Aimee Phan's We Should Never Meet

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

sa_am recommended Aimee Phan's We Should Never Meet: Stories a couple months ago, and I finally got around to reading it (as procrastination for other writing and reading work!). It is simply an amazing collection of linked short stories.



The stories shuttle back and forth between 1960s/1970s wartime Vietnam and 1980s/1990s America (in Orange County, California). What is most impressive to me is how Phan centers each story on a different character's perspective, one that is often contrasted by another story's focus on another character's narrative. The stories are also troubling. They are not geared towards happy endings or neat resolutions. Instead, Phan shows us how sympathetic characters can make awful decisions or act in ways that seem so impossible at first. The title story, "We Should Never Meet," (that's the best title ever, by the way), is especially heart-wrenching in its tracing of the main character Kim's attempts to make a relationship with an older Vietnamese woman.

I don't know enough of the details about the Vietnam War to judge how accurately Phan depicts the situations of the war, especially regarding orphanages and adoption agencies in Operation Babylift, but her stories certainly give a plausible sense of what the issues, loyalties, and emotions might have been on the ground for Vietnamese social workers, American volunteers and staff, and the children orphaned and abandoned in the war.

All in all, these stories are beautiful and worth reading and mulling over. If I had read these earlier, I would totally have assigned this book for my fall class on war and colonialism in Asian American literature.