PanThe New York Times Book ReviewThere are flashes of tenderness and heartache, but over all [Tran\'s] parents are voids that obliterate all light and perception. The result is a coming-of-age that is solipsistic in its understanding of its own pain. Even now that Tran is a 40-something husband and father of two, a Latin teacher and tattoo-shop owner in Portland, Maine, his memories are not told with the wisdom of age, but with the arrested development of adolescence. His parents still seem impossibly foreign, trapped in the amber of how white people must see them. As a result, a mix of resentment and light condescension toward Vietnameseness hangs over the book ... Sigh, Gone does not question its central premise that assimilation should be the desired goal for self-making and self-preservation ... lacks this curiosity about the world beyond Tran’s immediate one — whether political or familial or communal — to give the book enough sinew and connective tissue. (Even the way he writes about punk has a superficial flair. Little about the book itself is actually punk, formally or thematically, besides the anarchist \'A\' on the cover) ... gestures at interesting ideas without fully engaging in them ... the book still feels stuck in that same mentality — of waiting for approval that isn’t someone else’s to give.
