The Frangipani Hotel Stories

Review by New York Times Review

IN "BOAT STORY," the first offering from "The Frangipani Hotel," Violet Kupersmith's subversively clever debut collection, a teenage girl in Houston, from a family of Vietnam War refugees, asks her grandmother to recount her sea journey to the United States for a school assignment. "Communists! Thai pirates! Starvation!" the girl says. "That's an A-plus story." The girl has in mind a standard coming-to-America narrative: flight from oppression, endurance of a harrowing middle passage and a final embrace in this country's good fortune. What she gets instead is an unruly lesson in the family's background. Grandma spins an eerie tale of being a young woman lost at sea with her husband during a brutal storm. The ghost of a drowned man has summoned the tempest, and the rotting and waterlogged apparition pursues them through the towering waves, beseeching them for something he can no longer articulate. "We do not know how to lay you to rest," the grandmother cries as the storm's fury peaks. "We are just two wet and weary souls, like you." At these words, the ghost disappears, the storm subsides and the young couple swim safely home. The girl objects - "I'm going to fail history!" - and demands the "real story" of her family's escape. The grandmother replies that her story is real, and that it includes "everything you need to know about your history." As for escape, she says, "Did we ever really escape?" Each story in "The Frangipani Hotel," set in Vietnamese émigré communities in the United States and in modern-day Vietnam, traces a similarly spectral path. In the title story, a beautiful and vengeful phantom haunts a shabby hotel in Hanoi, bewitching a carpetbagging American man and luring him to his doom. Otherworldly figures surround an overweight Vietnamese-American girl dispatched by her mother to Ho Chi Minh City in "Skin and Bones," including a faceless banh mi sandwich maker whose delectable dishes compete with scents from beyond the grave. The wisecracking Vietnamese truck driver of "Little Brother" gives a ride to what he thinks is a dying man, only to end up fighting for his life with a body-snatching ghoul. The spirit of a young woman murdered during the Vietnam War comes to collect an awful debt from the soldier who shot her in "One-Finger." Kupersmith, the daughter of a former Vietnam boat refugee and an American father, is in her early 20s. She began to write "The Frangipani Hotel" as a student at Mount Holyoke College and during a post-college Fulbright in Vietnam. These stories - playful, angry, at times legitimately scary - demonstrate a subtlety of purpose that belies her youth. Ghost stories and gothic fables, an important part of Vietnamese folklore, are used here in part to subvert traditional Vietnamese narrative motifs about women. "The Red Veil," for example, with its untamed female twins, useless men and a murdered witch, seems a direct rebuke to the dutiful, chaste, ever-suffering female archetypes of "The Tale of Kieu," Vietnam's national epic poem. A sly storytelling gambit, if one that most readers would not notice. The supernatural also helps Kupersmith avoid a common approach among American writers, one in which Vietnam and the Vietnamese act as props to expose America's virtues and flaws, a form of storytelling that the grandmother in "Boat Story" refuses to adopt. Vietnam remains for many Americans less a place than an idea, the crucible on which the country's imperial ambitions foundered. The inhuman element in Kupersmith's stories leads us away from these clichés, making the characters more human and humane. In "Skin and Bones," the banh mi hawker lectures the story's gluttonous protagonist about her preference for a shortened version of her name - Thuy instead of the properly Vietnamese Bich Thuy. "It's only half of your name," she says. "Only half your identity." A familiar, even bland observation, but one made more forgivable when delivered by a ghost from another dimension preparing magical Vietnamese snacks. THEODORE ROSS is the author of a memoir, "Am I a Jew?" He has written for The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, The Oxford American and other publications.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 25, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

