We Should Never Meet: Stories
The linked stories that make up this dynamic debut are spare in their approach but profoundly observant. One painful narrative thread follows a mother as she sends her daughter off with Operation Babylift, an initiative launched in Vietnam in the mid-1970s to rescue 2,000 babies from a crumbling Saigon. Another traces the tensions between bookish Mai and hoodlumesque Kim, both Operation Babylift orphans living in L.A., now in their teens. Mai studies very hard, while Kim is a thief and a vicarious member of an Asian gang who inadvertently harms someone she wouldn't have purposefully targeted. These stories read quickly, and yet the deliberateness of their word choice and their motion make it evident that they've been planned very carefully, down to the last detail. Phan plays up the intrinsic toughness of L.A and the chaos of present-day and war-era Vietnam to moving effect in this unassuming but hard-edged psychological travelogue, which memorably shows the ways humans bob and weave against ever-present alienation.Max WinterCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved