Western American Literature

Angie Chau's debut collection of stories follows the dispersion of a Vietnamese family who fled the American war to settle—if that's the word for it—in San Francisco, California. The book brings to mind a constellation of earlier works: some western American, some literary in a wider geographical sense, and some philosophical.

Quiet As They Come is vaguely reminiscent of Hemingway's In Our Time (1925): each book involves a collection of reoccurring characters, many of whom are traumatized by a war whose temporal and spatial proximity is often ambiguous. And like James Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room (1956), Chau's book is a meditation on people adjusting to an unfamiliar continent, balancing newfound freedoms with bouts of disorientation, and constantly reflecting on ocean expanses and water movements that facilitate and bar transit back home. Chau's writing also resonates with echoes of Sandra Cisneros's classic work The House on Mango Street (1984) and shows stylistic resemblances to Maxine Hong Kingston's multignerational narrative China Men (1980). But Chau's work is perhaps closest in form and content to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990). In fact, Quiet As They Come can be appreciated in terms of its critical addition to O'Brien's Vietnam War stories: Chau contributes another set of vital stories that emerged from that conflict. Through the shifting perspectives of multiple family members, Chau narrates the obverse side of the war: the distant ripple effects and far-reaching consequences of a war that punctuated the age of modern globalization. Chau's take on this Pacific Rim curve suggests the geographic möbius strip at work: this western American literary work demonstrates how "East" and "West" are anything but distinct sides of the world—and yet, their myths still circulate with force. [End Page 442]

In chapter-stories that she strategically weaves together, Chau develops threads subtle and profound, deeply personal as well as complexly cultural. Chau does especially well with a certain unexpected focus on minute images, such as a mother's "perfume samples that will never know the inside of a wrist, old keys that open forgotten doors"—and a high school gym class in which "everyone wore blue short shorts with a serial number on the right leg" (166, 137). Chau does not deploy these images gratuitously; every detail is placed tactfully (but quietly, as it were) in the broader composition of the narrative.

Quiet As They Come cumulatively shows how a range of characters brush up against American pop culture to varying degrees of influence, numbness, and mania. For instance, Chau surrounds her characters with the ever-present, synaesthetic buzz of television, a media form that the characters experience as enchanting and oppressive, as a sign of status and as a phenomenological sinkhole. One character, Huong, sits on a couch "with her remote control, vigilantly watching the twenty-four-hour news channel, waiting for the next cruel blow to hit" (74). This scene is especially stinging when one considers the Vietnamese American shrimp fishermen on the Louisiana Gulf Coast in the aftermath of the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion—an event at once heavily exploited by the media and intensely immediate, a "next cruel blow" indeed.

Another character, Viet, was a philosophy professor in Vietnam but is relegated to a monotonous job at the post office in San Francisco, where he stands over a bin, "sorting mail by zip code" (71). His life follows a downward spiral in which TV functions as a visually dominating vortex. This is Viet's daughter, Elle:

I came home and asked my parents, "Why don't we talk more?"

My father said, "We talk plenty." He switched back to the TV.

One day I said, "We watch too much TV."

My father said, "But we watch TV to improve our English.

You said you wanted us to talk more."

(104)

Here is the viciously circular logic of an advanced consumer society, in which TV constrains possible forms of life by presenting illusions of...