CATINAT BOULEVARD

Two friends grow up in Saigon during the height of the Vietnam War, but follow very different paths in the war’s aftermath.

In 1966, Mai is 13 years old, leading a pampered existence in a traditional Confucian household in Saigon. In spite of daily media reminding her that her country is at war, Mai is largely sheltered by both her privilege and a willed propensity to “[remember] what she wanted to remember.” Such is the power of Mai’s determination that, in spite of the powerful impact of witnessing a monk self-immolate in protest against religious persecution and the bombing of Saigon in 1968, her adolescence is largely untroubled until she accidentally witnesses her father seducing his young student Mai Ly. Mai responds by entering into her own sexual liaisons with gleeful abandon, specifically with the American soldiers who hang out on Catinat Boulevard. Unlike Mai, Mai Ly had a childhood defined by privation. Her mother was killed in a hit-and-run accident when she was 4 and her father's family was massacred in My Lai, potentially by the same G.I.s who now frequent his street-corner beer stand. In 1975, the fall of Saigon finds Mai abandoning her baby in an orphanage as she flees on one of the last helicopters out of the city. Meanwhile, Mai Ly, who has served as a spy and armed combatant for the Viet Cong, returns to her home in triumph, ready to celebrate their liberation with a people who, shockingly to her, do not feel liberated at all. As the aftermath of the war unspools, the novel follows the fortunes of Mai; Mai Ly; Michael, one of Mai’s G.I. lovers, who's African American; their son, Nat; and many others as they navigate futures which must be lived in the light of their complicated pasts. This book is a capacious read but its conversational style, evocative characters, and penchant for very short, episodic chapters keep the reader from feeling bogged down by either the heft of its pages or the ambition of its scope.

Dazzling and impassioned, this novel evokes history from a perspective often overlooked—that of its survivors.