A book review by Lawrence Checkett

As East-Meets-West stories go, the endings either are almost always sad (Love is a many Splendored Thing), tragic (Sayonara), or happy in the most reserved sense (The World of Suzie Wong).  In Grass Roof, Tin Roof, we have a mixture of all three:  the sadness of a marriage gone bad, the tragedy of life in Saigon during the last years of the American-Vietnam conflict, and the unsatisfying love of a daughter for her father.

In this poignant first novel by Dao Strom, the life of a young woman named Tran unfolds in war torn Vietnam. She has two children out of wedlock, one to a foreign correspondent and one to her Vietnamese editor/mentor for whom she writes.  Tran is a budding and talented journalist, but she is hounded unmercifully by Vietnamese authorities for her no-holds-barred assessment of the scandalous political milieu exhibited by all sides.  Eventually, she arrives in the United States with her two children by escaping during the 1975 airlift.

After Tran reaches California, she writes of her exploits in the Sacramento Bee newspaper.  The story is read by a Danish immigrant and survivor of the Second World War named Hus Madsen, who contacts her, and after a brief courtship, he proposes marriage and a life of promise and understanding.  Tran and her husband and children move into a mobile home in northern California while Hus, an architect, builds their dream home.  After having a third child, Hus begins to fall into fits of depression during which he degrades Tran with demeaning racial slurs .  As the children grow older, they too are subject to racial discrimination in a culture that professes equality and sympathy, yet yields neither.  All three children are trapped between two cultures, neither of which is accepting of them.

In the last section of the novel, after Tran’s death, the middle child, April, returns to Vietnam to meet Tran’s family.  In bittersweet letters home to her father, April explains the special torment for those without a cultural identity, her father included.  Although she looks Vietnamese, her relatives do not appreciate her because she does not speak the language.  In America, she speaks the language, but she is not accepted because she looks foreign.  In a disturbing oxymoron, she writes to her father about her feelings for him and her cultural agony:  “I feel an attachment as deep as my resistance to you as I think these thoughts.”  She continues, offering him her thoughts both about his emigrating to the United States and leaving his family behind and her travels to Vietnam:  “And did you know, then, that the farther you went, the more ruined the air would become between you and those left behind?  For quite plainly, to them, you were refusing them—you were not returning by choice.”  Such is the dilemma of all the character in this beautifully written yet disturbing story.

Strom, herself, was born in Saigon in 1973 before emigrating with her mother to the United States in 1975.  She grew up in Northern California and graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  She is a James Michener Fellow and a winner of the Chicago Tribune/Nelson Algren Award.  Currently, Ms Strom lives in Austin, Texas.

Please give us YOUR opinion!
...and see what others are saying, too
The Global Forum

Reviewed by

Lawrence
Checkett

SCC English
 

Want to have your own copy of this book?

 

Book sales support
The Global Pages