Set in Vietnam and the U.S., these stories integrate the darker elements of Vietnamese folklore and myth. The nine pieces of short fiction feature a variety of characters who come from different economic and educational backgrounds and often spotlight relations among family members. In Reception, the slowly unfolding narrative encompasses the family running the Hotel Frangipani, an American businessman, and the beautiful manifestation of a local spirit. Internal tensions among characters propel narratives and create a suspenseful atmosphere. Guests features an American woman employed by the consulate in Ho Chi Minh City, her Canadian lover, and the people, local and expatriate, who surround them. Readers get to decide the outcome of several of the stories. One with an ambiguous ending, Red Veil, begins in a Catholic convent, alternates between modern and historic Vietnam, and spotlights the tragedy of two sisters, a new stepmother, and the revenge of a human channel for the spirits of the dead. This first collection introduces a writer to watch and belongs in any library serving a short story readership.--Loughran, Ellen Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In the stories in Kupersmith's fiction debut, which are based on Vietnamese folktales, the modern and ancient collide, as do the real world and the spirit world. The stories are cast with a diverse assortment of characters, alive and dead. In "Reception," set in the titular hotel in Hanoi, the front desk clerk, Phi, encounters an enigmatic woman whom he sets up on a fateful date with a visiting American businessman. In "Turning Back," Phuong Nguyen, an aimless Vietnamese-American girl, finds a naked, elderly Vietnamese man behind the convenience store in Houston where she works as a clerk, and discovers to her horror that the man can (and does) take the form of a giant python. The collection's least spirit-ridden story, "Guests," features Mia, a young American woman who works at the U.S. Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City; her job involves processing visa requests from people who claim to have been fathered by U.S. servicemen during the Vietnam War. The stories shimmer with life. The heat and tumult of Vietnam's cities are palpable, and the awed wonderment of humans confronted with supernatural occurrences is artfully conveyed. These polished stories mark Kupersmith, who is in her early 20s, as one to watch. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

What is most haunting in Kupersmith's nine multilayered pieces are not the specters, whose tales are revealed as stories within stories, but the lingering loss and disconnect endured by the still living. With an American father and a Vietnamese "former boat refugee" mother, the author channels her bicultural history to create contemporary, post-Vietnam War glimpses of reclamation and reinvention on both sides of East and West. In "Skin and Bones," two Houston sisters visit their Ho Chi Minh City grandmother "to rediscover their roots" but more realistically because "Vietnam Was Fat Camp." In "Guests," a pair of American expat lovers have diverging expectations. A dying youth tries to steal another's body in "Little Brother," and an insistent knock at the door demands retribution 40 years after the war in "One-Finger." In "Reception," set in the titular Frangipani Hotel, the clerk's family's past overlaps with the coming new brand of the ugly American. VERDICT The wunderkind moniker will soon enough be attached to the 1989-born Kupersmith, who wrote most of these stories as a Mt. Holyoke undergraduate. Her mature-beyond-her-years debut deserves equal shelf space with other spare, provocative collections, such as Paul Yoon's Once the Shore, Lauren Groff's Delicate Edible Birds, and Yoko Ogawa's Revenge. [See Prepub Alert, 10/14/13.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In Kupersmith's debut collection, old men shape-shift into serpents, ghostly women lap at bath water, mute twins frighten their own father, a deathly ill man hungers to hear his driver's story, and all have a price to pay. The ghosts of Vietnam haunt the pages of this collection, and as characters tell each other tales, the act of storytelling becomes dangerous, for the past feeds upon the present. As the grandmother in "Boat Story" tells of a strange encounter during a storm, she questions whether one can ever escape the past, because escaping the storm must surely have come at a price. The best of these short stories, such as "Little Brother" and "The Red Veil," are indeed disturbing. Set in the titular Frangipani Hotel, "Reception" deftly mixes humor with horror. The narrator, Phi, runs the desk because his English is fairly good. Once owned by Phi's father and two uncles, the hotel now belongs only to his uncle Mr. Henry; Phi's father committed suicide a few years after Phi's other uncle drowned under mysterious circumstances. With his crazy ideas for boosting business (including a weird plastic fountain