[In the following review, Nguyên offers a favorable assessment of Hoàng Thi Dáo-Tiêp's The Lonesome Moon.]

The Lonesome Moon is a collection of short stories by the refugee writer Hoàng Thi Dáo-Tiêp, whose first novel, Dăm khuya (On the Road Late at Night; see WLT [World Literature Today] 67:1, p. 241), has been widely acclaimed by readers all over the world. The fourteen stories depict the lives of Vietnamese refugees from all walks of life, now busy making a living and trying hard to adapt to the American environment.

“Vâng trăng lé ban”, the title story, is about Lê, a brave schoolteacher whose fiancé has perished during their attempted escape from Vietnam, together with the wife and children of her maternal uncle. Great with child, accompanied by her best friend Linh, and without her mother's knowledge, Lê takes a trip from Saigon to the village where her lover used to visit her and is now buried. From the two friends' conversation on the bus, in a pedicab, on the ferryboat, and on a sampan, the reader learns about Lê's family background and about the circumstances in which the unhappy young teacher met the navy lieutenant.

Soon after the collapse of the Saigon government in the spring of 1975, Lê's father and oldest brother were sent to a reeducation camp, while she herself was assigned to teach in remote Mó Cày. There she met Khánh, whose parents and siblings had fled the country and who had come down to Bên-tre to plan an escape by boat. The two fell in love and spent several passionate days together, but unfortunately they were caught before their boat could leave the island. Only in jail did Lê find out that she was pregnant. In their attempt to break out of jail, Khánh was shot to death; so Lê (her name means “Tears”) had to bear the shame of being an unwed mother. Disowned by her mother, she found sympathy and love in her widowed uncle Năm, who had erected an altar for Khánh as well as for his wife and children. As Lê put on her mourning clothes and performed the rites in front of the altar, neither she nor her friend could hide their tears when looking at “the lonesome moon” that night.

In “Gói quà” (Sending Presents) the reader sympathizes with Tú-Anh, who, like all refugees, denies herself and her pharmacist husband and children many things in order to buy medicine, fabrics, cosmetics, underwear, et cetera, to send home to her aunt. Still, the recipients of those “CARE packages” often complain that they do not receive the right stuff and that the communist authorities make them pay heavy taxes on those items that can be sold on the black market. “Dâu giây trên tuyêt” (Shoe Prints in the Snow) recounts the embarrassing predicament of a young man who catches himself wearing his shoes on the wrong feet the very night he takes his date to see a ballet in wintry Wisconsin. Little Thuy-Huong, a schoolgirl whose father works as a pedicab driver, decides to break her piggy bank and use her savings to buy a piece of cake for an old iceman in the village market, only to find that he has died of exposure during the night. In “Chiêc lá cuôi thu” (The Leaf at the End of Autumn) Thành and Chuong, two old friends from pre-1975 days, discover rather late, after their resettlement in the U.S., that the former's wife used to love the latter, an artist, and that Chuong himself loved Thành's wife, all as a result of an accident in which their respective parents had died.

The element of surprise is again present in “Chúngtích” (Evidence), the story of a couple reunited eight years after the events of 1975 separated them a scant four months following their marriage. My-Tiên, after joining her husband Hiên in California, still wears the two pairs of old panties that had saved her life in the course of two robberies back in Saigon. Nagged by his wife, the former teacher Thành in “Thày Thành kiêm dóp” moves to Los Angeles to look for a decent job; but his ambitious wife is not fully satisfied with his opportunities in a pizza parlor or in a dance band. That three other stories are about a schoolteacher should not astonish the reader, since the author was a high-school teacher herself.

Refugees in big cities who answer “Room to Share” ads often run into disturbing or comic situations, as in the case of Mùi, a new arrival in San Jose, California, who is unable to find a quiet room, hospitable hosts, or a minimum of privacy in “Cái nghiêp se phòng.” Hoàng narrates this tale and the remaining stories in the collection in her unique style, which in turn excites her readers and saddens them by carrying them far into the fantastic yet realistic twofold world of displaced persons: people who have left their depressing ways of life in an impoverished country in search of new freedoms in a strange land.