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Hoa Pham

Författare till Vixen

13+ verk 57 medlemmar 6 recensioner

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Foto taget av: hoapham.net

Verk av Hoa Pham

Vixen (2000) 17 exemplar
The Other Shore (2014) 11 exemplar
Lady of the realm (2017) 6 exemplar
Wave (2015) 5 exemplar
Forty-nine ghosts (1999) 4 exemplar
Reality 1 exemplar
On the Continent 1 exemplar
No one like me (1999) 1 exemplar
Mara [short story] (2007) 1 exemplar
Silence (2010) 1 exemplar

Associerade verk

Growing Up Asian in Australia (2008) — Bidragsgivare — 113 exemplar
Eastern Heathens: An Anthology of Subverted Asian Folklore (2013) — Bidragsgivare — 7 exemplar
Borderlands 09 (2007) — Bidragsgivare — 2 exemplar

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In The Wave, Hoa Pham gives us another heartfelt story about the immigrant experience. This novella is about two girls, Au Co from North Vietnam and Midori, from Fukushima, Japan. They meet while studying at an Australian university. The girls become close and soon become lovers.

Midori is the guardian of her little brother, having lost their parents in the Fukushima tsunami. Au Co is separated from her family by distance and does not feel any closeness to the local Vietnamese community, made up of southerners who resent her being from the north. The girls make up for their isolation by weaving fantasies about dragons falling in love, which they tell to one another and to the little brother.

This idyllic existence cannot last and the real world soon intervenes, in the form of a traumatic event at the uni and a marriage proposal for one of the girls. As their fantasy lives unravel, Au Co and Midori are faced with some hard choices about their future path in life.

This is an eloquent novel, well-told, but still sparingly written. Hoa Pham manages to be both poetic and direct, and her relatively brief stories manage to convey a lot. Her tales are both matter-of-fact and contain fantasy elements that could seem out of place in the hands of a less capable writer. It's an unusual style, but she brings it off with charm and ease.
… (mer)
 
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gjky | 1 annan recension | Apr 9, 2023 |
Hoa Pham is one of a burgeoning group of young Asian writers in Australia, some of whom are producing some excellent books. The Other Shore is set in postwar Ha Noi and is about Kim Nguyen, a reserved 17 year old schoolgirl. Kim has an accident and almost drowns. On recovery, she realises that she has become a psychic; Kim can now read people's minds by touching them. As she learns this, she is not sure if it's a blessing or a curse.

Her father is sure and tries to use her to raise money for her sister's wedding. Eventually the military learn of Kim's abilities and dragoon her into working for a military psychic unit. Kim's job is to handle human remains and divine where they are from, so that families who lost their loved ones in the war can be reunited. Kim is a bit reluctant, but reasons that this is a worthy use of the talent that the Goddess Quan Am has given her.

In her dreams, Kim sees the spirits of her grandmother and of the dead that she encounters in her work on the Other Shore. They entreat her to use her skill to reunite the hated South Vietnamese victims as well as Northerners, something the military strongly disapproves of. They also warn her about her boss Bac Phuc. After seeking guidance, Kim decides to defy the military and help the spirits of South Vietnamese and American dead as well. She is discovered, and her world comes crashing down.

This is an unusual take on a war novel, being about the effect of war on the next generation, among the winners, the losers and those who fled. Hoa Pham imbues Kim's psychic activities with the utmost credibility; nobody in Vietnam questions that such a thing would occur and when Kim does encounter sceptics, the reader immediately concludes that they are wrong to doubt her. That's quite a feat for a reader as left-brained and sceptical as I am, and is a testament to the author's story-telling. This brief novel intelligently tackles the difficulties of post-war reconciliation, and how there is no gift that comes without a price. I have already bought another Hoa Pham book, and will probably keep on doing so.
… (mer)
 
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gjky | 2 andra recensioner | Apr 9, 2023 |
One of the signs of a loss of innocence in children is the emergence of superpower fantasies: having great strength to overcome ‘the bad guys’; being invisible so that one can get into mischief undetected; and being able to read the minds of others so that their secrets can be discovered. I was about eleven when I read H G Wells’ The Invisible Man and discovered the tragic loneliness of its protagonist, but— except for dystopias with a political agenda like 1984— until now I’ve never encountered a book exploring the consequences of mind-reading. Melbourne author Hoa Pham’s The Other Shore was the winner of the 2014 Viva La Novella Prize and it’s an intriguing book.

