Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In

This high-impact, emotional memoir about growing up in a Vietnamese immigrant family refracts the author’s angry adolescence through a prism of classic literature. Tran, now a high school Latin teacher, escaped the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. One of the only Asian kids in the blue-collar town of Carlisle, Pa., Tran felt like an outsider. Falling in with “a wolfpack” of punk skaters partially satisfied his desire for belonging. But discovering Clifton Fadiman’s The Lifetime Reading Plan, with its lists of must-read books—Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, The Autobiography of Malcolm X—sparked his imagination. Books also provided Tran a refuge from the gap between himself and his parents, who he portrays in colorfully unsparing terms, from his mother’s “muscular, if simple, Catholicism” to his father’s habit of beating him with a metal rod scavenged from the garbage: “American efficiency, meet Vietnamese ingenuity.” Being well-read for Tran signified “the promise of acceptance and connection and prestige,” and by book’s end he enters adulthood as his own person and not just as an immigrant or rebel. Filled with euphoric flights of discovery, this complex and rewarding story of a book-enriched life vividly illustrates how literature can serve as a window to a new life. (Apr.)