Family in Six Tones
In 1975, a teenaged Lan boarded an airplane in Saigon and got off in a world where she faced hosts she had not met before, a language she didn’t speak, and food she didn’t recognize—all with the faint hope that she would be able to go home soon. Lan wrestles with her identities as not merely an immigrant but as a refugee from an unpopular war. She has bigoted teachers who undermine her in the classroom and struggles with inner demons, eventually being diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. But despite these challenges, she fought her way through confusion, and racism, to become a successful lawyer, novelist, and a law professor at Chapman University. Reflecting and refracting her mother’s narrative, Harlan, an American teenager through and through, describes the rites of passage of childhood and adolescence, filtered through the aftereffects of her family’s history of war, tragedy, and migration. Harlan’s struggles—to fit in in high school,...