Author Angie Chau tells of Vietnamese-American experience

“She told me, ‘Be careful when you eat it; your friends might think it smells weird. You might want to eat it alone.’ It was like there was a shame around the food.”

At age 4, Chau had come to the U.S. on a boat from Vietnam. Before moving to Sonoma County, she lived with three families in a house on 19th Avenue at Judah Street in San Francisco. It was only a few blocks from the house on 22nd Avenue where three Vietnamese families share one bathroom in her recently released debut collection of short stories, “Quiet As They Come.”

A decade ago, when Chau embarked on the complex story cycle, she didn’t know anyone writing about the Vietnamese-American experience.

“I started writing because that voice and that experience wasn’t there,” says Chau, who reads from her work Saturday at Copperfield’s Books in Santa Rosa. Now, “I can name all the Vietnamese writers in America on one hand practically.”

The Vietnamese characters she saw in movies while growing up were always secondary characters to American heroes like Rambo or the protagonists in “Platoon.” Or there were the absurd caricatures like Long Duk Dong in “Sixteen Candles.” Asian women were often portrayed as “quiet, meek Geisha girls,” she said.

“I remember when I was younger it was a disappointment that there weren’t reflections of people like the women in my family, who I really admired, who were strong and complex and smart. That wasn’t there at all. I didn’t have those characters to look up to, so I think that really inspired me to write.”

"Quiet As They Come" drops in and out of the lives of over a dozen characters as they struggle to chase the American Dream while still trying to preserve their own culture in the ‘80s. Young kids stay at home with the blinds closed tight while their parents work. Creepy older men flirt with young Vietnamese girls at ice cream parlors. In "Hunger," seven starving kids share one slice of pizza. In "The Pussycats," a single mother, raising two kids while her husband is imprisoned in Vietnam, unknowingly takes her daughter to a porn movie.

We see 49er Dwight Clark's famous catch, MTV and Run-DMC unfold through the eyes of the Bay Area Vietnamese. One sibling joins the Asian Boyz gang and kills his father. His cousin Sophia falls for a random older guy on a motorcycle she meets at Steps of Rome cafe in North Beach.

After graduating in 1992 from Santa Rosa High School, where she played volleyball and tennis and maintained a 4.0 GPA, Chau attended U.C. Berkeley. Moving to Kauai after graduation, she began writing and sending out short stories, eventually landing a New York agent at a writer's conference and earning a full scholarship to the U.C. Davis graduate writing program. She was making headway as a writer, but not much money.

"It's tough when you know that less than two percent of stories sent in, get accepted," says Chau, who now lives in Oakland. "It's like winning the lottery. You get 10 rejections all in one month and it's a story you've worked on for nine months.

“I think I made a decision at some point in graduate school that you’re not writing to make money. You’re writing because you have to. For me, it’s my meditation. I would do it regardless. I knew that I would be an old lady and still want to write stories.”

For a day job, she found work as a recruiter and headhunter for the healthcare industry. Whenever she got a chance to write, she took it. Along the way, writers Pam Houston and Sandra Cisneros offered plenty of feedback.

Now, at 36, returning to Sonoma County for a reading at Copperfield’s, Chau imagines it’s “going to be a fun homecoming of sorts, almost like a high-school reunion.”

“I’ve had people who I went to school with who have said, ‘I had no idea what your experience was like.’ But I was also guarded about that kind of stuff growing up there, because it was such a different story.”

Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. You can reach him at 280-8014, john@sideshowvideo.com and follow on Twitter @becksay.