“Her mother believed that love, in its most noble and worthy form, was sacrifice. To love her was to love purgatory.”

FDR 310. Pilchers Hill, Geilston Bay, March 2021.

The Coconut Children by Vivian Pham

It strikes me that this is the first novel that I have read by (and about) the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia. This strikes me as absurd, given the size and potential fodder for literature. Given that author Vivian Pham is just 19 (and wrote the first draft of this at 16!), we may have plenty to look forward to in the future.

Given her relative youth, I'll forgive Pham for the odd anachronism of language and life in the heady years of the late-1990s. Similarly, while there's a touch more melodrama than I usually go for in dialogue, the ages and sensibilities of our central characters can reasonably account for that.

These details aside, I found The Coconut Children an impressive and enjoyable read. Given the intergenerational trauma at the heart of our key cast - Vietnamese 'boat people' set adrift in a foreign land - and the setting during the massive heroin glut of late-90s Cabramatta, there is plenty of scope for histrionics.

While I struggle to accept either the troubled Vince and innocent younger brother as fully-realised and believable characters, the sweetness of the morality tale and innocence of Sonny (our female lead) won me over. Even more so, the rich and vivid sounds, smell and tastes of the Vietnamese households and shops are so wonderfully evocative that Pham could have ramped up the melodrama further, and I would have run with it.

Despite tackling some pretty heavy topics (untreated trauma, familial violence, sexual abuse, addiction, poverty and neglect), there is an optimism and confidence that carries the reader through.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2

Comments

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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