Book review: Dragonfish - a maddening, unexplained debut
Vietnamese-American Vu Tran pits his people's past against its future in novel that's a confusing pastiche
One of them, 43-year-old Hong, is obsessed with the past and the country where it's buried: the Vietnam she fled on an overcrowded boat of refugees five years after the fall of Saigon, accompanied by Mai, her young daughter. Left behind: her dying husband, broken by years in a Communist re-education camp.
The second, 45-year-old Robert, is an Oakland cop and the prototypical optimistic American. He resolutely looks to the future, allowing him to shrug off the past while believing that history can always be fixed - and that he's the right guy for the job.
These two wind up married for eight years before divorcing. It's one of many relationships in this maddening book that goes unexplained.
Instead, we're given variations on Hong's insistence that "people need each other not for reasons they can measure or explain in detail. It happens in an instant, when life becomes startlingly new and frightening and profound, and you turn to the person next to you and see that they feel it too."
There's plenty more where that came from: long on adjectives and abstractions, skimps on actual explanations of why relationships work or fail. Why does Hong marry the Vietnamese man she leaves? Why does she love a fellow refugee, a brutal and abusive man? Most important, why does she abandon her daughter shortly after arriving in California?
