Dec 16, 2009

Crickets | Crickets

At a glance:

Author: Robert Olen Butler
First Published: 1992
Type of Work: Short story
Genres: Short fiction
Subjects: Culture, United States or Americans, Parents and children, Interracial relationships, Fathers, Asian Americans, Louisiana, Vietnam or Vietnamese people
Locales: Louisiana

From the short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, “Crickets” is the story of a Vietnamese family displaced to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and the rift that develops between a father who would like to retain his Vietnamese heritage and a son who prefers all things American. Butler repeats his trope of the collision of cultures, this time as embodied in a second-generation Vietnamese American.

Thiệu is a chemical engineer in a Lake Charles refinery. His American coworkers insist upon calling him Ted; he believes that they call him Ted because they...

[The entire page is 681 words long]

Crickets | Crickets

At a glance:

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