Books Set in Asia and North America; Vietnam and California

The Women, by Kristin Hannah (2024)

Read: January 31, 2025

3 Stars

Books Set in Asia: Vietnam

Build Your House Around My Body, by Violet Kupersmith (2021)

 

This novel defies description.  The novel mainly focuses on Winnie, a young Vietnamese-American woman, who moved to Saigon ostensibly to teach English and to connect with her Vietnamese heritage.  She is very unhappy and drowns herself in beer and sex.  We know from the first page that she will disappear without a trace.

 

The novel seamless moves from the present to the past and back again, through French colonization to the Japanese coup in the 1940s, with brief references to the Vietnamese War.  We meet a marvelous assortment of odd characters, from a Khmer-French schoolboy who was left in a rubber plantation in the 1940s, to the Fortune Teller, to the brothers Tan and Long, to the young Binh, who disappeared decades before Winnie. Interwove through these characters is the supernatural and superstitions inherent in rural Vietnamese culture.

 

The author slowly peels away the layers, and slowly the connections between all these characters becomes evident.

 

This book won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I absolutely loved it.

 

Read:  January b28, 2023

 

5 Stars

Books Set in North America; North America; New Orleans, Louisiana

The Things We Lost to Water, by Eric Nguyen (2021)

The Things We Lost to Water is a wonderful novel about a Vietnamese family that immigrated to the United States from Vietnam after the war.  The novel begins in 1978 when pregnant Hương and her young son, Tuấn, run towards a boat to escape from Vietnam.  Hương was grasping her husband’s hand, but in the crush of people, they were separated and he stayed behind.  Hương gave birth to her second son, Bình, in a refuge camp.

Ultimately, the family finds itself in Louisiana and settle in New Orleans East.  Hương writes and continues to try to communicate with her husband Công, begging him to leave Vietnam and come to New Orleans.  Most of her letters are returned to her, however, she eventually received a postcard from him telling her not to contact him anymore.  She tells her sons that their father died in Vietnam.  His absence in the family is actually a presence in the family.  His “ghost” hovers over his sons.

The author captures New Orleans East with its shotgun houses, slummy apartment buildings and bayou filled with garbage.  As a young teen, Tuấn rebelled against his mother’s overprotection and joined a Vietnamese gang.  Although he was very young when he left Vietnam, he had some memories, hence ties, to his country of birth.  Bình, however, never lived in Vietnam, and felt American, so insisted that he be called Ben.  Ben is studious and after he landed a job with a literature professor, was able to obtain a scholarship to attend college.

Although she never stopped loving Công, Hương met and began dating Vinh, a fellow refugee with no apparent ability to hold a job.  He moves in with the family and tries to assume a surrogate father to Hương’s son.  Years later, Hương learns that Công died.  She and Tuấn return to Vietnam for his burial service.  They find that the country has vastly changed in the years since they were gone.

The novel takes the reader from the family running through water in Vietnam to facing the flooding following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  Water is a thread throughout this novel.  The Vietnamese word Nước means both country and water, thus the book’s title is a bit of a pun.  This novel captures the flavor of the New Orleans immigrant experience.

Read:  October 28, 2021

5 Stars

Books Set in Asia: Vietnam

The Headmaster's Wager, by Vincent Lam (2012)



Read: November 8, 2013