The Gentle Order of Girls And Boys: Four Stories by Dao Strom
Counterpoint Press; 4 Bks in 1 edition (May 31, 2006)

From The New Yorker
Strom's second collection explores the lives of four Vietnamese-American women through their interactions with men. The book is informed by the Vietnamese immigrations of the nineteen-seventies but is filled with social observation of contemporary middle-class culture Leena in Texas and indie sensibility Sage in Austin punk rock scene. A film student observes that her friend is not "the first disgruntled, slightly sexually embittered male in his twenties" to identify with Travis Bickle, then silently wishes that he would "close himself—save face." A professional party girl from Ho Chi Minh City who has married a rich Texan secretly prefers the clean uniformity of a nearby housing development that her husband hates. I was very int in this girl Leena (the third of the four). And then Sage too: A free-spirited young mother senses some indistinct but imminent blessing that makes her float through her cocktail-waitressing job "feeling so sharp . . . lucid and empowered." Quietly beautiful, Strom's stories are hip without being ironic.
I haven't yet read much of the first sxn, d n get interested in Mary. was somewhat but not very int in Darcy (her sister? but the other two women Leena and Sage have no relations to the other three) who has the strange man son of landlord making himself at home in her place. tat was set in california, san francisco area? less of int to me than Austin Tx maybe. and Mary is at a college somewhere. since the rest was very good, shld go back and read Mary part.

From Publishers Weekly
Small moments carry enormous weight in these four loosely linked novellas about young Vietnamese women living in present-day California and Texas. Mary, a film student, feels compelled to find meaning in a brief encounter she'd had with the young, white Kenny. Darcy, a cocktail waitress in San Francisco who encounters an intruder in her apartment, wonders why she cannot be "the kind of woman you needed to be... one who kept up proper barriers." Leena, married to a successful white American businessman with whom she has a young daughter, finds suburban Austin somehow "less of a life than she'd bargained for." Sage, a half-Vietnamese singer and songwriter sexually attracted to a teacher at her son's preschool, searches for the people and place that will finally feel like home. For Strom (Grass Roof, Tin Roof), the most ordinary events—eating ice cream, swatting a fly—contain minor epiphanies that can delicately convey her characters' sense of disconnection and longing. Though such moments sometimes strain under the burden of significance, Strom, like her character Mary, more often wisely leaves her audience "a little wanting—she will do no interpreting for them." (May)

Tender survivors, November 27, 2006 -- Reviewer:D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY)
In these accounts of Vietnamese women and their families living in the United States the usual structure of a short story is subtly reversed. The tales do not mount to a crescendo of action because the violence and physical danger in the women's lives are in the past. Dao Strom does not flashback to these events but only hints at them. For example, Sage, in the long final story is deeply devoted to her child and introspects about the nuances of her feelings for the men in her life. Her own mother was a Vietnamese prostitute who became pregnant by an American and asked him to pay for an abortion, instead of which he took her child. Some of the characters see the Americans as in some way soft and over-indulgent in meeting their emotional needs; needs that rank low in Maslow's hierarchy.
The first three stories ~ first two and the interlude: point of view of mother are closely interlinked and concern the same family. I found them the most intensely readable. Mary, Darcy, and American- born Christian are the three children of Su Heng, a boat person boat person?, who puzzles them by becoming apparently content with self-sufficient isolation.
The third story, "Neighbors" had the most dramatic impact. A beautiful Vietnamese girl, amoral but naïve and affectionate, is victimized sexually by men and yet able to manipulate them so as to survive.