jock librarian

Forced to leave war-torn Vietnam, four-year-old Lac Su and his family flee Danang traveling aboard a sixty-foot boat packed with over 300 people. After several weeks of drifting across the violent South China Sea, landing in Hong Kong and getting shuffled between tent cities, the family immigrates to the United States and settles in a drug-ridden neighborhood in Hollywood, California. Home is not the heaven Lac and his family imagine. Rather, their new world is marked by the "mayhem and commotion" of police helicopters shining their floodlights across rooftops ("crackhead and junkie haven[s]"), Los Angeles' booming traffic (a "tangled, teeming mess") and uneasy underworld encounters with drug dealers, prostitutes and gangsters. In his provocative debut, Su boldly writes about the trials of his youth, chronicling the loneliness of life in America, the challenges of growing up with a demanding father (a "firecracker with a testy fuse") and his intriguing, yet dangerous liaisons with street gangs. Su tells a frank story of tough love, expressing a deep human need for acceptance while exploring the universality of family life.