Food, Family, and Finding Yourself
An interview with author Loan Le about her debut novel, A Pho Love Story
This week’s issue of The Fixtape has a guest! A Phở Love Story was one of my highly anticipated releases for 2021, and author Loan Le (find her @loanloan on Twitter) was kind enough to answer some of my questions via email. Read on for our interview and my review.
But first, a summary:
If Bao Nguyen had to describe himself, he’d say he was a rock. Steady and strong, but not particularly interesting. His grades are average, his social status unremarkable. He works at his parents’ pho restaurant, and even there, he is his parents’ fifth favorite employee. Not ideal.
If Linh Mai had to describe herself, she’d say she was a firecracker. Stable when unlit, but full of potential for joy and fire. She loves art and dreams pursuing a career in it. The only problem? Her parents rely on her in ways they’re not willing to admit, including working practically full-time at her family’s pho restaurant.
For years, the Mais and the Nguyens have been at odds, having owned competing, neighboring pho restaurants. Bao and Linh, who’ve avoided each other for most of their lives, both suspect that the feud stems from feelings much deeper than friendly competition.
But then a chance encounter brings Linh and Bao in the same vicinity despite their best efforts and sparks fly, leading them both to wonder what took so long for them to connect. But then, of course, they immediately remember.
Can Linh and Bao find love in the midst of feuding families and complicated histories?
Interview:
K: First off - how does it feel to have your novel out in the world? What feeling do you hope your readers walk away with after finishing the book?
L: It’s been over a month now; I can’t believe it. It’s such a relief. Up until the publication date, I felt like I was keeping a huge secret! But now the book is out there. I’ve had a couple of readers reach out to say that they “feel seen.” And that’s a great feeling.
K: One thing I appreciated about this book is how it struck a balance between examining some of the legacies of the Vietnam War while still being a fresh story about two teenagers coming into their own. How did you think these things through, especially as you were writing a YA romantic comedy, which people are going to enter expecting a lighter tone?
L: Thanks so much! I always knew that the Vietnam War history would be in the background because that’s how I view it in my own life. I know about the war, what drove my family to escape, and how hard it was for them to make a life here. Of course, I knew it, but my family members were the main characters to that story, not me. So I had my own coming of age story. This is similar to Linh and Bao’s situation where they grew up knowing their family’s experiences, but they were born here and went through their own coming of age.
For Vietnamese American writers, I don’t want us to be pigeon-holed and expected to write about the war and the trauma from it. I think Viet-Am writers can write whatever they want (and this is the same for other BIPOC voices out there). In my case, though, I felt a need to put my family’s story into the novel. It adds another level to the obstacles that Linh and Bao face.
Despite the war being mentioned in the novel, I wanted to show that there's life beyond that. Linh and Bao’s parents are successful restaurant owners, and they have their families to take care of. Linh and Bao are dealing with high school, their identity, and their forbidden relationship.
K: Vietnamese is woven throughout the story, and the narrative doesn't go out of its way to translate or contextualize a lot of the phrases that get used. Were you nervous at all making that decision? How does this relate to your own background with the language? (As someone who isn't fluent, I know it was fun for me to see what I could parse on my own, and it was a good bonding exercise for me to bring some of the other sentences to my parents and ask them what they meant.)
L: I’m not fluent either! I’m definitely better now because I took some Vietnamese classes, but I still suck!
When I was putting Vietnamese into the dialogue, I did it without thinking. That’s how my parents sometimes speak: Vietnamese and English seamlessly blending together. I remember being nervous when I saw some early readers giving my book low reviews because I didn’t include footnotes or a glossary in the back, or directly translate certain phrases. So, in my proofs, I made sure to put more context behind them—not necessarily translate them word-for-word, though, because that’s too awkward for me.
Then there are other parts where I just let the Vietnamese phrase be. I think it’s okay to not know immediately what something means. I mean, isn’t that how we all start out learning a new language? Plus, when I’m reading something, and I can’t find the context, I turn to the internet. And that’s fine with me.
I also wrote with Viet Thanh Nguyen’s helpful advice in mind: “Writers from a minority, write as if you are the majority.”
