What happens when a person's “home” - that very tangible, physical place, as well as the more emotional, metaphysical place of belonging - is very different for parents and their children?

This phenomenon has become more prevalent during recent years, with the growth of cross-cultural adoptions, international business opportunities, and the lure of long-term travel. It is not at all unusual for Mom from Canada to marry Dad from China, and adopt kids from Sri Lanka and Korea, respectively.

Dad “goes home” to Beijing for Lunar New Year and Mom takes the family “home” to Toronto for the summer, while the kids return to a different “home” each day after school. Amid all this confusion, it is not surprising that a child should ask the simple yet provocative question: Where exactly is home?

In Truong Tran’s Going Home, Coming Home, young Ami Chi, while visiting her parents’ childhood village in Vietnam, grapples with this same question. At first, she confirms her only version of reality:

...home has always been our little ruby red house in America, where Mom grows herbs and flowers in the backyard. Home is where you get to go to the Grand Canyon on vacation, or ride on roller coasters at an amusement park.

Then, she embarks on a sensory journey through a very different world that her parents grew up in: streets choked with motorbikes, rice paddies seeping tranquility, and market stalls selling fried canaries and fruit in the shape of dragons and stars.

Ami Chi meets new relatives along the way, finding them full of the same warmth and joys of home. There is Grandmother (Ba ngoai) whom she cannot converse with, yet who has no problem doling out ladles of affection, and Uncle Binh, who skillfully leads them through the streets of Saigon to Cho Lon Market.

Among the endless market stalls, Ami Chi makes friends with Thao, a girl her own age, who invites her to play pick up sticks. The friendship makes a strange place become more familiar, although Ami soon realizes she has lost sight of her family. During an emotional rainstorm, Ami Chi clutches Thao's hand and decides to enjoy the moment:

The deliciously cool water mixes with the tears on my face? Thao takes my hand. We kick puddles at each other. We catch drops on your tongue. In the rain we're sisters, very wet sisters.

When Thao's brother helps reunite Ami Chi with her parents, she exclaims, "I thought I'd never find my way home!” Her dad is surprised at her choice of words. Upon returning to America, she develops an even more astute definition of the term home: “... two different places, on the left and right sides of my heart.”

Coming Home is an artistic book, both from the standpoint of Trung Tran’s lyrical prose, and from Ann Phong’s textured oil painted images of bustling market scenes, quenching rainstorms, and tender moments between grandchild and grandmother.

Truong Tran’s bilingual work is a welcome addition to the slowly emerging body of Vietnamese-American children's literature. Although Vietnamese is now the second largest Asian group in North America, there are very few works that represent this population - and even fewer bilingual ones. When I taught in Southern California's "Little Vietnam” for six years in the late '80's and 90's, forays into Asian malls and led only to poorly-printed Vietnamese versions of a few Disney classics, while scanning the catalogues of English language presses was even less fruitful.

Although Troung Tran’s story is a largely personal one (he left Vietnam at the age of five and did not return for twenty-five years), it certainly has wider appeal to a new generation of kids who like Amy Chi, does not share the same cultural background as their parents.

This is also a book for children who have moved to a different city, state, or who perhaps have moved in with a step-parent or new relative. It sparks the important dialogue of, "Where is home exactly, and how do we define it?”

Roseanne Thong
17 October 2003

Roseanne Thong is author of Red is Dragon and Round is a Mooncake, multicultural picture books featuring Asian culture. She has also written numerous short stories and works of non-fiction. She divides her time between Hong Kong and Los Angeles.

Truong Tran was a 1999 Kiriyama Prize fiction finalist, with The Book of Perceptions.