About this item

A dual first-person memoir by the acclaimed Vietnamese-American novelist and her thoroughly American teenage daughterAfter more than forty years in the United States, Lan Cao still feels tentative about her place in her adoptive country, one which she came to as a thirteen-year old refugee. And after sixteen years of being a mother, she still ventures through motherhood as if it is a foreign landscape. In this lyrical memoir, Lan explores these two defining experiences of her life with the help of her fierce, independently-minded daughter, Harlan Margaret Van Cao.In chapters that both reflect and refract her mother's narrative, Harlan describes the rites of passage of childhood and adolescence, as they are filtered through the aftereffects of her family's history of war, tragedy, and migration.



About the Author

Lan Cao

Lan Cao is a Vietnamese American writer who left Saigon for the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She is the author of two novels, Monkey Bridge (Viking Penguin 1997) and The Lotus and the Storm (Viking Penguin 2014) . Both novels tell the stories of Vietnamese refugees in America, set against the Vietnam War and its traumatic aftermath for those who are left with its haunting legacy. In both novels, the war is told from a Vietnamese American perspective.She also co-authored, with Himilce Novas, Everything You Need to Know About Asian American History (Plume 1996) . She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and her J.D. from Yale Law School. She is also a professor of law who has taught at Brooklyn Law School, Michigan Law School, Duke Law School, William & Mary Law School, and currently at Chapman Law School in Orange, CA. She has written numerous articles on public international law, international trade, and rule of law development. Her book Culture in Law and Development: Nurturing Positive Change was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.



Read Next Recommendation

Report incorrect product information.