i don't believe i've ever read a book in such a fluid, hallucinatory style before, sentences running on like streams of water following their own course. and yet somehow thuan creates something poignant and cohesive, a story that feels almost inevitable in the way that it arises from what may otherwise look like a maze of jumbled thoughts. taking place in the mind of the narrator during a suspected bomb threat on the métro, thuan traces her experiences as a diasporic vietnamese woman -- from her early days in vietnam, to her studies in leningrad, to her present dwellings in paris. throughout it all, memories of her old love, thuy, linger in the bridges between each thought, each feeling, from his discrimination in vietnam for being half-chinese, to the conflict of her parents' involvement in her Future (with a capital F) and their disapproval of him, to her son's sense of ethnic identity in paris, as well as her own ethnic identity as part of the diaspora -- if her neighbours call her madame Au and her documents say madame Au and chinatown is a daily part of her life then, therefore, should she not also be an Au? to what extent is her ethnic identity the same as which she had been born into when it has been reshaped by so many different molds? thuan delves into the running thoughts of the narrator as a way to show the deep-seated nature of diasporic conflict, and the way it forms the foundation of the experience of any such individual.