Grass Roof, Tin Roof : A Novel

by Strom, Dao

• ISBN13: 9780618145591
• ISBN10: 0618145591
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780547972831
• Additional ISBN(s): 9780547972831
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-01-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

In this stunning novel about a Vietnamese family resettling in the isolation of California gold country, Dao Strom investigates the myth of westward progress and the consequences of cultural displacement. Told from multiple perspectives and interwoven with the intimate reflections of a middle child, Grass Roof, Tin Roof begins with the story of Tran, a Vietnamese writer facing government persecution, who flees her homeland during the exodus of 1975 and brings her two children to the West. Here she marries a Danish American man who has survived a different war. He promises understanding and guidance, but the psychic consequences of his past soon hinder his relationships with the family. The children, for whom the war is now a distant shadow, struggle to understand the world around them on their own terms. In delicate, innovative prose, Strom's characters experience the collision of cultures and the spiritual aftermath of war on the most visceral level. Grass Roof, Tin Roof is a beautiful work of profundity and empathy, powerful emotion and rare insight.

Author Biography

Dao Strom was born in 1973 in Saigon to a well-known writer and journalist. Her mother fled the country with her when she was a baby; her father stayed and was later sent to reeducation camps. Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills with her mother and stepfather. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have appeared in the Chicago Tribune; Still Wild, an anthology edited by Larry McMurtry; and several literary magazines, and she is the recipient of a James Michener fellowship, the Chicago Tribune/Nelson Algren Award, and several other grants. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Excerpts

1 Fire Hazards My mother collected newspapers. Mostly Vietnamese publications sent to her by old friends now living in San Jose or Los Angeles. She clipped articles and stowed them in binders and envelopes, supposedly to be organized into some form of record at some later date. My mother was apt to get lost in a task, so enamored was she by the possibilities - the wealth - of information, and so reluctant, too, to reach any end that might force her to admit unrequited ambitions. Who is to say if she would actually need to look again at any of these papers? Yet she could not throw them away. My father, who had also thrown away a past - his by choice, however - criticized my mother for refusing to let go of pain. He called her selfish. "Your mother," our father would say, not unfacetiously, "your mother is a fire hazard." And I would take this in. Certainly he meant her papers, but in my young mind it was she I saw going up in flames, up into black curling smoke. It was her hair I saw shriveling to ashes and rising, her flesh melting; it was her eyeglasses I saw exploding from the heat and then - as in the movies-only the frames that survived and landed, with a dramatic thunk, at the edge of a circle of ashes. It would be the end of a scene, the glasses in the foreground of a low-angle closeup shot in which smoke and a few glowing embers of orange were a blur in the background. My mother would be gone from me; I feared this constantly. She was vulnerable and a little afraid of the world and smaller than average. She sat on a pillow when she drove and wore high heels everywhere, even at home. Whenever she went alone to a movie or to run an errand, I prayed for her safe return. I worried she might be kidnapped by a strange man as she crossed a parking lot, and we would be left to live with just our father. It is true my mother almost burned to death once in her childhood. She was playing in the kitchen with her older brothers when they turned on the stove and accidentally set her on fire. It was a gas stove; the flames jumped, or my mother was standing too close. If it had not been for an aunt passing unexpectedly by the house that afternoon, that might have been the end of my mother, then and there. But the aunt threw a blanket over her and saved her. My mother was six years old. She later told me this story as a kind of justification: it was the reason she never taught us how to cook. As for my mother's collection of newspapers - these have since been thrown away, too. papier I It was a grand story with many events and an inconclusive ending, and it left her with an ache in her brain and heart, a feeling akin to wanting. Wanting tinged with amazement and understanding - the ending would always be inconclusive - and this was why the story worked as well as it did; this was why it was so affecting and rending and lingering. For many nights afterward, she went to sleep wishing she could live this story and picturing herself after the experience a wiser, sadder, nobler person. Or she liked to imagine meeting a man who had lived through such an experience, a humble, beaten man whose integrity only she would recognize, and she would be his friend. She wouldn't ask for more than that. She had been introduced to the story by a man whom she knew only by his first name, Gabriel. He was a French war correspondent living intermittently in her country and his own. When she met him in 1969, she was twenty-four years old, unwed with one son, then a toddler, from a previous relationship, and she was taking French and English literature and language classes at Saigon University, where Gabriel of