Characters Orbit: Jhumpa Interpreter and American-Raised Children

characters orbit: There's Liem, a newly arrived refugee whose habit of forgetting was too deeply ingrained, as if he passed his life perpetually walking backward through a desert, sweeping away his footprints, according to The Chronicle Herald. There are longtime residents Mr. and Mrs. This gorgeous collection of short stories recalls Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, but with Vietnam as the loose centre around which the richly drawn characters orbit. Khahn, distant from their American-raised children, as well as those who stayed behind, like Phuong, wistful for a different future. Nguyen convincingly takes on the voices and lives of these myriad characters, whose stories highlight not only the unique horrors that drive people to become refugees, but also the universal experiences that affirm their humanity from the transformation of a 13-year-old brave enough to say what I had suspected for a while, that my mother wasn't always right to the heartbreak and turmoil of a woman losing her husband to the fog of dementia. And there's Claire, an American transplant with no familial ties to the southeast Asian nation who explains to her incredulous father that she has a Vietnamese soul. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.