Fire Summer

by Thuy Da Lam

Overview

You can go home again. When twenty-three-year-old Maia Trieu, a curator’s assistant at the Museum of Folklore & Rocks in Little Saigon, Orange County, is offered a research grant to Vietnam for the summer of 1991, she cannot refuse. The grant’s sponsor has one stipulation: Maia is to contact her great-aunt to pass on plans to overthrow the current government. The expatriates did not anticipate that Maia would become involved with excursions in search of her mother or attract an entourage: an American traveler, a government agent, an Amerasian singer, and a cat. Maia carries out what she believes is her role as a filial daughter to her late father, a former ARVN soldier, by returning to their homeland to continue the fight for an independent Vietnam. Along the way, however, she meets a cast of characters—historical and fictional, living and dead—who propel her on a journey of self-discovery, through which she begins to understand what it means to love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597094641
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	09/17/2019
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Thuy Da Lam was born in Qui Nhơn, grew up in Philadelphia, and now lives in Honolulu, where she works on her next book and teaches at Kapi’olani Community College. She holds a BA in creative writing from Hamilton College and PhD in English from UH Mānoa. She received the George A. Watrous Literary Prize for Fiction, Myrtle Clark Writing Award, and John Young Scholarship in the Arts. Her debut novel, Fire Summer, is a revision of her dissertation, part of which appeared in Lost Lake Folk Opera in commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

https://thuydalam.com/

Thuy Da Lam was born in Qui Nhơn, grew up in Philadelphia, and now lives in Honolulu, where she works on her next book and teaches at Kapi’olani Community College. She holds a BA in creative writing from Hamilton College and PhD in English from UH Mānoa. She received the George A. Watrous Literary Prize for Fiction, Myrtle Clark Writing Award, and John Young Scholarship in the Arts. Her debut novel, Fire Summer, is a revision of her dissertation, part of which appeared in Lost Lake Folk Opera in commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

https://thuydalam.com/

Thuy Da Lam was born in Qui Nhơn, grew up in Philadelphia, and now lives in Honolulu, where she works on her next book and teaches at Kapi’olani Community College. She holds a BA in creative writing from Hamilton College and PhD in English from UH Mānoa. She received the George A. Watrous Literary Prize for Fiction, Myrtle Clark Writing Award, and John Young Scholarship in the Arts. Her debut novel, Fire Summer, is a revision of her dissertation, part of which appeared in Lost Lake Folk Opera in commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

https://thuydalam.com/

Thuy Da Lam was born in Qui Nhơn, grew up in Philadelphia, and now lives in Honolulu, where she works on her next book and teaches at Kapi’olani Community College. She holds a BA in creative writing from Hamilton College and PhD in English from UH Mānoa. She received the George A. Watrous Literary Prize for Fiction, Myrtle Clark Writing Award, and John Young Scholarship in the Arts. Her debut novel, Fire Summer, is a revision of her dissertation, part of which appeared in Lost Lake Folk Opera in commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

https://thuydalam.com/

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt One

She was free at last. She gripped the railing of the now-abandoned fishing boat, its plank deck heaving beneath her feet. In the noon light, the distant island seemed to bob like a mossy green canteen on its side.

The captain and navigator, an old fisherman from a southeastern seaport of Vietnam they had escaped from a week before, had plunged in first. Others followed. The shoal of their black heads dipped and rose in the waves as the pouches and satchels strapped to their gaunt, sunburnt backs dispersed. A flock of seagulls circled and lit upon the crests to pick at the feast afloat on the South China Sea.

The woman looped the handles of her red basket around her shoulder. She was glad her few possessions were in tightly sealed jars and plastic bags. When she hoisted her leg onto the railing, she noticed someone had scratched the date on the wood. Bidon 12-18-1980. She slowly raised herself and pulled up her other leg. She crouched there, feeling the pitch and wallow of the boat. As her body moved, she balanced and stood up.

White sand encircled the hilly island like a strand of luminous, odd-shaped pearls. Farther inland, thatched-roof huts nestled beneath coconut palms that bowed toward the sea. She breathed in deeply, clasped her hands, and gazed into the water. She felt suddenly light.

She dove into a reflected sky.