K: From Ms. Yamamoto to Chef Le, adults and their encouragement are such an important part of the kids' journey in this book. In your personal life, can you think of a mentorship moment that was really formative to you?
L: I really love Chef Le! But Ms. Yamamoto is actually named after my late high school English teacher. She passed away suddenly as I was revising the manuscript, and it gutted me because she influenced my love of writing. I don’t think she even realized how much she meant to me. She always encouraged me and other students to find our voices and write about things that felt important to us—even if it didn’t seem like it was important to other classmates. She encouraged us to find our own truths.
K: Who are some of your writing influences?
L: This is hard. I am actually new to writing YA. I mostly wrote adult fiction before A Pho Love Story. Some adult writers who influenced me include Jennifer Egan and Nam Le.
K: One of the protagonists, Linh, is always thinking about life in terms of paintings. If you had to describe yourself with one piece of artwork, what would it be?
L: I am not an art person, so I had to look up a few things for this question, ha! I like Monet’s vibe. His paintings are pretty chill to look at.
K: Your other protagonist, Bao, is a bit of a word nerd. So - what's your favorite word?
L: I included it in the novel! Defenestrate :) I love how specific it is.
K: Besides the familial love, which I was so delighted to see, the courtship that unfolds between Bao and Linh was also incredibly sweet. So let's talk romantic inspiration! What is a movie or book scene that always makes you swoon?
L: I wouldn't say it inspired Linh and Bao's relationship completely, but I never get tired of the film adaptation Pride and Prejudice, the one starring Keira Knightley. There are so many swoon-worthy scenes: the first time Mr. Darcy looks at Elizabeth and does a double-take; when he helps her into the carriage; their passionate argument; and that final scene where Elizabeth spots him walking out of the fog. Iconic.
K: Lastly - as someone who works in publishing, what makes you most excited about the landscape? What's something you think still needs to be worked on/you hope to see change?
There’s a lot of new blood, or people my age and younger, who are changing things up in publishing. Being more outspoken when something goes wrong. Trying to make publishing less opaque and more equal. That’s great to see, especially when all of this leads to an honest dialogue between the new blood and the people who came before us. I see this happening at work.
I hope to see more BIPOC voices in not just books but also in the publishing industry, so more BIPOC editors, designers, copyeditors, etc. And this change shouldn’t be a burden that’s put on BIPOC individuals, or be something that we have to fight for. Equal treatment and respect should be expected from the get-go. Not a fight.
Review:
There’s one thing I have to get off my chest: I think a prime opportunity was lost in not calling this book Phở-bidden Love. (I mean, come on, the pun was right there.) This one overdramatic gripe of mine aside, A Phở Love Story is a wry and loving coming-of-age tale that did indeed make me “feel seen.” It’s interesting to be reading this book now because I think twelve-year-old me would have rejoiced at having a contemporary YA with two Vietnamese leads in her hands; at the same time, I don’t know that my twelve-year-old self would have appreciated it as much because I hadn’t yet come to my own understandings about my heritage.
I didn’t grow up in a super concentrated Vietnamese community by way of Orange County like Linh and Bao, the two main characters of the novel. My English teacher—someone who read all my college application essays—was surprised when I dropped by after my sophomore year and mentioned that I’d joined the Vietnamese Student Association (VSA) at my school. I don’t fault her; at the time, I didn’t feel like “being Vietnamese” was a big part of my growing up, not in the larger contexts of being a girl or being Asian. Yet Loan Le, from the first few pages of her book, made me feel right at home. Sure, some of it was in the language, the scattered bits of Vietnamese her characters use interchangeably. But much more of it was in the mannerisms of her characters: the dads and their toothpicks after dinner, the classic mention of Paris By Night, the slight asides to parents that inevitably become detours into their experiences during and after the war (an actual outtake from my dad, driving past an airfield: “That’s the plane I left Vietnam in! C-130 Hercules.”)
