Shreve, SusanHong, Dan2016-10-092021-04-27https://hdl.handle.net/1920/10493This thesis has been embargoed for 5 years. It will not be available until April 2021 at the earliest.This novel-in-stories follows a trio of Vietnamese American siblings and their friends and family living in the shadow of the most powerful city in the world, Washington, D.C. Spanning the decades between the 1980s and 2010, the stories weave around local events such as the fall of the Little Saigon neighborhood and the growth of the Eden Center strip mall, and illustrate the shifting tapestry of the D.C. metropolitan area’s Vietnamese American history. The characters find themselves confronting the specters of war, refugee assimilation, poverty, violence, crime, gangs, and all the hiccups that go along with these traumas while building lives from the shards of a homeland they carry within themselves. But as the characters grow, so do the distances from each other, sometimes in violent and surprising ways.enAsian AmericanFictionImmigrantVietnamese AmericanCrimeWashington DCThesis