As she submerged, the woman arched her back and lifted her head skyward to surface but slipped back instead. The ocean coursed through her body and pulled her down. The murmur of the sea lullabied her. She relaxed her grip, and the straps of her basket rose from her shoulder, scattering pictures of a husband on a bridge that hung across a river like a crescent moon and a daughter named after a blossom of the Lunar New Year. The ocean tugged at the woman’s fingers and spread her arms. She soared through the clear blue sky.

Excerpt Two

While Saigon slept at noon, Maia Trieu returned with her father’s ashes. Her flight on the Boeing 707 from Los Angeles with a changeover in Bangkok bore citizens of free nations. As she deplaned and bussed across the tarmac of Tan Son Nhat International Airport, she was caught in the intertwinement of yellow rice paddies and abandoned bunkered hangars, fusing in the summer heat of 1991.

Across the aisle, a man murmured about the humidity and wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his hand. When he pushed his dark hair off his forehead, she saw gray-green eyes, and her hand reflexively reached for the jade locket around her neck. The jade’s muted color did not spark like the man’s eyes, but the locket felt large and important on her. She gazed out at the midday mirage. Sunrays flickered on the hot asphalt runways and glimmered off wet rice paddies. Thirteen years earlier, she had escaped the country with her father, crossing the South China Sea in an overcrowded fishing boat to find asylum in America. Her hand clasped the octangular jade locket. Ba, we’re home.

“That’s a shame,” the man said, looking past her through the window at the bunkered hangars. “A terrible shame.” He peered through his camera and snapped several pictures. Besides a few Asian businessmen, the visitors were mostly Europeans, some from the newly unified Germany. The gray-eyed man of mixed ancestry was traveling alone. He looked at her. “Viet kieu?” he asked. His voice had a distinct American intonation. Except for a lightning bolt tattoo on his upper left arm, he fit the profile of an innocuous tourist. Beneath his relaxed exterior, she detected something else.

The trolley stopped at the terminal, and attendants in light azure áo dài pulled the glass doors open, greeting the visitors with the words of the yellow and red banner fluttering above. “Welcome to the City of Enlightenment.”

Editorial Reviews

Lam’s novel is a whimsical, if elegiac, perception-altering hero’s journey inspired by mourning and displacement, in which the dead roam throughout the country and former and would-be soldiers hide out in Cambodian borderlands. In Fire Summer, truth and art coexist, while imagination never quite overpowers experience.
—Diacritic

From the Publisher

2019-07-15
A young Vietnamese native returns to her motherland looking for answers only to find that the past does not yield its secrets easily.

In the early 1990s, Maia Trieu, a 23-year-old Vietnamese expat, is on a mission to her native country, seemingly charged by the collective diaspora to do one thing: help the Independent Vietnam Coalition contact her great aunt. The expats believe that Maia's relative, a former military commander, is capable of instigating insurgency in the Central Highlands. While that might be Maia's primary agenda, one she has even received a grant for, she is also in Vietnam to seek answers: What prompted her mother to stay behind in Vietnam while Maia escaped along with her dad? Who is left of her family who might have the answers and the closure she craves? In this haunting if meandering debut, Maia travels the countryside following the trail of breadcrumbs on the way to her mission: " ‘Whatever you do,' the Coalition instructed, ‘be at the foot of the Vong Phu Mountain on the first night of the full moon.' " Along the way, Maia attracts a ragtag group of fellow travelers, including an American journalist whose brother served in Vietnam. Lam blends the past with the present, fluidly teasing out strands of narrative, but at times the plot is as hazy as the smoky, incense-filled air in the temples that Maia visits. The meditative novel functions best as travelogue and food diary: "The smell of deep-fried shrimp and mung bean patties from a bánh cuốn stall filled the air. The vendor in a lilac đố bố waved customers to her footstools and knee-high tables as she served plates of steamed rice rolls filled with pork mince and wood ear mushrooms, garnished with blanched bean sprouts, fresh mint leaves, and chili fish sauce." Generous doses of folklore—the tale of Hòn Vống Phu, a wife who turns into stone waiting for her husband's return, is a recurring theme here—and poetry add ballast to an otherwise cloudy narrative.

Transportive armchair travel if you're willing to follow along just for the sights.

Kirkus Reviews