and mustard-yellow uniforms), Mr. Henry both exasperates and amuses his nephew. One day, however, Phi discovers a strange woman living in an officially unoccupied room. She exacts promises that set in motion a catastrophic collision between present and past, man and woman, America and Vietnam. Other tales are less successful, omitting links that would explain startling metamorphoses. In "Skin and Bones," for example, an overweight girl is sent to visit her grandmother. She knows full well it's really fat camp, and she's willing to tell her story to a masked woman in exchange for delicious sandwiches. Her story may come at a cost, but Kupersmith's tale leaves a lot of loose ends dangling. At her best, Kupersmith writes lyrically haunting tales; she's a writer to watch.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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BOAT STORY "Here, con, I cut up a đu đủ just for you." "Oh no, Grandma, I--­" "It's very ripe!" "Gra--­" "And very good for you too!" "Grandma! You know I can't eat papaya. It makes my stomach hurt." "Tck! It goes in the trash can then. Such a waste." "Wait! Why can't you eat it? Or feed it to Grandpa?" "Grandpa and I are sick of it--­we've eaten nothing but đu đủ for two straight days because I bought six from that Chinese grocer out in Bellaire last week and now they're starting to go bad." "Ha! Why did you buy so many?" "I was hoping for visitors to share them with. But no one comes to see me. Everyone is too busy--­so American! Always working, working, and no time for Grandma. Not even your mother stopped by this week. And the only reason you're here is a silly high school project." "All right, all right. But I'm only gonna eat a bit, okay? Just this little piece right here. And then we'll do the interview . . . Oh God, it's so slimy . . ." "Wonderful! Yes, chew, chew--­" "You don't need to tell me to chew!" "It's disgusting to speak with your mouth full, con. Chew, chew. Swallow! See, that wasn't so bad, was it? And it will make your hair shiny and give you good skin. Have another piece." "My stomach feels weird already, Grandma. But I'll have one more piece while you talk, deal?" "Oh, making deals now, hah? And I thought you weren't sneaky like the other grandchildren. You'll start gambling next. What kind of story did you want me to tell you, con?" "I'm after the big one." "Oh dear." "Leaving Vietnam. The boat journey. That's what I want to write about." "Ask your mother." "I did, but she was too young when it happened. She only remembers the refugee camp and arriving in Houston." "Ask your father then." "He came over on a plane in the eighties, and that's not half as exciting. That'll get me a B if I'm lucky. But your boat person story? Jackpot. Communists! Thai pirates! Starvation! That's an A-­plus story." "Oh, is that what it is?" "Mom said you don't like talking about the war, but I should know about my past, shouldn't I? That's what this school project is about--­learning your history, exploring your culture, discovering where you came from, that kind of thing." "You really want to know the country you came from?" "Yes." "And you want a story about me on a boat?" "Yes!" "Fine. I will tell you a boat story. It begins on a stormy day at sea." "Wait, wait! Let me get my pencil . . . Okay, go!" "The waves were vicious, the wind was an animal, and the sky was dung-­colored." "Hang on a second. Where were you?" "On the boat, of course." "Well yeah, but is this 1975? We are talking about 1975, right?" "Child, when you're my age you don't bother remembering years." "But this is at the very end of the war?" "Did that war ever really end, con?" "Look, Grandma, I just need to get the dates straight! How old were you then?" "Around the same age as you; I married young. Perhaps a couple years older." "I think you're getting confused. If Mom was seven when she left, you had to have been way older than sixteen." "Don't be silly. I remember everything perfectly. This was the day after my wedding. My hair was long and shiny--­it was all the đu đủ I ate growing up, I'm telling you, con--­and my teeth weren't bad; they said I could've made a better match than a fisherman. But I did not care about money. Even though we were poor, at the wedding I wore a silk dress embroidered with flowers, and gold earrings that my mother-­in-­law gave me. After the ceremony I gathered my belongings in a bag and moved onto Grandpa's sampan." "Okay, we're definitely not on the same page . . ." "Quiet, con, you asked for my boat story, so now listen to me tell it." "Your grandpa spent our first night as husband and wife throwing up the two bottles of rice wine he