We should never meet : stories / Aimee Phan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Phan, Aimee.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)--Fiction.

Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam).

Orange County (Calif.)--Fiction.

Orange County (Calif.).

Vietnamese Americans--Fiction.

Vietnamese Americans.

Refugees--Fiction.

Refugees.

Adoptees--Fiction.

Adoptees.

Orphans--Fiction.

Orphans.

Genre:

Fiction.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

243 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : St. Martin's Press, 2004.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Miss Lien

We should never meet

The delta

Visitors

Gates of Saigon

Emancipation

Bound

Motherland.

ISBN:

0312322666

OCLC:

56330187