Bøger af Caroline Vu

Under the cover of darkness, Kim, a young girl, is put by her mother on a crowded fishing boat to escape Vietnam. The derelict boat drifts for two weeks on the South China Sea before reaching Palawan, a refugee camp in the Philippines. There, an American immigration officer mistakes Kim for a sponsored orphan with the same name and sends her to America. In the US, Kim tells her unsuspecting adoptive family the orphan stories they want to hear. While she succeeds in inventing vivid details for her assumed identity, there is a missing page in her own past. The boat trip out of Vietnam is a total blank, and she fears the worse. Years later Kim returns to Palawan as a volunteer doctor. Still haunted by what may have happened on the boat, she begins to record the stories of the other refugees. Through them, she seeks to unblock her suppressed memories.

Beginning in Saigon during the Vietnam War and ending in present day New York, Catinat Boulevard tells the story of two friends Mai and Mai Ly. While Mai flirts with American GIs in rowdy bars along Catinat Boulevard, Mai Ly joins the communist resistance in the jungle. The story also follows Nat, Mai's half Vietnamese-half African-American son abandoned in a Saigon orphanage.

This story follows three generations of a Vietnamese family as they struggle through major events of the 20th century. From the War of Independence against the French colonial power to the Vietnam War, the novel depicts a family's resilience in the face of tragedy, as told through the voice of a young girl attempting to understand family scandals within an historical context. At the novel's core is the death from AIDS in the early 1980s of the narrator's half French, half Vietnamese cousin Daniel, a beautiful rebel who is stricken down following a summer escapade in Provincetown. His family of three generations of physicians cannot bear to call the disease by its true name. Daniel dies alone in his Montreal hospital room.