Please Welcome
Sarah-Ann Smith, Author of Trang Sen
My Foreign Service assignment during the last two years
of the war was in the Indochina section of the State Department. In that
position I was deeply aware of the way the war, and its ending, tore apart
people’s lives, both American and Vietnamese. And there were many refugees, or
émigrés really, in and around Washington, and I got intrigued by what their
lives must be like here, after starting over. I started thinking, they would
make an interesting story.
Had you been to
Vietnam when you started the book?
No, but as soon as travel bans imposed by our government
were lifted, around 1988, about thirteen years after the war ended, I did go to
Ho Chi Minh city and environs, wandering the streets, keeping a journal and
describing places that I thought would be where scenes in the novel might have
taken place.
How did you manage
to connect places in wartime Saigon with what was there a decade and more
later?
Actually, it wasn’t as hard as one might think. Vietnam
at that time had not begun to develop economically, so there hadn’t been much
physical change, modernizing and so forth. Saigon was like a ghost city full of
people, the remnants of American service stations with the American signs,
rusted but still hanging; American-style signal lights at the intersections,
most of which were no longer working. The highest buildings on the skyline were
American-built, so that the place looked much like a mid-1960s Midwestern city,
with the older French buildings and small Asian storefronts mixed in.
How long did it
take you to write the novel?
I wrote it in fits and starts, beginning back in the
mid-1980s. Other things, such as family illness, kept getting in the way. When
I finally did have something I thought was worth sending to agents, the response
was very discouraging, and I would periodically get stymied. But gradually it
took shape, and the final version – before the copy-editing and publishing
process took place – was done about four years ago.
Do you speak
Vietnamese?
No. I did try to learn such things as names people give
their children, forms of address – Miss, Mr., etc. And I do speak Chinese, so
Asian-language tonalities and speech patterns weren’t completely unfamiliar to
me.
How did you go
about writing the novel? Did you do a great deal of research?
I had some background to start with, from my academic
studies, which focused on East and Southeast Asia, and from my Foreign Service
experience, though I never actually served in Vietnam. When I began working on
the book, I started with the story, then tried to be sure it was as
historically and culturally accurate as I could make it. That isn’t the way all
authors work, it’s just my way. Some writers do it the other way around, doing
lots of research, then writing the book.
Did you
particularly identify with one or more of the characters, Trang Sen, for
instance? Are there others that you dislike?
To a certain extent, particularly as the characters were
being developed, I identified with each of them. I don’t think I could create a
character that I disliked from the word go. Once the book was in editing stage,
I liked some better than others – I’m not going to say which ones.
How would you
describe the focus of the book?
I originally intended it as a coming-of-age story about a
young woman with conflicting desires and ambitions. And it is a coming-of-age
novel, but I’ve been surprised that readers see it as a way of understanding
certain things about the Vietnam war that they never understood before. So I’ve
come to see that it really is both, and perhaps other things as well.
How accurate is
your description of the issues faced by Vietnamese immigrants when they arrived
in the U.S.?
In my own personal experience, which is reflected in more
objective studies, it was terribly difficult for many of them. Refugees who
were highly trained professionals found themselves in menial jobs as the only
way to make a living – that’s very humiliating for an educated person. Some
committed suicide. Teen-agers were also adrift, and some went terribly astray.
Did you know any
couples like the one you describe?
Working in the State Department – and because of the
personal stories that went around at the end of the war – I was aware that
there were many relationships, and many kinds of relationships, between
American men and Vietnamese women. Some of them were quite good and ended in
marriage, but many were little better than the kind of liaison between a G.I.
and what I refer to in the book as Tea Girls.
Will there be a
sequel?
A lot of people have asked me that. I think everyone who
reads the book ends up wondering what will happen to Trang Sen in her new life.
But given that this book took so long to write, I don’t know that I’d want to
undertake that commitment right now.
About Trang Sen
Set in the Vietnam War era, Sarah Ann Smith's novel "Trang Sen" touches numerous genres—historical novel, coming of age, love story, political analysis—but at heart it is simply a riveting story of fascinating people caught up in the turmoil of their time and place, and told in the spare style of a true master of the language. Trang Sen is "White Lotus," a young Vietnamese girl caught up in the chaos and heartbreak of civil war, international conflict, and the disintegration of her family. At last, in a new life far from her homeland, she finds deep within herself the brave woman she has always longed to be.
{Blurb from Trang Sen at Amazon.com }
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