Title: The Land South of the Clouds
Description: "It is the summer of 1979, the year everyone anticipates the long awaited release of Apocalypse Now, America's frustration with inflation and the long lines to the gas pumps; the top story on every news channel is President Jimmy Carter and his administration's grim dilemma in trying to rescue the American hostages in Iran, and our 10-year-old narrator, Long Vanh, is burdened with the secret his mother, Vu-An, entrusted him to keep: not to tell anyone of her desire to return to Vietnam to be with her father who is serving hard labor in a reeducation camp. Because Long Vanh is a con lai--half Vietnamese, half black--he believes he can become the obedient son despite his shortcomings of not knowing how to decipher the accent marks adorning the words in the letters she receives from the old country, his inability to speak the language, or even maneuver chopsticks properly. He believes if he can compensate for his flaws, she will want to stay in "Asia Minor", an enclave of Los Angeles comprised of veterans and their foreign war wives. She will stay in America to keep the family intact and forget that she ever packed her Samsonite with ao dais, letters, and photographs she made him store in his closet, make her forget that she ever taught him how to lie to anyone who phones that she doesn't live here anymore, that he can even tell them that she is dead. The Land South of the Clouds serves as the companion piece to The Land Baron's Sun: The Story of Lý Loc and His Seven Wives. It is the story of immigrant families meshing into the fabric of American culture, their memories of the old country weighing on their conscience and the repercussions they feel even from thousands of miles away on another continent, in another world, another life"--
Subjects: Vietnamese American families, Cultural assimilation, Fiction, Vietnamese Americans, Amerasians, Racially mixed families, Racially mixed people