We Should Never Meet FROM THE PUBLISHER
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 stories take place twenty years after the evacuation 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.
FROM THE CRITICS
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[s] 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. Agent, Dorian Karchmar. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Eight stories shift between life in Vietnam before Operation Babylift, which evacuated some 2,000 Vietnamese orphans shortly before Saigon's fall, and life in the US for the orphans who grew up here. "Miss Lien" offers the familiar tale of a young girl who leaves her newborn at a rural convent after having been impregnated (possibly by force) while working to support her war-ravaged family. The title piece, next, introduces Kim (Lien's daughter?) and her boyfriend, a gang member named Vinh, both having been raised in a series of California foster homes that have left them emotionally adrift and full of rage at both Americans and Vietnamese. "The Delta" returns to the rural convent in Vietnam, where a nun calls on her former fiance to help deliver babies to a better-supplied orphanage in Saigon. Back in California, in "Visitors," Vinh lets his emotional guard down with an old Vietnamese man before his gang robs the old man's house, while in "Gates of Saigon," a Vietnamese woman who works at the Saigon orphanage is offered the chance to leave during the evacuation but stays after learning that her husband and oldest son are imprisoned in the north. College-bound Mai has led a happy childhood in America, living with a caring foster family until her "Emancipation" at 18, but Mai can't escape her sense of guilt for succeeding over her best friend Kim. An American doctor in "Bound" learns that her altruistic decision to leave her family to work in the Saigon orphanage will keep her from adopting a Vietnamese toddler. As an adult, that toddler, Huong, returns to the "Motherland" with his adoptive mother-not the doctor-and his old friend Mai. Resistant at first, he visits the orphanages and findsa sense of closure. Many of the stories, especially those in Vietnam, read like thinly veiled journalism, but newcomer Phan's painfully damaged characters should pull the heartstrings of remembering Americans. Agent: Dorian Karchmar/Lowenstein-Yost Associates
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