By Justine Trinh
A Pho Love Story takes place in the Vietnamese American ethnic enclave of Little Saigon in Orange County, California and follows two Vietnamese American teenagers, Bao Nguyen and Linh Mai, children of the owners of rival pho restaurants. Bao and Linh are forbidden from interacting with each other due to their feuding families — a theme reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. But after they are partnered together for a journalism assignment, they learn that they are not so different after all and eventually develop feelings for one another. However, their secret relationship threatens to upturn their lives when family secrets are revealed.
When I first heard about Loan Le’s book, I was excited for a multitude of reasons. This was a Vietnamese American young adult novel, which I had never seen before. When I think of Vietnamese American novels, I think of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (which I’ve written on here), Thi Bui’s The Best We Can Do, and so on. Most of these works engage with the war and its aftermath, whereas A Pho Love Story markets itself as a simple love story between teenagers. And as someone who was born and raised in Orange County, I yearned to see my home represented.
Yet as I kept reading, my sense of disappointment grew with every page. At first, I felt like my complaints were pedantic:
“There’s no Larkin Street near Bolsa!”
“La Quinta High School doesn’t have an astronomy class or journalism class!”
“I don’t remember caricature artists selling pictures on Main Street in Huntington Beach.”
“Do teenagers really have first dates a Phước Lộc Thọ? It’s basically all jewelry stores!”
But my numerous grievances pointed at the larger issue I had with this book: I didn’t recognize the Little Saigon Le described. Rather she present[ed] Little Saigon from the eyes of a tourist, name dropping well-known places such as Thuận Phát Supermarket and Phước Lộc Thọ without ever really describing them accurately. She scrubs the enclave of its culture and character. Gone are the overcrowded businesses crammed with people trying to order their food to-go, shouting over one another for their chè or bánh mì baguettes with older men outside waiting with their cigarettes and cà phê sữa đá. Gone are the chaotic streets and parking lots overfilled with cars and pigeons and people trying to sell fruit and homemade food wrapped in banana leaves like bánh bột lọc.
When Le briefly gestures to this environment, her “squatting old Vietnamese women, dressed in countryside outfits” seem exoticized and foreign, a spectacle to be marveled at for their inability to assimilate to Western standards. The word usage of “countryside outfits” instead of áo bà ba holds negative connotations that these women are backwards and incongruous in the suburbs of California when in actuality, they are commonplace.
It is painfully obvious Le did not grow up in the vicinity of Little Saigon; Le actually grew up on the East Coast and is currently residing in Manhattan.
So the question now becomes: does authenticity matter within this novel? Despite pondering this question for the past week, I could not come up with a definitive answer.
At first, I wanted to say yes, because the novel bears the burden of providing context in its details for non-Vietnamese American readers. However, in its attempt to explain itself to its reader, it ultimately represents the community in a damaging way in its details and ignores the historical context. To explain the community’s universal distaste for Ho Chi Minh and communism, Le creates a fake pho restaurant within the story, Pho Bác Hồ, that eventually closes. However, this detail undermines the impact of the Hi-Tek incident in 1999 when 15,000 people protested in the streets of Little Saigon after business owner, Trần Văn Trường, hung a picture of Ho Chi Minh with the communist Vietnamese flag within his video store. The Hi-Tek incident showed the emotional hurt within the Southern Vietnamese refugee population and brought awareness of the consequences of referencing Ho Chi Minh and/or communism. For Le to carelessly create a scenario even in passing where a Southern Vietnamese family would name their restaurant after the despised political leader does more psychic damage than good.
However, perhaps these inaccuracies may be overlooked for the overall plot. Not every reader will be familiar with Little Saigon or its history, but I still hold reservations. While the novel’s story revolves around Linh and Bao’s relationship, it attempts to tackle issues of racism, war trauma, and the cost of success. The issues of racism and war trauma are brought up closer towards the end of the book, but at that point, it is too late to fully flesh out these complicated notions properly.
The topic of success is more fleshed out, but it does not reach any satisfying revelation; rather, Le perpetuates the harmful debt and repayment structure of success. Linh struggles with the idea of success where her parents wish her to become an engineer while she wants to be an artist, but Le’s usage of these issues perpetuates the debt of accomplishment culture. Asian American Studies Professor erin Khue Ninh discusses in her book, Ingratitude: The Debt Bound Daughter of Asian American Literature, that while the parents state their constant concern is for the benefit of their children, it is not always for the child’s wellbeing but rather, the “second-generation children [are] viable capital investments, raised to enter the lucrative math- and science-based professional fields now open to them, in order to repay their parents’ suffering with prestigious consumer goods.” Linh’s parents’ success is dependent on her success, and therefore places Linh in a debt structure where Linh owes her parents for her success and this only compounds her never-ending debt. Instead of breaking this harmful cycle, Le reinforces this mentality by attributing Linh’s academic and artistic accomplishments to her parents when Linh states to her parents, “I still wanted to make you proud and show that everything I was doing was because of you.”
I cannot hide my disappointment with this book. Representation of the sort the novel aims for, after all, is badly needed. And in some ways, it succeeds—Vietnamese American young adults now finally have a book in which the protagonists look like them, and they can resonate with the characters through their experiences like getting boba at 7 Leaves and the pressures to succeed. I only wish it depicted its neighborhood with the vibrancy and care it deserved; that it paid homage to Little Saigon’s complicated, brutal, and beautiful history; and that it conceived of representation outside of its most superficial contexts. While I still remain conflicted about the book, I can neither recommend it nor discourage it, but only caution readers of these issues.
A Pho Love Story is available from Alexander Book Co, Barnes & Noble, Book Cellar, Bookshop, Powell’s City of Books, and Trident Booksellers & Cafe.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.