Dao Strom’s The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys goes against the grain. Its careful attention to language and close examination of subtleties that emerge from the conflicts between inner world and outer world extend the corpus of Vietnamese American literature. Ethnic markers and memories of Vietnam do not infuse the four novellas. As the book ends, readers are left with the impression, “What just happened?” We close our eyes and take a deep breath: “Nothing and Everything.” Disquiet phrases begin to surface from consciousness: careful truth, curse of beauty, cool calculated honesty, murky boundaries, and more. They linger and resonate.
Conflicting desires and wants pervade these stories. The characters move in the realms of daily life as a student, waitress, musician, daughter, wife, lover, and mother. They are women who experience their worlds in large part through their senses while maintaining a certain degree of detachment from everything. Their bodies, spirits, and minds are pulled in different directions. The Vietnamese American female characters are not excessively good or bad as those we often see in movies—they are ordinarily good and bad. They seem trapped in a culture that fails to see them for who they are. And yet the characters don’t regard themselves as victims nor as fighters. Instead, they express emotions and thoughts, and take actions that complicate predetermined notions of female wisdom and naïveté. Pointing obliquely to the psychological cost derived from the dissonances between awareness, emotions, and actions is an “Interlude” situated in between the novellas, told from a privileged perspective of a younger brother who, in contrast, appears too pure and too kind.
The courageous exploration of the four heroines’ complex interiors evokes the contradictions seen in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, where the narrator admits her struggle between the desire for independence and the longing to be taken care of by a man. Forty years later, Strom’s narrators share similar concerns, while excavating directly the excesses of “lightness” and “darkness” that can emanate from such tensions.
Characters in The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys search for the meaning of life, while also appearing blind to external racial and gender biases that shape their lives. They don’t quite fit in their respective worlds, and yet they’re not different enough to stand out as misfits. Their subsequent ambivalence vis-à-vis those who are near them transpires to readers, as we are simultaneously pulled in and pushed out from easy identification with them.
The book is also reminiscent of Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth, in which the protagonist’s ethnicity is revealed only at the end of the novel in order to bypass stereotypes and center the humanity of the Vietnamese American woman’s narrator. Literary texts such as these pave the way for other writers to explore the complexities of Vietnamese American characters devoid of memories of the Vietnam War and journeys of escape, without fear of being judged as not “ethnic enough” or as not “refugee enough.”
Dao Strom does not write for an audience in search of exoticism or in search of a resolution of the Vietnam War. She asks rather in beautiful prose that the vacillation of her characters between lightness and darkness, their anxieties and joys, be understood on their own terms without having to carry, represent, or measure up to those who came before her.