{"id":52256,"date":"2017-03-09T02:53:33","date_gmt":"2017-03-09T02:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=52256"},"modified":"2017-03-09T18:56:42","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T18:56:42","slug":"eric-nguyen-reviews-genaro-ky-ly-smiths-the-land-south-of-the-clouds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=52256","title":{"rendered":"Eric Nguyen Reviews Genaro K\u1ef3 L\u00fd Smith\u2019s \u2018The Land South of the Clouds\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Nguyen Reviews Genaro K\u1ef3 L\u00fd Smith\u2019s \u2018The Land South of the Clouds\u2019<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

diaCRITICS: Covering the arts, culture and politics of the Vietnamese at home and in the diaspora<\/a>
\n2017-03-06<\/p>\n

Eric Nguyen<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nAuthor Genaro K\u1ef3 L\u00fd Smith<\/a>.<\/small><\/p>\n

diaCRITIC Eric Nguyen reviews <\/em>The Land South of the Clouds<\/a>,\u00a0Genaro K\u1ef3 L\u00fd Smith\u2019s newest fiction novel.<\/em><\/p>\n

Genaro K\u1ef3 L\u00fd Smith<\/a> returns to familiar territory in his second book, The Land South of the Clouds<\/em><\/a>. Readers of his previous book, The Land Baron\u2019s Sun, will be acquainted with many of the subjects here: the Vietnam War<\/a>, the loss of homeland, and even a character, L\u00fd Loc, the elderly patriarch based on Smith\u2019s grandfather who sees his old ways of life dramatically changed when the Communists come to power. But whereas Smith\u2019s first book largely focused on life in Vietnam<\/a> in the aftermath of war, The Land South of the Cloud<\/em> explores what life is like for those who left.<\/p>\n

The book opens up in Los Angeles<\/a>. It is June 1979. The Iran hostage crisis<\/a> is only a few months away and so is the release of Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s<\/a> Apocalypse Now<\/em><\/a> in American theaters and ten-year-old Long-Vanh is watching his mother, Vu-An, leave as her husband, Wil, sleeps. \u201cYou can tell them I\u2019m dead,\u201d she says before asking Long-Vanh to keep her departure a secret and boarding a cab. Torn between loyalties, Long-Vanh races to his sleeping father but is interrupted by the unexpected return of his mother. It was a practice run, she says, before telling him again, \u201cDon\u2019t tell your Dad.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…The Land South of the Cloud<\/em> is frank in its depiction of being biracial in a country that often sees only black and white when it comes to race. Like the nameless narrator of James Weldon Johnson\u2019s<\/a> The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man<\/em><\/a>, Long-Vanh isn\u2019t so much as straddled between two worlds of race as alienated by them. Unlike Johnson\u2019s narrator, though, Long-Vanh can\u2019t pass<\/a> as one race or the other. The result is an experience marked by both outsider status and shame. For Long-Vanh this means being treated as an anomaly at worst or an exotic object at best. As a child, he is called a \u201cyellow nigger\u201d by other Vietnamese kids. As an adult, Long-Vanh notes:<\/p>\n

Women were always curious about my kind, and they wanted to know what it was like to sleep with someone like me.\u00a0 To them, I was something of a curiosity, someone they could lay claim to, like a token, and say, \u201cI\u2019ve slept with one of them.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Long-Vanh is never truly comfortable with who he is…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

diaCRITIC Eric Nguyen reviews “The Land South of the Clouds,”\u00a0Genaro K\u1ef3 L\u00fd Smith\u2019s newest fiction novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,5,8,20],"tags":[26382,26383,26377],"class_list":["post-52256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-diacritics","tag-eric-nguyen","tag-genaro-ky-ly-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52257,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52256\/revisions\/52257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}