Play Book Tag discussion

I regret not reading this last year when it was SPL’s “Seattle Reads” pick. I think I was put off by the marketing of the book, which downplays the parts I found most interesting. The book cover blurb emphasizes the “anguish of immigration”: the Bui family’s refugee journey, their struggle to build new lives in America, and how the author’s own perspective on all this is altered by the experience of becoming a mother. All of this is indeed covered, with warmth and insight, but what the blurb somehow doesn’t mention is that many of the traumatic shadows that linger over the family predate their refugee experience, and that a large section of the book is devoted to telling the stories of her parents’ early lives in Vietnam. Perhaps the central traumas of their lives weren’t related to the fall of South Vietnam or their flight to America at all: as a child, her father went hungry and was separated from his mother (who he believed had starved) under Japanese occupation during WWII, and it is the loss of the couple’s first baby to ill health, not their wartime experiences, that the author describes as a shadow “casting a grey stillness over our childhood”. In telling the family’s story this way the author both illuminates and highlights the complexity of Vietnam’s recent history (there’s a great page in which she contrasts her parents’ confusingly contradictory opinions about the war with the “oversimplifications and stereotypes” of American accounts), and also shows how far her parents’ humanity extends beyond a view of them as symbolic refugees. I’m not usually drawn to graphic novels, but this “illustrated memoir” is one I would highly recommend.

I will be reading this by months end. So glad you enjoyed it as I remember you said you regretted not reading it last year.