Sigh, Gone does not question its central premise that assimilation should be the desired goal for self-making and self-preservation. As a result, a mix of resentment and light condescension toward Vietnameseness hangs over the book. His parents still seem impossibly foreign, trapped in the amber of how white people must see them. Even now that Tran is a 40-something husband and father of two, a Latin teacher and tattoo-shop owner in Portland, Maine, his memories are not told with the wisdom of age, but with the arrested development of adolescence. The result is a coming-of-age that is solipsistic in its understanding of its own pain. There are flashes of tenderness and heartache, but over all parents are voids that obliterate all light and perception.
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