Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey

The good folks at War is Boring described Vietnameria as Maus for the Vietnam War. I’m not sure if that’s true; I don’t generally read comix and Maus isn’t even on the pile. What I can say is that this is a book about identity and trauma, about survival and family. The story follows G.B. Tran’s family, starting with the funerals of grandparents, moving through the childhoods of his parents, the escalating war, and then G.B. coming to grips with his almost unknown family. The story is tragic, most especially G.B.’s father, Tri Huu Tran, who was an artist, teacher, and intellectual in South Vietnam, and who seemed to have lost all those things in his flight to America, leaving a shell of authoritarianism and resentment (although the alternative was several years in a prison camp, so…) Some of the art is quite evocative: busy cityscapes, or refugees trying to climb out of an abyss in the shape of Vietnam.