drank at the wedding reception. In the morning his head was foggy, so he untied the boat and steered us out to sea without paying attention to the signs: the taste of the wind, the shape of the clouds, the strange way the birds were flying. He cast his nets but kept drawing them back empty, and so we drifted farther and farther from land. By the time he noticed how strong the waves were, we could no longer see the shore. "The storm began, rain drilling down on us as we crouched together beneath a ratty tarp. Our poor sampan bounced on the water like a child's toy. Waves sloshed over the sides, slapping me in the face, the salt burning my nostrils. When our tarp was torn away with a scream of wind, Grandpa and I dug our fingernails into the floorboards of the boat, even though we knew it would do no good in the end. "'When we are thrown into the water, cling to my back,' Grandpa shouted, mostly to hide his fear. 'I will swim us home.' His breath was still stale with rice wine. "But this boat is our home, I thought. I looked out over the waves that I knew would soon swallow us up. Then to my surprise, I saw a small dark shape bobbing off in the distance. I wiped my eyes and looked again--­it was coming toward us. 'Another boat!' I cried out, overjoyed, thinking we would be rescued after all. Grandpa braced himself against the side of the hull and stood up, waving his arms and yelling as loud as he could. I grabbed on to his feet to keep him from toppling overboard, and together we waited to be saved. "But as we watched, we realized that the thing approaching us was not a boat after all. I blinked and squinted, not wanting to believe my eyes, hoping that the rain was blurring my vision. Grandpa stopped waving and went silent, his face puzzled at first, then terrified. "It was a man, not a boat. He was walking upright over the water--­I swear it on my mother's dirt grave in Ha Tinh--­staggering across the sea as if it was just unruly land. Perhaps I cannot say that it was a man, for it was clear that he was long dead, and from the looks of it had met his end by drowning; the body was bloated and the flesh that hadn't already been eaten by fishes was a terrible greenish-­black color. The chest had been torn wide open, and I could see ribbons of kelp threaded among the white bones of its rib cage. Whatever spirit had reanimated the corpse must have been a feeble one, for the body moved clumsily, legs stiff but head dangling loose as it struggled to keep its balance on the angry waves. Grandpa sank down to his knees next to me, and we peered over the gunwale in helpless horror as the body tottered closer and closer. "When there were only a few feet of churning black ocean left between it and our boat, the corpse stopped. It swayed before us like a drunk man--­and for some reason it stood on tiptoe, the decomposing feet arched like a dancer's--­dipping and rising with us on each wave but never breaking the skin of the water. "Grandpa and I waited for the body to move. To talk. To pounce on us. But it simply stood there. I felt it was watching us even though its eye sockets were empty--­for the face is where the fish nibble first, you know. We crouched in the boat until our knees hurt, all the while under the sightless gaze of this unnatural thing. Grandpa would have vomited in fright had his stomach not already been empty from throwing up all night. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore; if I was going to die, I wanted to get it over with. "'Spirit!' I called out, my voice so small against the storm. 'What is it that you want?' "The drowned man's head flopped down to one side and it turned its rotting palms out to me, as if to show that it didn't know, either. " 'My husband and I have nothing to give you; no rice or incense to make an offering with. We do not know how to lay you to rest.' A wave slopped over the side of the boat and I received a mouthful of salt water. I spat it out and continued. 'We are just two wet and weary souls, like you.' "I didn't have to shout these last words, for the wind had begun to quiet down. The rain was no longer beating on my skull and the back of my neck. "With the jerky movements of a puppet on strings, the corpse lifted its head once more and bent its knees. It had no eyes, no lips or cheeks, and there was only a little bony ridge where the nose had been, yet it still looked sad. Poor thing: lost, half-­eaten, and a little too alive to be completely dead. It spun on its tiptoes, then began wandering away across the waves once more. Grandpa thought it went south, and I was sure it went west, though we were probably both wrong, for we were still dazed by the