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Dmitri Kalmar
, October 08, 2010
Aching and rewarding, quiet and stunning like a slow Bach cello suite in minor, Quiet As They Come is gorgeous and painful at once. The language is simple and straightforward, yet is often more poetry than prose. It is matter of fact, as it transports us to the deep inner lives of dignified people experiencing indignities and surprises in a new culture, a new land where "up" is now being called "down". This is the story of a family that fled the Viet Cong after the fall of Saigon and came to America, as did Angie Chau herself at the age of three.
The book is a collection of stories. Each winds it's way along with a simmering tension, taut and rich, before rising to a swift Beethovian crescendo. Each is like a bottle of champagne that you study slowly and thoughtfully before finally popping the cork with a bang and a sudden rush. Like the protagonists, the writing style walks softly but carries a big stick. It is more resonant for its lack of flowery embellishment.
From story to story, the point of view changes to different members of the family. The writing style changes to suit each character. In the first story, "Hunger", Chau deftly captures the way a child sees and processes the world:
"The house is big and old. There are lots of hidden closets and corners and secrets inside… Like how we have to step over my dad when we go to the bathroom at night, but come morning we have to pretend he was never sleeping in the hallway… My name is Elle. It's not my real name. That's kind of a secret too."
"No one at school knows it's my fake name. My parents changed it so I would fit better. Sometimes I wonder if they'll change my last name too. And if they do, what will become of the old me? The Vietnamese name with the two letters that match like your favorite pair of socks."
Much later in the book, when we meet Elle as a teenager into rock and roll, riding in a fast car with her friend and her friend's musician father, the language is musical and rhythmic right from the start. It's more like spoken word, or Beat Generation:
"On the Fourth of July we glide through the winding roads of Mt. Tam with the top down. Tree tops sway and leaves shimmer like tinsel when the moon hits just right. Over the railing the Pacific Coast is as placid as a lake tonight… But still Stan puts the music loud. He's a jazz musician. He plays trumpet. He's deaf in one ear from his years next to a speaker."
The book is often creatively symbolic. Both of these Elle stories take place on the Fourth of July, the symbol of American freedom. The meaning is whatever you make it, but Elle is the only character who was young enough to truly assimilate in this country.
This collection is a study in the contradictions that make people interesting. In "Hunger", it's the vulnerability and strength of an eight year old refugee spending the day in an American city without adult supervision. In "Everything Forbidden", about Huong, the stern matriarch of the family, it's a look at love versus smothering dominance.
When a government figure comes into Huong's home to interrogate her and make accusations, each line of dialogue shows how these two people are still on different sides of the planet. It is an example of Chau's skill with the craft that this intruder gets no more lines of dialogue once Huong explodes with indignation and disbelief. That's a great tool for taking away her power in the story. Her words were her weapon. Then, turned into a mute subject of the story instead of a vocal participant, she recedes into the background, cast downstream in the river of Huong's outrage.
Some of the biggest moments use the fewest words. Miniature sentences like "The candy flew" and "The room bulged" are tight pinnacles of slowly building crescendos, like turning on a dime, where things have reached a boiling point and suddenly fly out of control.
By showing restraint throughout, Chau can make your head spin a bit when she spontaneously swerves off into poetry, like the literary equivalent of having the orchestra swell louder in a film during a soft lens closeup. The doting father, Viet, described by his co-workers at the post office as being "quiet as they come", was a college professor back in Vietnam, and sits alone one night after being called a disappointment by his wife:
"Viet sat alone in the stillness of the night staring at the soiled dust filters he had forgotten to show her. They were spread out on the kitchen table like a constellation of stars. Each time he moved a filter, the debris would fall off and leave a trail not unlike the gaseous particles of the moon or a planetary ring… In his youth, Viet had naively believed that he held the world in his hands. Orion, Pleiades, Pegasus, the winged horse soaring away. He shuffled the stars in different patterns looking for a map into the world, a direction to follow, the way back into her heart."
The book is very personal and naked. Chau opens up each character and bares all. She helps keep it personal and emotional by never becoming overtly political, despite the political events that cast these people from one life into another. Viet asks his daughter, "How did I get reincarnated from a man to mule all in a lifetime?"
Her alter ego in the book, Elle, talks about the sleepovers she used to have at her best friend Phoebe's house during high school, and how inspirational Phoebe's musician father was. Elle's father doesn't like the sleepovers, asking:
"'Is there something wrong with our home?' He tells me that in Vietnam, the word 'sleepover' doesn't exist. I say words like 'privacy' and 'passion' aren't in the Vietnamese language either. 'Does that mean they don't exist?'"
As a teenager, Elle already wants to be a writer, scrawling poems on pizza boxes, whatever paper surface is available. Elle's father tells her she should become a doctor, an engineer, or a professor. Meanwhile, "Phoebe's dad says 'Follow your passion'." Lucky for us, that's what Angie Chau did.
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