Synopsis "Nothing Follows"
The title of this debut collection, Nothing Follows, is reappropriated from a government documentestablishing the beginning of a refugee family's time in the United States. Atevery coordinate of their lives, the refugee family provides affidavits, letters, and reams of paperwork as they work to beseech those in power to grantthem "family reunification" visas for those they had to leave behind in 1975after the fall of Saigon. Nothing Followsdraws from the genres of memoir and poetry. Written from a young girl'sperspective, the center of this world is a military father, an absent mother, sisters who come and go, broken brothers, and friends she meets in San José. With each place the book travels through--from Butler, Pennsylvania, to San José, California--we see that racism, objectification, andsexual violence permeate the realities of the narrator and those close to her.In marking the journey, Lan Duong recreates the portraits of the girl's friendsand family and maps out refugee girlhoods. Spiked with violence, pleasure, and longing, these refuges are questionable sanctuaries for those refugee girls who havegrown up during the 1980s in the aftermath of war.
