By Holly L.

When I first glimpsed the cover of Phuc Tran’s powerful 2020 memoir, Sigh, Gone, I chuckled at the title. Sigh Gone—hahaha, I get it! As in Saigon. As in Vietnam, the country Tran fled with his family as a little boy in the mid-70s. The unsubtle title perfectly suits the story of, “a misfit’s memoir of great books, punk rock, and the fight to fit in.” In his debut book, Tran tells a compelling coming-of-age story of a book-obsessed punk in small-town Pennsylvania. His case for the transformative power of books struck a chord with me, as a library worker. As an Asian American who also came up in 1980s America, I empathized with Tran’s struggle to fit into a society that was relentlessly calling his American-ness into question.   

Each of the book’s sections is titled with a famous work of literature, the prologue being Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey. The opener is a scene from Carlisle Senior High School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town in the Susquehanna Valley. Tran is sizing up the new kid, Hoàng Nguyễn, whose arrival marks Phuc’s demotion as the (meaning only) Vietnamese kid at his school. “@#$% that kid,” he thinks. Rather than seeing Hoàng as a potential comrade, Tran regards him as “a fun-house mirror’s rippling reflection of me…I was filled with loathing.” By this time, as an eleventh-grade Asian kid who had finally achieved “insider status”—acceptance among his punk crew and being better read than any of his classmates—Tran saw Hoàng as only a distorted picture of who he might have been had he not assimilated so well.

The story begins in earnest in 1978 with Tran’s earliest memory. He’s in the eat-in kitchen of his family’s first apartment in the United States, having fled Vietnam three years earlier. While his mother prepares dinner and his father tries to make sense of some bills with his limited grasp of English, Tran asks his dad, “Ba, what’s my name?” The question arises from playground encounter when another kid asked Tran his name and he didn’t know how to reply. Among all the nicknames and endearments he was labeled with by his family, he didn’t know which name to give. Young Tran felt he needed a name, an English name, that would make sense to his playmates. After a minute of consideration, Tran’s dad decided that the actual Vietnamese pronunciation of his name (which sounds more like Fuhp, with a rising tone at the end) would be too confusing to Americans, and he settled on Phuc (sounds like Fook, rhymes with Luke), which Tran adopts, referring to it as an alter ego.

Tran’s story takes us from childhood through adolescence with identity being a central theme. As he forms friendships and battles racist bullies, Tran struggles to define who he is, along with where he and his family fit in a mostly white working-class town. He expresses an ambivalence about his community, “(as refugees) random strangers had saved us. And random strangers were cruel to us, too.” Violence is another thread running through the memoir, inflicted upon Tran by school bullies and members of his own family.

He finds refuge and a means of self-fortification through books (first comics then Western classics) and later, music, specifically punk rock and its rebellious, non-conformist subculture. Tran’s scuffed Doc Martens and rotation of band T-shirts represent an identity of his choosing, not one imposed upon him by society. As Tran’s reinvention into honor-roll skate punk becomes complete, we see a growing alienation from his family, whose notions of success and assimilation don’t align with his own. One exception being Tran’s second-hand store hauls, approved of by his thrift-conscious father.

Some reviewers criticized Tran’s memoir as lacking in nuance and maturity, but I loved how he channeled the voice of his teenage self in all its egocentric, pained, misunderstood glory. In the best scenes I felt like I was right there, hanging out with his crew, cheering them on when they successfully fled the cops on their skateboards during their annual “Running of the Pigs.” By the end of the book, I felt a kind of pride in this self-made young man, considering how far he had gone, what he had endured, and who he had become. I almost wished for another few chapters detailing the adventures that awaited Tran beyond graduation. But that was the end of the story, at least until he writes another memoir. Sigh, gone. 

Sigh, Gone is available from HCLS in print and also in e-audiobook and e-book formats.

Holly Learmouth is an Instructor & Research Specialist at HCLS Miller Branch. She enjoys reading widely, knitting sporadically, and baking as often as she gets the chance.