A haunting, affecting memoir of what’s lost in emigration.
Hue, in his debut memoir, writes about family separation following the Vietnam War.
Hue—or Five, as he’s known in the book—was the fifth child in a family that fled Vietnam for the United States shortly before the fall of Saigon. Left behind, however, was Hue’s mother; her uncommon independence and estrangement from his father meant she wasn’t included in the escape. For 20 years, Hue and his siblings pushed their mother’s ghost from their minds, treating her like any other war memory, as distant and uncomfortable as those of the Tet Offensive. “I erased the memories of my mother in a similar manner…deliberately or inadvertently,” he says. “I had purposely tried not to think of her. I lost other memories by not examining them for years.” Then, while Hue’s stern, silent father succumbed to cancer, the letters started to come out—letters written by his mother begging her children for assistance, unanswered and kept by Hue’s father in a pouch in his closet for years. Hue, in his 30s by this point, undertook the process of discovering who his unknown mother truly was and how his native land forever shaped the family’s fortune. His discoveries changed the way he saw his quiet father and the way he saw himself. Hue writes in direct, simple prose, eschewing most overt expressions of emotion for a more tempered, contemplative narrative style. He methodically doles out letters and photographs as evidence of his family’s unspoken history, weaving the different layers of past and present in an artful depiction of a group of lives. Though no earth-shattering mystery looms waiting to be solved by the right combination of documents, there is enough material here—threads of an absent mother, a distant father, a lost country, a future that feels somehow hollow without the past—to keep the reader engrossed. Though some sections would benefit from an edit for concision—the 500-plus pages could fit in 400—the reader can hardly blame Hue for being comprehensive in his search for his parents’ pasts. Indeed, perhaps the best method for combating the deathly silence of history may be to fill the present with pages and pages of words.
A haunting, affecting memoir of what’s lost in emigration.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1505612646
Page Count: 542
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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