The Vietnamese Stories of Immigration
The Vietnam War has continued to play itself out in fiction, history books, and autobiographies, but no American writer has captured the essence of the Vietnamese like Robert Olen Butler. Butler captures the lives of a people that managed to beat the odds and survive in a new country. Madison Bell wrote in the Chicago Tribune "Butler's achievement is not only to reveal the inner lives of the Vietnamese, but to show, through their eyes, how the rest of us appear from an outside perspective." Butler accurately describes the tensions felt between and among the Vietnamese community (both in America and native Vietnam) and the effects the war had on its diverse populations. The lines drawn between the Vietnamese themselves--religious, sociopolitical, etc.--play an important role in Butler's stories, exhibiting his knowledge for the many cultures hidden under the umbrella of nationality. In almost all of the stories, there is a sense of the tensions, for example, between the Buddhist and Catholic traditions in Vietnam help illustrate the country's still decaying sense of unity among its people. As in the story of Mr. Green, the grandfather tells his granddaughter that when he passes on, she will not be able to pray for him. He told
As the narrator in the story of "Love" sat in the tree contemplating throwing the hog bladder filled with goat pellets, we remember the first line that he said in this story: "I once was able to bring fire from the heavens." (Butler 73) We wonder how can a man that could do that, be sitting up in a tree about to throw this concoction over a man's house in order to ward off the man's attention from the narrator's wandering wife. The narrator felt that it was his obligation to eradicate the suitor from his wife's life, as it was his duty to do the same when they were in Vietnam. He does reach a point where he decides enough is enough and let's his wife choose where she wants to be. While the narrator's actions seem to be ludicrous, we see this same pattern of characters choosing their own path in the story of "Crickets" as well. the granddaughter that she was a girl, "So it's not possible for you to do it alone. Only a son can oversee the worship of his ancestors." (Butler 19) This statement by the grandfather in itself is enough to make the granddaughter want to prove that she can pray over her ancestors as well as any man could as well as pray for him using the Buddhist traditions as well as the Catholic traditions. Robert Olen Butler's stories u
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Approximate Word count = 853
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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