A young Vietnamese girl’s migration to Alabama in the 1970s

Inside Out & Back Again
By Thanhha Lai
(HarperCollins)


The United States prides itself on being a melting pot, but the many immigrant stories that make up our uniquely American stew aren‘t always known or published by the mainstream press. Take Thanhha Lai, who, in her recent National Book Award winner, “Inside Out & Back Again,” chronicles her family’s move to the U.S. from her native Vietnam in 1975.

This novel in verse, based on Lai‘s experiences, is written in a spare, yet accessible style that bears no trace of her struggles to learn English as a 10-year-old immigrant. Told from the perspective of Ha, with the action unfolding in the present tense, the story begins on Feb. 11, the first day of Tet, the Lunar New Year. According to the fortune teller whom Ha’s mother always visited, her family‘s life was about to “twist inside out” as the country plunged into civil war.

At first, there’s little indication such a prediction will come true. Ha‘s father had gone missing nine years earlier, but life was otherwise good. Ha’s mother had steady work as a secretary and a seamstress, and Ha and her three older brothers were enrolled in school. But when their neighbors could no longer afford clothes, Ha‘s family felt the effects of their government’s unraveling at the seams. Money was increasingly worthless. Food was less and less available.

“Mother measures rice grains left in the bin. ... Her brows twist like laundry being wrung dry. Yam and manioc taste lovely blended with rice, she says, and smiles, as if I don‘t know how the poor fill their children’s bellies,” Ha writes in a one-page chapter that, like all the book‘s chapters, is short and anchored with a dateline.

It was April 13, just two months since Tet. Two weeks later, each family member packed a home-sewn bag with “one pair of pants, one pair of shorts ... three clumps of cooked rice, one choice” and was herded onto an overcrowded boat abandoned by the Vietnamese navy. There thousands of refugees watched as bombs fell on a city they weren’t likely to see again.

It‘s a chilling scene to even imagine, let alone live through, but Ha’s impish and intelligent spirit stop the story from becoming maudlin. Ha‘s anxiety is grounded by simple physical experiences, such as the daily food ration, as well as her observations and interactions on the boat, where she spends an entire month.

“Inside Out & Back Again” is divided into three parts: Saigon, At Sea and Alabama, where Ha’s family moves after being sponsored by a well-meaning “cowboy” without a horse and his disapproving wife.

“Green mats of grass in front of every house. ... Cement lanes where no one walks. Big cars pass not often. Not a noise. Clean, quiet loneliness” is Ha‘s experience. But it gets worse in school, where she’s relentlessly teased and treated like a pity case. Her home is routinely pelted with eggs and bricks.

It‘s no wonder Ha thinks: “At times I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama.” Assimilation isn’t an easy experience, but it‘s rare to be given an opportunity to experience its specifics, and rarer still to hear it from a Vietnamese perspective.

The story of Ha may not become as well-known as the Pulitzer-Prize-winning photograph of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. But just as that picture was worth a thousand words, Lai’s “Inside Out & Back Again” paints another, much-needed portrait -- one that humanizes what otherwise would be a history-book experience. (MCT)


An American abroad and on a mission

Ghost Lights
By Lydia Millet
(W.W. Norton)



Few writers are known for combining dark humor and environmentalism in their fiction; in fact, Lydia Millet may be the only member of that club. For her efforts, in the short story collection “Love in Infant Monkeys,” she was named a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. “Ghost Lights,” her first book since then, is the middle novel of a trilogy that began with 2008‘s “How the Dead Dream.”

Literary trilogies may be hard to enter midstream, but Millet has made it easy for those not familiar with the first book to start with this one. Her trick? She’s made a wholly clueless character from the first novel the narrator of this one. It‘s Hal, an affluent Southern California father who works for the IRS. He can give us the vague back story -- his wife Susan’s boss, a young multimillionaire real estate developer named T., has gone missing -- but he‘s not so good at details. Exactly how far did the relationship between T. and their daughter Casey go? Like people who haven’t read “How the Dead Dream,” Hal doesn‘t know; like any father, he doesn’t really want to.

Hal, “a paper-pusher, a dim gray shade,” is prone to reveries, to hiding out in bathrooms as his mind spins thoughts he can‘t say out loud. Sometimes he worries that he thinks too much, but he reassures himself of “the unending and sweet privacy of thinking. How no one else, no matter how great or powerful, could ever enter.... It was a perk of being human: your mind was your own, always and forever a secret territory.” In that territory he harbors lustful thoughts about a beautiful German tourist -- but that comes later, after his life has turned upside-down.

As the book opens, Hal and Susan are picking up T.’s dog from its boarding kennel. Susan is devoted to T., and after he goes missing in Belize, her efforts to track him down are fruitless. Hal has a hard time listening closely -- he drifts off, thinking, often about their adult daughter, Casey. She is in a wheelchair, and Hal‘s concerns for her are saturated with melancholy, a constant mourning for what her life might have been without the accident. What accident that was, exactly, is too much for Hal to think about; to us, it’s an ongoing mystery. To Casey, it‘s the past. She’s sharp-spoken and strong-willed, yet her father cannot look at her without a sense of regret.

Soon the focus of his regret turns to himself, and his own marriage; he stumbles across evidence that his wife of 25 years is having an affair. Stunned, discombobulated and drunk, he volunteers to go to Belize and track down T. His motivations are muddy: He wants to appear heroic to his family, he wants to get away from his wife, he wants to punish her for her betrayal by leaving. This middle-aged IRS man is hardly suited to rescue anyone from the jungle, and he‘s not at all concerned about the welfare of T., his quarry, but soon he’s on his way.

There is awink toward Joseph Conrad‘s “Heart of Darkness,” and parallels with Ann Patchett’s recent bestselling novel “State of Wonder” in which an American goes to a tropical outpost in pursuit of a lost colleague. In Patchett‘s book, the focus narrows on what her protagonists find there; in “Ghost Lights,” it’s about how Hal is changed. As a thinker, he wonders about the role of authority, of nature, of his relationships and their failures. As an American expat, he sees new edges of the world, and of himself. He is frequently drunk. He ogles the German woman and, with bemusement, watches as her husband rallies a search-and-rescue party to go after T.

As is often the case in stories like this, Hal is less of an actor than someone who is acted upon: In the jungle, things happen to him, rather than the other way around. When he has a sexual encounter, or finds a path to T., these things come to him. In this sense, the story sits and waits (and thinks) for events to push it forward.

This could be dull, if Hal weren‘t interesting. But his thoughts wander through worthwhile questions about modern society, nature and connection -- “All you were to the rest of the human race was a flash or a glint, a passing moment in the field of the perceived,” he thinks at one point, while later concluding, amusingly, “He was a surplus human, a product of swollen civilization. He was a widget among men.”

That edge of intelligence and humor is enough to satisfy, but the book suffers a bit from its mid-series status. In some ways it seems to be waiting, like Hal, for the next thing to happen.(MCT)