A Bánh Mì for Two

POV: 1st person; dual
setting: Sài Gòn, Việt Nam
keywords/phrases: culture, secrets, family, grief, racism, colonialism, own-voices
tropes: love is the answer
spice: 0🔥s
language: 🤬

read this if… enjoy culturally rich, descriptive stories that also delve into complex issues.

the good

• The story is own-voices.
• The writing is so descriptive that I felt I was in the moment, in the locations, with the characters.
• The writer didn’t shy away from tough topics and wrote about them in ways that educated without making it feel as if it were a textbook.

the bad

• It was a little instalovey at times.

A note: I loved this book, but I also loved it from the perspective of a white woman who is outside the culture. I’ve read reviews that argue that the story, at best, scratches the surface of Vietnamese culture, and, at worst, skews the reality of it. I’m not going to speak on these things in my review, because I don’t have the knowledge to do so.

That being said, I appreciated that the story deals with complex subjects. Vivi’s character is Vietnamese-American, and she struggles to straddle the line between those cultures. She’s grown up never feeling American enough, nor Vietnamese enough, and that’s compounded by the lack of knowledge she has about her parents’ lives in Vietnam before emigrating to the US. For her father, it’s simply because he was too young to remember much. But her mother emigrated much later, and has reminded close-mouthed about her life. Vivi’s part of this story is her journey to Việt Nam to find answers for herself.

Lan was born and raised in Sài Gòn with her parents. But she’s struggled since her father died, sacrificing her own aspirations in order to care for her mother. His death took much of her joy for life, leaving her to flounder. Lan’s journey is one of family and forgiveness, of loyalty and responsibility, of grief, and of finding joy in life again and finding how to move forward.

The writing is so descriptive, so much that I often felt as if I were in the city with the characters. The descriptions of the food were magnificent. Food plays a huge role in this story, and not only did I spend most of the book hungry, there was a lot to learn, too!