I Read a Lot of Books

So, I am not Vietnamese, but I am multi cultural. My mom is Chilean, so I understand what it is to float between two cultures, to be American and something else. I’ve rarely read a book, fiction/non-fiction/YA/Adult that captures so well what it means to embrace the beauty of two different cultures to understand what it means to be a person. So subtly Lai captures that one doesn’t have to be one thing or another thing and the constructs that we give ourselves as we mature. Lai, is Vietnamese and her book is about a young girl learning to embrace all of the parts of herself.

The story is about Mai, who is twelve years old and a bit of the stereotypical Asian over achiever kid. She gets straight As. She is respectful of her parents, but inside there is a girl that just wants to go to the beach with her friends and hang out on her cell phone. Instead of spending the summer with her friends Mai is going to Vietnam for the first time. Her grandfather, Ong, disappeared in the war before Mai’s family became refugees in the US. Mai’s grandmother, Ba, has always longed to know what happened to her husband and feels she must go back to Vietnam because the answer is there. Mai knows very little about her heritage and pulls the bratty teenager card a couple times, but eventually becomes fascinated by the new world that she discovers. It is a world of tradition, complex language, and a sad, sad history. She begins to help Ba unravel the mystery of what happened to her husband and at the same time unravel new aspects and insights to her own personality.

Lai is such a great writer. I FELT like I was experiencing Vietnam for the first time and feel that if I get the chance to visit, some things will be familiar because of how Lai described them. The sights, sounds, and even smells depicted in a way a young adult or middle reader would find fascinating. The story is interesting and isn’t over preachy. Sometimes authors want to hit you on the head with the MORAL particularly in youth books. Lai lets the reader engage in an interesting story and like a flower unfolds each petal, so does the story. I did have to subtract points (do I even do that?) for Lai’s description of the Vietnamese language and how it is written. Now, I like languages. I do. I speak three fluently and would love to pick up some others before I die, so I do not say this lightly. Her insistence that the reader get the Vietnamese language goes beyond tedious and pulls the reader from the story. Thankfully, it doesn’t go on forever, but it goes on long enough.

I’d like to see more of this type of YA book. Sometimes YA books come off as heavy handed. They are trying to hard to ‘teach’ something. Tolerance. History. Civil Rights. I find most, while trying to be sincere, refuse to show complexities in various issues. Listen, Slowly painted a complex picture and created a very relatable character. If I were a teacher I’d make this required reading. It would also work well for adult book clubs as the themes are easily translatable to adults.