Goodbye, Saigon

Westminster, California, in 1993. Little Saigon is a neighborhood where two women who fled very different kinds of hardship try to build lives of their own. Anh is a quick-tongued Vietnamese woman, small in stature and sharp in manner, who keeps a large extended family afloat by acting on tips from a lawyer who snorts cocaine and gambles. When he vanishes, she turns to his secretary, Jana, an Anglo woman who is tough, self-reliant, and in as much need of money as Anh is. The two open a fake law office in Little Saigon. Anh finds the clients and Jana poses as the attorney, and the scheme prospers until the violent Nep gang demands a share.

As Anh shows Jana how things work in Little Saigon, a rough, unrestrained version of capitalism runs up against rigid, old-fashioned customs. Interwoven with the present day are memories of Anh's youth in Vietnam, when she lived through the constant brutality of war. Later, a veteran who knew her back in Vietnam arrives to offer her a way into a different life, and she has to draw Jana into the effort to settle an old debt of blood.

The novel portrays a community governed by the traditional family structure of an agrarian society, transplanted into the busy, commercial sprawl of Southern California. That collision produces gang violence, open racism, and ambitious get-rich-quick schemes. The book treats its immigrant characters with both affection and a tragicomic eye, and its focus is on people trying to make a future in the country that has left their past behind.