Tran's debut memoir...recounts in stunning detail his coming of age in white, small-town America ... Tran...structures the narrative around works ranging from The Scarlet Letter to Homer’s Iliad. This approach expresses themes like longing, love and rebellion, but is emblematic of assimilation in and of itself, and of the ways white supremacist roles of race and class infiltrate identity formation. This framework is perhaps the book’s most powerful hinge ... In laying out his childhood around themes and metaphors, Tran makes his own Great American Memoir ... full of humor and wordplay. This is a writer who loves language, and whose keen sense of observation lends a great deal of humor in the layers ... Tran also does a service to this memoir by containing it in a period of time, closing as high school ends. By focusing on the rich trove of youth without the 'after,' this journey never lets go of its nostalgia even while critiquing it.
... affecting, deeply felt ... [Tran] writes movingly about his struggle for acceptance and his two-pronged attack to achieve assimilation ... A clever conceit, in this connection, is his naming each chapter with the title of a great book and then finding a parallel with his life in each. The result is a compelling story of an outsider discovering himself and a world where he fit in.
Tran has written the great punk rock immigrant story. Or should that be the definitive refugee punk rock story? Or a story about how punk rock and great books helped a Vietnamese kid in small-town America fit in by standing out? Whatever order we put the words in, Tran’s book is my pick for the best, the funniest and the most heartfelt memoir of the year ... With grace and clarity, Tran writes pivotal scenes involving the sometimes violent disconnect between his traumatized refugee parents and their Americanized children—a testament to the sensitivity and balance he brings to his exploration of generational and cultural conflict ... filters the archetypal high school misfit story through the lens of immigration and assimilation, building it into a larger narrative about the ways music and books can bring us together, even when the larger world threatens to tear us apart.
Tran's loosey-goosey writing style is all over the place in emotional tone and subject—something I might ordinarily find annoying, but kind of appreciate right now. In this confused and scary time, a story about displacement that itself is so scrambled feels just right to me ... In his loose, often funny, and rambling way, Tran talks a lot about the reassuring influence of books ... But the surprise element in Tran's coming-of-age story is punk rock ... In actuality and on the pages of this memoir, Tran's life goes off-road, defies reading plans or most other kinds of plans. Which makes Sigh, Gone a congenial read for our chaotic time.
There 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.
... [a] funny heartbreaker ... The march of time rather than a head-of-steam-developing narrative gives Tran's coming-of-age story its forward momentum; Sigh, Gone concludes with his high school graduation ... Phuc Tran, you're so amusing.
... a lot smarter and a little edgier than Blinded by the Light in ways that matter to both the story and its messages ... engages with problems of domestic abuse, homelessness, and poverty in a way that Blinded by the Light does not even fathom ... the chapters all use a different book as a framing device, and though the tone and content of this memoir has literally much more to do with punk rock than any of these books, using the music as his conceit would not have worked.
Phuc Tran is someone who manages a number of seemingly disparate occupations ... Among many other things, Sigh, Gone is a testament to the positive effects the right teachers can have on the development of their students – and reading it, it’s not surprising to learn that Tran’s own adult life took him down a path of teaching ... Sigh, Gone can be seen as Tran’s attempt to synthesize a host of nominally conflicting impulses and show how, in reality, they’re not so far apart after all. With this heartfelt and ambitious memoir, he succeeds.
Tran combines funny moments with heartbreaking stories; his explanations to his parents about why he wants to buy his clothes at Goodwill rather than the mall are laugh-out-loud funny, and readers will respond with compassion as he and his family deal with his mother’s cancer diagnosis ... Tran’s engaging prose will connect with readers who ever went through a phase of wishing to fit in, which is pretty much all of us.
Funny, poignant, and unsparing, Tran’s sharp, sensitive, punk-inflected memoir presents one immigrant’s quest for self-acceptance through the lens of American and European literary classics ... A highly witty and topical read—an impressive debut.
... high-impact, emotional ... Filled with euphoric flights of discovery, this complex and rewarding story of a book-enriched life vividly illustrates how literature can serve as a window to a new life.
