I brace myself, pick it up again and kneel down to study the plastic underside. His eyes are looking right back at me. The gaze is accusatory, too much to bear. The photo shows a baby sitting in a large leather armchair. He is propped on top of a behemoth encyclopedia. He is surrounded by stacks of books and masses of magazines. He is chubby-cheeked and clear-eyed with his Buddha belly protruding before him. He looks regal. There is no mistaking who he is. Even after I place everything into the pink plastic bags and seal it all up, I can still feel the heat of his stare searing through me.

After I bathe and my mom bathes. After we get fresh and clean and change into our crisp cotton pajamas. After we unpack our suitcases and bring out our shiny packaged gifts from America. After they say thank you a dozen times, and we say you’re welcome a dozen more. After all of these pleasantries, my uncle says, “Now where’s that newspaper article I promised you?”

When he stands over the coffee table and scratches his head, I think I will die. I hear him say, “I must be getting old.” He grumbles under his breath and goes over to a banana leaf basket filled with old papers and screams to my aunt, “I hate it when you put things away without telling me.”

He dumps the entire stack out. The newspapers spread out on the floor and he shuffles through them. He is on all fours and the knees of his white pajama bottoms get sooty with print. The blood on his neck from the bug bite has dried. I am watching as he searches through the papers. I have exactly what he wants. It is tucked away in a sky blue Samsonite suitcase. It is covered in shit, inside plastic bag upon pink plastic bags. He scrunches the papers in his fist and tosses them in the air. One by one, they flutter down like parachutes, completely vulnerable and exceedingly common, and still, I pray for each a safe landing.

READING GUIDE QUESTIONS

READING GUIDE QUESTIONS

1. Quiet As They Come focuses on the lives of one extended family that has immigrated from Vietnam to America. What do their stories tell us about the two cultures that they straddle?

2. The book also straddles generations. Discuss the differing experiences between the parents’ generation and that of the children. In particular, how do the children change from the first story in the book, where they are Vietnamese children in America, to the last, in which Elle returns to Vietnam for a visit? How do her Vietnamese relatives see her, and how does she see herself in this context?