Vietnam haunts young Paul, who worries about dying there even as he prepares for his father’s funeral by Chinese reckoning, he is too young to take his place at the head of the family, but not to be swept up into a faraway conflict. Says her narrator, “Now we know the Vietnamese call it Tet, but the Chinese own it: New Year, they call it,” a time in Vietnam as in Chinatown of explosions, bright lights and revolutionary fervor. The story opens on the Lunar New Year of 1968. Yamashita ( Circle K Cycles, 2001, etc.) blends prose, theater and art into this set of related novellas centered on a shabby residential hotel. An overstuffed, multiform swirl of a novel about a decade in the life of San Francisco’s Chinatown and, by extension, the Asian experience in America.
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