I also appreciated how present the parents are in this novel, as challenging as Linh and Bao’s relationships with them can be. Linh’s position with her parents feels tenuous because she’s been keeping her art secret from them since they don’t approve of it as a secure path for her future. While some people might think the “break free from your parents’ expectations of your career” narrative is a repetitive trope for Asian protagonists, I think there’s value to how it’s handled here. Namely, despite the friction, Linh’s family is ultimately warm and loving. They’re affectionate with each other—the scenes where Linh and her older sister Evie are with her mom and dad are my favorite because you get to see all the shades of interaction, the doting and the back-and-the-forth and a little of the bickering, too. It feels more true to my experience of growing up than the quiet estrangement between parent and child that I feel like some other coming-of-age novels deal in, where part of the protagonist figuring out their place in the world also involves severing themself from any sort of authority figure.
I also have strong opinions about a compassionate depiction of parent-child conflict because I hated the tiger parent stereotype that exploded onto the scene in the 2010s. I wanted to be able to gripe about my parents without it being symbolic of some East-vs.-West paradigm or fodder for comments like, “omg, Asian parents are sooo strict.” I felt like people made assumptions that my relationship with my parents was fundamentally strained just because we were Asian, when the reality is that all families are complicated. My sister and I have talked about this at length with each other, but I actually think the brand of humor that gets peddled on Facebook groups like subtle asian traits of “I know I’m Asian because my parents never apologize but at least they cut me fruit” can be damaging. I’m not trying to create a hierarchy of care; I get that people have different love languages. A lot of us have things we need to unpack and don’t always do it in the most emotionally open ways. And I never want to negate someone else’s lived experiences. But I think the baseline assumption that “Asian love” is naturally more reticent or less physically affectionate does everyone a great disservice because it assumes we aren’t able to transform the ways in which we interact with each other. We owe it to ourselves to advocate for the kinds of love we want, to create those spaces in which we feel seen. And I feel like A Phở Love Story, both through Linh’s and Bao’s journeys and also through its message of forgiveness, mending rifts, and moving forward, gets at that idea, too.
Besides the familial love on these pages, Linh and Bao’s budding romance was also a sweet spot. Growing up, I was very into belligerent sexual tension; all my favorite fictional couples were always at each other’s throats or exchanging snarky banter. We can unpack what that says about me later, but suffice to say that I went into this book expecting rivals-to-lovers. Instead, Linh and Bao are pretty sweet on each other from the get-go, and it’s mostly background circumstances that keep them apart. They were less wishy-washy than I expected them to be; the friendly rapport is established relatively early, and the rest of the novel is two kids clearly smitten with each other but just awkward on how to go about it. I appreciated how supportive they were of each other’s passions (Linh and her art, Bao and his writing), and Loan Le is good at carrying their dynamic through various mediums (texting, in-person) and shenanigans (I burst out laughing at the chaos that was their VSA volunteering day).
The pacing did feel a little slow at some parts and too fast in others in that the conflict between Linh and Bao’s families is alluded to all throughout the book, which felt like a lot of build-up just to be resolved in the last few chapters. I’d definitely say that the latter half of the book is more action-packed; most of the story is us getting to know the characters and their day-to-day before they get a little bit of everything thrown at them. Thanks to the alternating point of view, both Linh and Bao get their fair share of the spotlight, time to showcase each of their respective talents. There’s also some discussion of anti-Asian racism, which feels especially timely given recent news coverage about the increase in attacks against Asian-Americans.
All in all, A Phở Love Story is a delectable novel that explores what it means to balance finding yourself with your family’s struggles and trauma. Read if you’re looking for something that will make you smile on a quiet day (which I did on Lunar New Year when my mom’s flight got delayed and I was sad she wasn’t going to make it home in time to celebrate). Read also if you’re looking for something to warm your heart while making you incredibly hungry. (Trust me, you’ll want to take notes on all the good Vietnamese food that gets mentioned. There’s more out there than just phở!)
You can buy a copy of A Phở Love Story at any of the following locations, or check to see if it’s stocked in a library near you!
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Bookshop
‘Til next time. <3
Food, Family, and Finding Yourself
"I think the baseline assumption that “Asian love” is naturally more reticent or less physically affectionate does everyone a great disservice because it assumes we aren’t able to transform the ways in which we interact with each other. We owe it to ourselves to advocate for the kinds of love we want, to create those spaces in which we feel seen."...couldn't love these lines more ❤