Description:
From the backstreets of Saigon to the sprawl of suburban Texas, Gills gathers stories of longing, estrangement, and quiet transformation. In luminous, sometimes haunting prose, Tuan Phan captures the ways Vietnamese lives ripple outward across oceans and generations, shaped by war, exile, and the stubborn pull of memory.
A refugee returns to Vietnam decades after fleeing by boat, only to find himself swept into a troubling new kind of tourism. A child shuttles between separated immigrant parents, torn by loyalty and the shifting ground of identity. In rain-soaked Saigon, siblings trapped in a violent household undergo a strange mutation that cracks open the possibility of escape. A dog's sudden illness pushes an electronics recycler into petty crime. A motorbike driver zigzags desperately across the city in search of proof of residence.
Each tale traces its characters at the edge of survival or change, where the mundane and the uncanny brush against each other. What emerges is a portrait of people who live suspended between past and present, absence and belonging, loss and renewal.
With empathy, wit, and an eye for the unsettling detail, Phan writes of those who stayed, those who fled, and those who return. Gills is a collection about inheritance--of memory, of displacement, of desire--and the fragile but persistent ways people find to breathe.
Brief description:
Tuan Phan is a Vietnamese American
teacher of literature, currently living and teaching in Taipei. He was born in
Vietnam and left in 1986 with his family as part of a second wave of Boat
People refugees. His memoir, Remembering Water (Hidden River Press,
2023), chronicles his family's departure and return to Vietnam. It won the
Panther Creek Book Award in Nonfiction.
Review Quotes:
"In knowing, compassionate prose, Tuan Phan limns the lives of contemporary Vietnamese and Vietnamese American people, refusing sentimentality in favor of gritty humor and truth-telling. His stories will stay with you, especially his resourceful, cunning, flawed yet brave characters--and you will wonder how, through compulsively readable narratives, he has managed to make these characters linger in your mind for years."
--Chaya Bhuvaneswar, author of White Dancing Elephants: Stories, PEN/Bingham Finalist and Kirkus Reviews Best of 2018 for Debut Fiction and Short Fiction