The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys: Stories [Hardcover]

Dao Strom (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2006

In this stunning new book, four tales of love and desire reveal the complications of living in a modern global village. In this beautifully written, psychologically astute examination of the rites of female passage, the acclaimed Dao Strom takes us from girlhood to young womanhood, wifehood and motherhood. Told in four sections, each story introduces us to a compelling young woman and the questions before her, set against the jungle and noise of America today. In this elegant rendering of the rites of passage, we meet four unique young women: Mary, a film student in college who is full of yearning but finds herself confounded by the casual give-and-take of the people around her. Darcy, a twenty-something musician, who must confront the dark and unknown in the form of a naked stranger who repeatedly breaks into her ramshackle sublet. Leena, aged thirty, isolated and alone after having been transplanted from Vietnam to Texas through marriage to an American business man. And finally Sage, a new mother in her early thirties who finds herself entertaining thoughts of her son's preschool teacher while on a road trip with her four-year-old boy and his father. With both shrewd insight into the moral perils of contemporary life and unwavering compassion for the missteps we make along the way, "The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys" is a major accomplishment from an exciting new talent.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Small moments carry enormous weight in these four loosely linked novellas about young Vietnamese women living in present-day California and Texas. Mary, a film student, feels compelled to find meaning in a brief encounter she'd had with the young, white Kenny. Darcy, a cocktail waitress in San Francisco who encounters an intruder in her apartment, wonders why she cannot be "the kind of woman you needed to be... one who kept up proper barriers." Leena, married to a successful white American businessman with whom she has a young daughter, finds suburban Austin somehow "less of a life than she'd bargained for." Sage, a half-Vietnamese singer and songwriter sexually attracted to a teacher at her son's preschool, searches for the people and place that will finally feel like home. For Strom (Grass Roof, Tin Roof), the most ordinary events—eating ice cream, swatting a fly—contain minor epiphanies that can delicately convey her characters' sense of disconnection and longing. Though such moments sometimes strain under the burden of significance, Strom, like her character Mary, more often wisely leaves her audience "a little wanting—she will do no interpreting for them." (May)
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From The New Yorker

Strom's second collection explores the lives of four Vietnamese-American women through their interactions with men. The book is informed by the Vietnamese immigrations of the nineteen-seventies but is filled with social observation of contemporary middle-class culture and indie sensibility. A film student observes that her friend is not "the first disgruntled, slightly sexually embittered male in his twenties" to identify with Travis Bickle, then silently wishes that he would "close himself—save face." A professional party girl from Ho Chi Minh City who has married a rich Texan secretly prefers the clean uniformity of a nearby housing development that her husband hates. A free-spirited young mother senses some indistinct but imminent blessing that makes her float through her cocktail-waitressing job "feeling so sharp . . . lucid and empowered." Quietly beautiful, Strom's stories are hip without being ironic.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582433437
• ISBN-13: 978-1582433431
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,012,466 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dao Strom was born in Saigon, Vietnam and grew up in the hills of northern California. She is the author of Grass Roof, Tin Roof, a novel, and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, a book of stories. Dao is also a writer of songs, with two independent releases, Send Me Home and Everything That Blooms Wrecks Me -- also available here on Amazon.

The New Yorker described Dao's latest book, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (2006), as being "filled with social observation of contemporary...culture and indie sensibility," "quietly beautiful," and "hip without being ironic." Venus Zine described it as "an acute, often painful, exploration of identity, displacement, and sexuality."

Dao is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award, the James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship, and other honors. Her stories have been anthologized in Still Wild: Short Fiction of the West, compiled by Larry McMurtry, as well as Charlie Chan Is Dead 2, an anthology of Asian American fiction edited by Jessica Hagedorn, and Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, published by the Asian American Writers Workshop.

An essay on motherhood and family appears in The May Queen: Women on Life, Love, Career and Pulling It all Together in your 30s, edited by Andrea Nicole Richesin (Penguin Putnam).

Dao's music can be found at: www.daostrom.bandcamp.com.

Dao lives in Portland, Oregon.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tender survivors, November 27, 2006

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D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys: Stories (Hardcover)

In these accounts of Vietnamese women and their families living in the United States the usual structure of a short story is subtly reversed. The tales do not mount to a crescendo of action because the violence and physical danger in the women's lives are in the past. Dao Strom does not flashback to these events but only hints at them. For example, Sage, in the long final story is deeply devoted to her child and introspects about the nuances of her feelings for the men in her life. Her own mother was a Vietnamese prostitute who became pregnant by an American and asked him to pay for an abortion, instead of which he took her child. Some of the characters see the Americans as in some way soft and over-indulgent in meeting their emotional needs; needs that rank low in Maslow's hierarchy.

The first three stories are closely interlinked and concern the same family. I found them the most intensely readable. Mary, Darcy, and American- born Christian are the three children of Su Heng, a boat person, who puzzles them by becoming apparently content with self-sufficient isolation.

The third story, "Neighbors" had the most dramatic impact. A beautiful Vietnamese girl, amoral but naïve and affectionate, is victimized sexually by men and yet able to manipulate them so as to survive.

Incidentally, I never figured out where the book's title came from.