Sigh, Gone

November 11, 2019
This high-impact, emotional memoir about growing up in a Vietnamese immigrant family refracts the author’s angry adolescence through a prism of classic literature. Tran, now a high school Latin teacher, escaped the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. One of the only Asian kids in the blue-collar town of Carlisle, Pa., Tran felt like an outsider. Falling in with “a wolfpack” of punk skaters partially satisfied his desire for belonging. But discovering Clifton Fadiman’s The Lifetime Reading Plan, with its lists of must-read books—Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, The Autobiography of Malcolm X—sparked his imagination. Books also provided Tran a refuge from the gap between himself and his parents, who he portrays in colorfully unsparing terms, from his mother’s “muscular, if simple, Catholicism” to his father’s habit of beating him with a metal rod scavenged from the garbage: “American efficiency, meet Vietnamese ingenuity.” Being well-read for Tran signified “the promise of acceptance and connection and prestige,” and by book’s end he enters adulthood as his own person and not just as an immigrant or rebel. Filled with euphoric flights of discovery, this complex and rewarding story of a book-enriched life vividly illustrates how literature can serve as a window to a new life.

December 1, 2019

Tran takes readers on a personal journey through his life after resettling to a small town in Pennsylvania from Vietnam following the fall of Saigon. The author describes being harassed by racists, and most important, by attempts to fit in, to be American. Tran's struggle to be accepted is two pronged: he delves into books, reading voraciously, and also restyles his appearance, becoming a "skater kid." His love of classic novels, the "great books" referenced in the book's subtitle, is evident as each chapter title recognizes a book that has influenced his life, and academic success helped Tran adjust to his new life. Tran combines funny moments with heartbreaking stories; his explanations to his parents about why he wants to buy his clothes at Goodwill rather than the mall are laugh-out-loud funny, and readers will respond with compassion as he and his family deal with his mother's cancer diagnosis. VERDICT Tran's engaging prose will connect with readers who ever went through a phase of wishing to fit in, which is pretty much all of us.--Susan E. Montgomery, Rollins Coll., Winter Park, FL

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2020
I was a Vietnamese, Tran writes in this affecting, deeply felt memoir of his growing-up years in very white Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I was an American, he continues. I was an artist. I was a reader. A study in contrasts, he was also a punk rocker and skater who was the best student in his English class. He writes movingly about his struggle for acceptance and his two-pronged attack to achieve assimilation: first, an attempt at academic excellence (he ranked fourteenth in his class of 333) and, second, what he calls Operation Look Punk, explaining that one way to fit in is by not fitting in. Whether he fit in with his own family is problematic. Love was at a premium; his hot-tempered father was a savage disciplinarian, once beating his son with an iron rod so savagely the boy could hardly walk the next day and hurt so much he couldn't sit down. Another time his father attempted to stab him with scissors. Tran survived all of this by reading great literature. A clever conceit, in this connection, is his naming each chapter with the title of a great book (Crime and Punishment, The Scarlet Letter, The Metamorphosis, etc.) and then finding a parallel with his life in each. The result is a compelling story of an outsider discovering himself and a world where he fit in.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from February 1, 2020
A high school Latin teacher and tattoo artist's memoir about immigrating to small-town America from Vietnam and learning to fit in through reading, skateboarding, and punk rock. Tran and his parents fled Saigon as war refugees in 1975, and they eventually settled in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. There, they became the lone Asians in a town that "offered all the rainbows of Caucasia." Local children taunted Tran throughout childhood while neighbors and co-workers saw his parents as amusing curiosities or "symbols of a painful and confusing war...of the people who had shot at them and killed their friends, brothers, and sons." As he neared adolescence, Tran decided that he could solve his problems by trying to "be less Asian." First, he developed "social Teflon" by earning top grades in all his classes, deciding that he "would take nerd props over no props at all." He further learned to deemphasize his otherness by joining the skateboarding subculture as a young teen and adopting a punk persona. Even though he was a good student, however, the author sometimes came up short of parental expectations for perfection, with excruciatingly painful results. During his junior year of high school, he stumbled across a guide to classic literary texts touted as "the foundation for being 'all-American.' " Eager to assimilate, Tran immersed himself in works like The Metamorphosis and The Importance of Being Earnest. He became more self-reflective and developed an unexpected passion for books, which he highlights by naming each chapter after a favorite work of literature (Madame Bovary, Pygmalion, etc.). At the suggestion of a history teacher, Tran read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which heightened his awareness of white racism toward Asians and of the racism he saw in his own father toward blacks. Funny, poignant, and unsparing, Tran's sharp, sensitive, punk-inflected memoir presents one immigrant's quest for self-acceptance through the lens of American and European literary classics. A highly witty and topical read--an impressive debut.

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