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While looking in the Biography section of our local independent bookstore to see if they still carried Suze Rotolo's splendid book, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, I noticed GB Tran's book and took it off the shelf and was immediately drawn into this story of a family's journey told by a man who was born in South Carolina in 1976, a year after his parents escaped from Vietnam.
GB's father, Tri Huu Tran (a teacher and artist born in 1947), says to his 30-year-old son near the end of the book, "You can't look at our family in a vacuum and apply your myopic contemporary Western filter to them. Our family wasn't alone. We weren't a special case. EVERYONE suffered. EVERYONE had to do whatever they needed to survive. Years passed before families reunited, before people felt like they had a future again. By then it was too late for my generation. Our hopes and dreams lie with our children. Every decision we made ... every sacrifice we gave ... was for their future."
GB Tran says, " Making this book broke my heart -- my deepest gratitude to Stephanie for putting it all back together."
I am deeply grateful to GB Tran for this complex and compelling memoir that he wrote and illustrated between April 2008 and April 2010.
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