WE SHOULD NEVER MEET

This graceful, spare debut collection of eight loosely connected short stories follows the lives of four Vietnamese-American orphans, three of them evacuated from Vietnam in the weeks before the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War in an effort called Operation Babylift. Huan, Mai, Kim and Vinh live in Orange County, California's Little Saigon. Beautiful, troubled Kim and her gang-member boyfriend, Vinh, are victims of a faulty foster-care system; studious Mai fares slightly better, though her vegetarian hippie foster parents never go so far as to adopt her. Huan is the lucky one, adopted by parents who love him even when he "sneer[s] that they treated him like a charity case, their trendy Vietnamese baby." The stories of the four orphans alternate with tales of the wartime journey of one baby—finally revealed to be Huan—from an orphanage in the Delta valley to an adoption center in Saigon and on to the U.S. Phan unswervingly captures the cruelty of children who have themselves been cruelly treated and the grief, denial and alienation created by loss, yet allows Mai and Huan to come to an uneasy peace with their pasts on a trip to Vietnam as adults. The tales of wartime Vietnam are less immediate than the present-day stories, but this is a wrenching, poignant collection laced with pity and horror. Agent, Dorian Karchmar. (Sept.)