by Aimee Phan
The yellowed envelopes scatter across the top of the water, fanning out like schools of fish. For a brief moment, they stand out bright and clear in the jade-green bay. Xuan and Cam swim ahead of her toward the soaking letters. But Cherry can already feel them growing heavy, sinking, sinking to the bay floor.
Acknowledgments
This book belongs to many people.
Thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Washington State University, and California College of the Arts for their support of the research and writing of this novel.
Thanks to Dorian Karchmar, for her insight and quick thinking, to Nichole Argyres, who often understood my characters and plots better than I did, and to Laura Chasen, for having the answers to any and every question that I had.
Thanks to my family and friends, who rallied me through the many versions of this book. Especially AT and Teresa Phan, Andrew and Hannah Phan, Terry and Patricia Shears, Ellen Lee, Anu Manchikanti, Sharon Ongerth, Vu Tran, Alex Kuo, Joan Burbick, and Augusta Rohrbach. To Julie Thi Underhill, for her beautiful pictures and the elegant redesign of my Web site.
And to my life partner, Matt Shears. Your compassion and wisdom is laced throughout these chapters, which you have read and reread for the last seven years. I am honored to share my life, children, and writing with you.
ALSO BY AIMEE PHAN
We Should Never Meet
About the Author
AIMEE PHAN’s story collection We Should Never Meet was named a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards. A recent National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, Aimee is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she won a Maytag Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Oregonian, among others. Born and raised in Orange County, California, she now teaches writing and literature at the California College of the Arts.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE REEDUCATION OF CHERRY TRUONG. Copyright © 2012 by Aimee Phan. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Phan, Aimee.
The reeducation of Cherry Troung : a novel / Aimee Phan.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-32268-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4299-6247-6 (e-book)
1. Vietnamese Americans—Fiction. 2. Orange County (Calif.)—Fiction. 3. Refugees—Fiction. 4. Extended families—Fiction. 5. Family secrets—Fiction. 6. Vietnam—Fiction. 7. Paris (France)—Fiction. 8. Malaysia—Fiction. 9. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.H36R44 2012
813'.6—dc22
2011041346
e-ISBN 9781429962476
First Edition: March 2012