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288 pages, Hardcover
First published February 10, 2015
The last time Tu had been with them, the sound of the couple's long nights of love filling the air which in a culture of one-room households it was taboo for anyone to acknowledge. For as many nights as it lasted Ba lay in her corner pretending not to hear the rhythmic noises and small groans coming from their mat but remembering her own nights of pleasure long ago in a world at war, hoping they were being careful but knowing that they weren't.(Wherein Grandma takes a break from her dread at daughter-in-law's wartime pregnancy, in order to explain her own culture anthropologically. With clauses that may or may not have been randomly pieced together by committee to resemble sentence-like products.)
Son sighed and swung the sampan toward the stars of the Black Tortoise. He thought of the things Huyen had told them about the river. The Mekong was a series of rivers that originated in the icy mountains of Tibet and reached the South China Sea through a network of tributaries south of Saigon. It branched and forked and twisted for almost three thousand miles, the dark brown surface deceptively calm. Anywhere two or more branches met there was a dangerous current as the two rivers became one. At its widest, the Mekong stretched more than seven miles from shore to shore.(Wherein kid should quit the profession of fishing and take up writing Wikipedia articles.)