Tran’s book is going to face numerous comparisons to Gurinder Chadha’s hit film, and it’s true that their broad strokes are identical: immigrant kid suffers from serious racism, self-loathes and rejects traditional culture of the parents, finds motivation courtesy of a few great Humanities teachers in high school, gets a taste of success on the school newspaper, chases girls and finds solace in a particular brand of music, roll credits as newly self-actualized high school graduate speeds off to college and an unknown future that is nevertheless brightly lit. That film is about Javed Khan, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant living in England in 1987, who’s teenage poetry ultimately drives him to an obsession with the music of Bruce Springsteen that motivates his survival and then eventually his accomplishments. If this is starting to sound a little familiar, you’re thinking of Sarfraz Manzoor’s 2019 memoir, Greetings from Bury Park, or more likely the universally acclaimed film it was made into, Blinded by the Light (Gurinder Chadha, 2019). The subtitle of his book is A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In.
If the pun-alicious title of Sign, Gone hasn’t clued you in yet, Tran has turned out to be anything but poorly read. Then he grew up in a small Pennsylvania town in the Susquehanna Valley where inevitably the kids in school classified him as the one Asian kid, and he classified most of them as “poorly read. He left Saigon, one little baby shoe flung away and missing in the rush of it, when he was just a toddler. “In Vietnamese,” he writes in his debut memoir Sigh, Gone, “the word for country and the word for water are the same” because with the nation’s two-thousand-mile coastline and thousands of islands, “waters were so prominent to its primordial people that water defined where you came from.
The shop’s website expresses a “commitment to environmental, social-justice, humanitarian, and civic issues” because “we are not islands.” Tran knows about islands. Phuc Tran, Carlisle High School graduate of the Class of 1991, moved to Portland (the one in Maine) with his wife and two little girls to open Tsunami Tattoo in 2003.
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