This is the blurb:

‘My grandmother had been right to hide her Buddhist rituals for so many years during doi moi, when ancestor worship was forbidden. The spirits were more important than the rules of men.’ When the dead begin speaking to sixteen-year-old Kim Nguyen, her peaceful childhood is over. Suddenly everyone wants to exploit her new talent – her family, the Vietnamese government and even the spirits themselves. The Other Shore is a delicate meditation on the nature of ghosts, belief and how the future is shaped by the past.

A near-drowning on Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi changes Kim’s life. (This lake in central Hanoi is a sacred lake with a powerful mythology embodied in the temple that you can see in the picture on my blog). Thanks to her grandmother’s intervention to protect the shrine of their ancestors when the Communist government was at its most rigid in suppressing religion, the goddess Quan Âm saves Kim’s life and gives her the power of reading the thoughts of others if she touches them. But it turns out to be a dubious gift.

Kim is only sixteen but the psychic power makes her grow up fast. She soon learns that the thoughts of her parents and sister are shallow, greedy and manipulative. Her sister has always been the preferred daughter, and Kim’s days are blighted by anxiety that she may never fulfil the expectation that she should marry. Her father exploits her power to raise money to pay for her sister’s wedding, and before long Communist party officials demand that she work for them to identify the restless spirits that are interfering with a road project where a mass grave has been found.

Whereas H G Wells’ novel used a semi-scientific device to enable invisibility in The Invisible Man, the psychic gifts in The Other Shore derive from the spirit world, and the sceptical reader not only has to accept the idea that Kim can identify bodies in mass graves through the restless spirits that have not been laid to rest, but also that a 21st century government would commission her to do it. Fortunately, the sceptical reader can find meaning in other aspects of the novel.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/11/23/the-other-shore-by-hoa-pham/
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
anzlitlovers | 2 andra recensioner | Nov 22, 2018 |
This new title from Hoa Pham would make a great choice for Novellas in November*. Although it’s set in Vietnam, tracing many decades of that country’s tragic history, it’s a calm, meditative book which asserts that peace is possible. I liked it very much.

The Lady of the Realm features a young girl who grows to womanhood during the years of the American War, which we in the West know as the Vietnam War. Liên wakes one day after an horrific dream in which she sees the massacre of peaceful people in her village and she seeks reassurance from her grandmother Bà, who tends the shrine of the Lady of the Realm.

In the morning I went to the dinh, the village square, where a wooden effigy of the Lady of the Realm was kept in the centre hall. Bowing to Bà, my grandmother who tended the shrine, I clutched a bunch of purple wildflowers for the Lady, and a rice cake from my breakfast. Bà opened up the hall for me and bade me enter.

I bowed to the wooden figurine shrouded in the shade of the morning sun. She wore a bright pink cloth veil made by my grandmother, and her serene face bore a half-smile. The hall always had a hush about it due to the meditating and worship for the Lady and I walked slowly on the hallowed ground. (p.7)


Her grandmother counsels her to have faith in the Lady’s power to protect them and to hope and pray for peace, but this faith is sorely tested.

Over five decades we see the impact on Liên as first, the Viet Minh arrive, and then the war escalates. But peace does not come when war ends ...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/09/01/the-lady-of-the-realm-by-hoa-pham/
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
anzlitlovers | Aug 31, 2017 |

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Statistik

Verk
13
Även av
3
Medlemmar
57
Popularitet
#287,973
Betyg
½ 3.4
Recensioner
6
ISBN
15

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