the committed viet thanh nguyen ending explained

Phuong knew instantly why her sister had taken upon herself a foreign name, and whose name it must have been: Vivien Leigh, star of Gone With the Wind, her father’s favorite film, as he had once told her in passing. Except the American Phuong has given herself the foreign name of Vivien: She spends money on expensive dinners, presents, and excursions for her second family. When her eponymous half-sister visits Saigon, she appears to be the ideal of American success. In a striking story, “Fatherland,” Phuong, the eldest daughter of a father who left Vietnam for the U.S., discovers he’s begun a new family there and given his three children the same names as those he left in Vietnam. There are contrasts drawn between American-born and native Vietnamese. In the introductory story, “Black-Eyed Women,” a sister haunted by the ghost of her brother tells him, “Looking back…I could see that we had passed our youth in a haunted country.” Each story is illuminated by Nguyen’s insights in prose that is at once vivid and elegiac. An immigrant to San Francisco is sponsored by a gay couple and is stunned by the openness and freedom of his new American life. A couple and their young son, living in 1970s San Jose and running a market, are faced with difficult memories of the past when a friend presses them for a donation to fight the Communist forces in Vietnam. In one of these short stories about refugees, memories of Vietnam and the ghost of a brother haunt a young woman who earns her living as a ghostwriter. Identity, family loyalty, dislocation, and memory drive each of the nine stories. These may be quieter lives compared to The Sympathizer’s double-agent narrator, but the conflicts are no less powerful. Ordinary Lives and Extraordinary Circumstances

The committed viet thanh nguyen ending explained