storm. It did not turn to look back at us, and after a while we couldn't see it any longer. "The waves were far from calm and the sky too dark for us to be optimistic, but Grandpa began steering us toward what we hoped was the shore. When we finally made it back to land we were shaking, but not for the reasons you might think. It wasn't that thing we had met out on the water that frightened us, but the fact that we had gotten away so easily. Because what we suspected then was that there would be a price to pay later. I look at it this way: On that stormy day the spirits did not take us, but they wrote our names down in their book, and we knew they would eventually come collecting." "Grandma! What the hell was that?" "Watch your mouth, con." "Seriously, if Mom heard you talking like that, she'd think you were losing it and send you right to an old folks' home!" "Well, now you know why I never tell your mother any of my stories." "What am I supposed to do with a story like that? I'm going to fail history! And your papaya is giving me a stomachache!" "Con, if you were listening you would have learned almost everything you need to know about your history. The first rule of the country we come from is that it always gives you what you ask for, but never exactly what you want." "But I want the real story!" "That was a real story. All of my stories are real." "No! You know what I mean, I know you do! Why can't you tell me how you escaped?" "It's simple, child: Did we ever really escape?" BOAT STORY "Here, con, I cut up a đu đủ just for you." "Oh no, Grandma, I--­" "It's very ripe!" "Gra--­" "And very good for you too!" "Grandma! You know I can't eat papaya. It makes my stomach hurt." "Tck! It goes in the trash can then. Such a waste." "Wait! Why can't you eat it? Or feed it to Grandpa?" "Grandpa and I are sick of it--­we've eaten nothing but đu đủ for two straight days because I bought six from that Chinese grocer out in Bellaire last week and now they're starting to go bad." "Ha! Why did you buy so many?" "I was hoping for visitors to share them with. But no one comes to see me. Everyone is too busy--­so American! Always working, working, and no time for Grandma. Not even your mother stopped by this week. And the only reason you're here is a silly high school project." "All right, all right. But I'm only gonna eat a bit, okay? Just this little piece right here. And then we'll do the interview . . . Oh God, it's so slimy . . ." "Wonderful! Yes, chew, chew--­" "You don't need to tell me to chew!" "It's disgusting to speak with your mouth full, con. Chew, chew. Swallow! See, that wasn't so bad, was it? And it will make your hair shiny and give you good skin. Have another piece." "My stomach feels weird already, Grandma. But I'll have one more piece while you talk, deal?" "Oh, making deals now, hah? And I thought you weren't sneaky like the other grandchildren. You'll start gambling next. What kind of story did you want me to tell you, con?" "I'm after the big one." "Oh dear." "Leaving Vietnam. The boat journey. That's what I want to write about." "Ask your mother." "I did, but she was too young when it happened. She only remembers the refugee camp and arriving in Houston." "Ask your father then." "He came over on a plane in the eighties, and that's not half as exciting. That'll get me a B if I'm lucky. But your boat person story? Jackpot. Communists! Thai pirates! Starvation! That's an A-­plus story." "Oh, is that what it is?" "Mom said you don't like talking about the war, but I should know about my past, shouldn't I? That's what this school project is about--­learning your history, exploring your culture, discovering where you came from, that kind of thing." "You really want to know the country you came from?" "Yes." "And you want a story about me on a boat?" "Yes!" "Fine. I will tell you a boat story. It begins on a stormy day at sea." "Wait, wait! Let me get my pencil . . . Okay, go!" "The waves were vicious, the wind was an animal, and the sky was dung-­colored." "Hang on a second. Where were you?" "On the boat, of course." "Well yeah, but is this 1975? We are talking about 1975, right?" "Child, when you're my age you don't bother remembering years." "But this is at the very end of the war?" "Did that war ever really end, con?" "Look, Grandma, I just need to get the dates straight! How old were you then?" "Around the same age as you; I married young. Perhaps a couple years older." "I think you're getting confused. If Mom was seven when she left, you had to have been way older than sixteen." Excerpted from The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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