Fire summer

Date
2014-12
Authors
Lam, Thuy Da
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[Honolulu] : [University of Hawaii at Manoa], [December 2014]
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When twenty-three-year-old Maia Trieu, a curator's assistant at the Museum of Folklore & Rocks in Orange County, is offered a research grant to Vietnam for the summer of 1991, she cannot refuse. The grant's sponsor, the Independent Vietnam Coalition, has one stipulation: Maia is to contact her great aunt, a former military commander recently released from re-education camp, to pass on plans to overthrow the current government. The Vietnamese expatriates plot to instigate insurgency on the Central Highlands and prepare to attack from the Cambodian border. A young woman could pass through Tan Son Nhat International Airport more easily than a man, the expatriates predicted, but they did not anticipate that she would become involved with excursions in search of her heritage or attract an entourage: Xuan, a watchful government agent; Na, a black Amerasian singer; JP Boyden, an American travel writer; and No-No, a stray cat with an umbilical hernia. Maia carries out what she believes is her role as a filial daughter to her late father, a former ARVN soldier, by returning to their homeland to continue the fight for an independent Vietnam. Along the way, however, she meets a cast of characters--historical and fictional, living and dead--who propel her on a journey of self-discovery, through which she begins to understand what it means to love. Thomas Wolfe says, "You can't go home again." Fire Summer, an interplay of the fantastic and Eastern philosophy, tells a story of transformations individuals go through to go home again. Set in a war-ravaged country where the worlds of the living and the dead intermingle and rocks inscribed with stories bear silent witness, this magic realist novel illuminates the interconnectedness of lives, following four characters and a cat on a journey through an enduring land, from their fortuitous first meetings to love's final acts.
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Ph.D. University of Hawaii at Manoa 2014.
Includes bibliographical references.
Keywords
diaspora literature, magic realism, Vietnam conflict
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Theses for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (University of Hawaii at Manoa). English.
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