheless produces an extraordinary debut with undeniable resonance. As the MFA-ed, prestigiously fellowshipped (Lambda, Tin House) editor in chief of diaCRITICS, Nguyen ciphers all that literary practice and training into creating a Vietnamese family, three-quarters of which arrive in New Orleans in 1978. Once upon a time, Hương was a village wife to teacher C�ng, mother to young Tuấn. Suddenly, all three are running for their lives, but only Hương and Tuấn board the boat, embarking on a path of everlasting separation. Hương carries within the unborn Binh, who later baptizes himself as Ben. Settling into a New Orleans East apartment, Hương continues to record cassette tapes for C�ng even after he inexplicably severs their familial bonds. Years pass before Hương finds supportive companionship with fellow refugee Vinh, and yet his constant presence remains a weighty reminder of C�ng's absence. Tuấn finds tenuous connections with a dangerous girl and a vicious gang; Ben seeks solace alone in a life of books, then on a journey abroad. Nearly three decades later, Hurricane Katrina will once again confront the trio with ""Things We Lost to the Water"" and the question of what can and should be salvaged from the devastation.
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