In this stunning novel about a Vietnamese family resettling in the isolation of California gold country, Dao Strom investigates the myth of westward progress and the consequences of cultural displacement. Told from multiple perspectives and interwoven with the intimate reflections of a middle child, Grass Roof, Tin Roof begins with the story of Tran, a Vietnamese writer facing government persecution, who flees her homeland during the exodus of 1975 and brings her two children to the West. Here she marries a Danish American man who has survived a different war. He promises understanding and guidance, but the psychic consequences of his past soon hinder his relationships with the family. The children, for whom the war is now a distant shadow, struggle to understand the world around them on their own terms. In delicate, innovative prose, Strom's characters experience the collision of cultures and the spiritual aftermath of war on the most visceral level. Grass Roof, Tin Roof is a beautiful work of profundity and empathy, powerful emotion and rare insight.

Grass Roof, Tin Roof

Literature & Fiction

Strom, Dao

Humor & Satire

Harper-perennial

A memoir in text + image + song. In this unique hybrid work, author/musician Dao Strom navigates the spaces between shores, mother and father, two cultures. The daughter of writers, she fled Vietnam with her mother at the end of the war. It was not until years later that she learned her father was still alive and had spent a decade in Communist "reeducation" camps as persecution for his work as a writer in the pre-1975 era of Saigon. This rift--caught between the forward-looking mother who severed ties with the past, and the only tenuous presence of a father who could not turn away from the past--is the initiating ethos behind this memoir, which renders itself also as an experiment in literary multimedia, combining text, image, and song to express the nuances and buried emotions of aftermath. Strom juxtaposes documentary images next to family memorabilia to ruminate on the intersection of personal and collective histories. She travels between the Pacific coast and the Champa ruins of Viet Nam to capture original photographic images that re-imagine folk myths. Her autobiographical essays are candid at the same time they are enigmatic, playing with white space and the shapes the text makes on the page. The result is a multidimensional work that draws disparate "voices" together into one confluent, challenging whole. We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People is accompanied by a music album, East/West, that explores the mythos of two "geographies." The book's "chapters" correspond with song titles on the album, with lyrics interwoven amid the essays and fragments. All songs written and performed by Dao Strom. Recorded at Type Foundry Studio in Portland, OR; co-produced with Dylan Magierek. For a full experience, we recommend listening to the songs to accompany your reading. The book is available as a full-color, perfect-bound, 8x8 paperback; 200 pages. The digital album is available at: daostrom.bandcamp.com Please visit paperdollworks.com or theseaandthemother.com for information about a limited art-edition printing of the book.

We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

MPMP

In an evocative portrait of the rites of female passage, a collection of short fiction by the author of Grass Roof, Tin Roof journeys from girlhood and young womanhood to marriage and motherhood, capturing the lives of four young women dealing with the challenges of romance and relationships at different stages in their individual lives.

The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys: Stories

United States

Counterpoint

"The book is informed by the Vietnamese immigrations of the nineteen-seventies but is filled with social observation of contemporary middle-class culture and indie sensibility . . . Quietly beautiful, Strom's stories are hip without being ironic." ―The New Yorker When The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys was first published in 2006, it was groundbreaking in its depiction of contemporary young Vietnamese women living in the United States, centering their ordinary lives as mothers, lovers, friends, and daughters against the backdrop of immigration and assimilation. Available now for the first time in paperback and featuring an introduction by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and a new preface by the author, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is a beautifully written, psychologically astute foray into the rite of female passage.

The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys: Four Stories

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Asian &amp; Asian American Studies. Art. Bilingual Edition. Translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen. Dao Strom's YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SOMEONE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE, translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen as Mình s? luôn là ng??i n? ??n t? n?i n?, is a collection and is a re-collection, a "re-membering". Caressing the fault lines of history and self, the book locates fragments and rubs them into their own wholeness. As when a camera lens zooms in, images of "memory's memories" come into focus as story. And as the lens continues to zoom, the story ruptures back into words, punctuation, slices drifting in empty space. And you are aware that you are implicated, that your act of reading is involved in the continuation and the erasure of memories that do not "belong" to you, as mythologies are created, as echoes of knowledge are passed on across time and distance. Dao Strom's book contains this instruction, explicitly named and repeatedly misspelled: "teach them woh to read us, teach meht how to read us, hcaet them how to read us, teach them how to read su." Calling to mind Edmond Jabès' "shattered writing," a shard of broken glass reflects the absent clouds and reflects the whole sky. Each piece of letter mirrors the eyes and hearts of the writer, as you, as someone else. Teach us. How to make something v?, something broken, something shattered be beautiful? YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SOMEONE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE, where you are.

You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else

Poetry

AJAR

Product Description Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Art. Music. 175 pages long, Dao Strom's INSTRUMENT is an experiment in multimodal poetics-inhabiting a synergistic blend of poetry, music, and visual art: the artist's three forms of "voice." Born in Vietnam and leaving the country at the age of two for Northern California, Strom's life and work speaks to fragmentation-of/within selves, histories, cultures, groups of people, and places-yet within this configuring lies her art's fluid mastery. Combining color photography, personal biography and gripping, restless poetry, INSTRUMENT represents a unique melding of literature and art. The poems are augmented by an album, Traveler's Ode, of ambient and folk-tinged songs featuring ethereal assemblages of sung-poetry, vocal layering, spare guitar and piano, and field sounds from sources such as rivers, sea, jungle, birds. Traveler's Ode is a collaborative release between Fonograf Ed. and Antiquated Future. Book Description A virtuosic hybrid text by Vietnamese American artist Dao Strom, winner of a 2020 Literary Arts Career Fellowship About the Author Dao Strom is a Vietnamese-American artist who works with three "voices"written, sung, visual--to explore hybridity and contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Using practices of polyvocality, fragmentation, and (re)assemblage, Strom writes arrangements of poetry, music, image, song and sound, to be experienced as performance, installation, multimedia, recordings, and inside the spaces of a book. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship. She has received support from RACC, Precipice Fund, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others.

Instrument

Music

Fonograf Editions

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