We Should Never Meet

August 30, 2004
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. Agent, Dorian Karchmar.

September 15, 2004
The linked stories that make up this dynamic debut are spare in their approach but profoundly observant. One painful narrative thread follows a mother as she sends her daughter off with Operation Babylift, an initiative launched in Vietnam in the mid-1970s to rescue 2,000 babies from a crumbling Saigon. Another traces the tensions between bookish Mai and hoodlumesque Kim, both Operation Babylift orphans living in L.A., now in their teens. Mai studies very hard, while Kim is a thief and a vicarious member of an Asian gang who inadvertently harms someone she wouldn't have purposefully targeted. These stories read quickly, and yet the deliberateness of their word choice and their motion make it evident that they've been planned very carefully, down to the last detail. Phan plays up the intrinsic toughness of L.A and the chaos of present-day and war-era Vietnam to moving effect in this unassuming but hard-edged psychological travelogue, which memorably shows the ways humans bob and weave against ever-present alienation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)