To be sure, no children's book could touch all the complicated issues facing Vietnamese immigrants and refugees as individuals and as a community, and Vu's is no exception. Nowhere is the middle-aged pharmacist and former South Vietnamese Army captain who dreams of fighting communists while running a successful business in Dorchester's Fields Corner, the heart of Massachusetts' Vietnamese community. Nowhere is the Vietnamese language instructor at the Saturday morning school on Dorchester Avenue teaching his Americanized students to not only speak their native tongue, but to know what it means to be Vietnamese. Nowhere is the Vietnam-born police officer who must overcome his ingrained subservience to elders when he needs to exercise the authority of his badge. But Vu's book is a start.
Today is our first day of school.
My mother is preparing lunch for us. My mother pinched his cheek. In most cases, the answer reveals not just how assimilated someone might be, how Americanized they have become, but more importantly, the status they left behind and the hardships they endured. In just 25 years, there have been five waves of Vietnamese migration, similar only in the most general ways - an escape from communism and a search for economic opportunity. In other ways they are as distinct as the scars, the losses, and the memories the individual travelers bear.