3. The author has called this a book of “interlinked short stories.” How does this genre differ from a novel, and how is it similar? Could each of these stories stand alone as a short story? What do they gain by their placement among the other stories?

4. Each of these stories is filtered through the point of view of one of the characters. What are the effects of these shifts in viewpoint? How do we see a character or a situation differently depending on who is looking? Choose a character and look at his or her depiction in several stories in order to tease out the effects of point of view. For instance, how do you see Kim in “The Pussycats” as compared to “Everything Forbidden” or “Arcade Games”?

5. The title of the book is taken from the impression Viet’s co-workers at post office have of him. Why might this title encapsulate not just his story, but the collection as a whole?

6. What is the role of food, both Vietnamese as well as so-called American foods such as pizza, in Quiet As They Come?

7. Many of the images and objects in the book have both a literal and a symbolic meaning. Choose something in the collection that seems to have this kind of double meaning and unpack its symbolism. For example, in the final story, “Relief” there are multiple reference to excrement. What do all of these references—which Elle refers to as a scatological obsession—mean, at a deeper level?

8. Chau is masterful at bringing her stories to a resonant conclusion. Study the final paragraphs of several of the stories in Quiet As They Come with an eye toward analyzing the different ways in which Chau constructs her endings.

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For their monumental support, I would like to thank Hedge-brook for the solace and fresh air, the Macondo Foundation for your community and inspiration, and to the UC Davis Creative Writing Program, where I was fortunate to have been taught by Pam Houston, the best reader I know, and Lynn Freed who instilled discipline in the best way; to Robin Romm for the great honor of selecting me for the UC Davis Maurice Prize in Fiction along with John Lescroart for making it possible; a heartfelt thanks to my reader, writer, friends, Stephan Clark, Diana Ip, Leslie Larson, Alix Schwartz, and Adam Scott for your conversation, keen insight, and beautiful minds; for his encouragement from the very start, my editor in Kauai, Dennis Wilken; to Sandra Cisneros for the first awakening with her words and then decades later giving me a homeland, and finally for Elizabeth Clementson and Robert Lasner at Ig Publishing for taking a chance and believing in this book. And last but never least, to Scott Henderson for the spaces in between, the commas, with love.

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