
Linh Ly is Doing Just Fine tracks the life of protagonist Linh Ly as she navigates her middling 20s—in the wake of her parents’ divorce and the dissolution of her family as she previously understood it—in all of its violence and difficulties. Thao Votang navigates this transition with biting humor, skepticism, and references that draws the reader into recognizing that the Asian-American perspective is a universal one.
When we first meet Linh Ly, she’s disenchanted with her life trapped in a corporate career, studded with bouts of tennis matches and insistent, neurotic care for her mother that verges on stalking. As she faces rising anxiety, amplified by a shooting at the university where she works, she finds solace and guidance among her relationships with her tennis friends, Hoa and Chandler. Nevertheless, she is constantly thwarted by her own self-doubt, questioning the intentions of both Chandler, her romantic interest, and Peter, her mother’s new boyfriend. The novel traces Linh’s journey of self-realization as she grows to trust herself and the people around her, and as she reconciles her family’s past and how her mother may be permitted a future by moving forward.
The structure of the book carefully pours over the details of Linh’s life and moves us through its individual parts and how they comprise her whole. We learn about the cloying friends in the tennis group and the sense of inadequacy and disjointedness that she experiences in their midst. As a reader, you witness her alone in her apartment teetering on loneliness as she dotes on her cat, Lollipop. Her experiences with once-unattainable Chandler mirror the rise-and-falls of romance as one would expect, while her relationship with her parents defy standard expectations of how we construct ourselves relative to our parents.
Her relationship with her mother sits at the center of the text, buffered and influenced by her mother’s choice to date after her divorce and, later, the death of Linh’s father. Linh exercises a familiar protectiveness over her mother in an inversion of the standard parent-child dynamic. The starkness of this is further bolstered by our status-quo understandings of parent-child relationships in Asian cultures where filial piety is expected. In regards to her father, the inversion of their power dynamic manifests as pity. When faced with clearing out his house in the wake of his death while “tears [silently] dripped down [her] face,” she toiled over his belongings and the small remnants of his life, finally understanding him as sad and stripping him, at last, of his role as tormenter. In this manner, her suffering is displaced and the void is then filled with quiet grief and questions.
As a narrator, Linh is brusque, yet tentative in her steps. She is willing to assert her presence and take up space with little regard for those around her, yet she doubts herself and is constantly questioning her actions or if she fits into the landscape around her at brunch with the tennis club, where she wonders if she could ever “escape that feeling of not belonging,” or at Jessica’s bachelorette party away at the lake house. Her approach to the situations before her verge on misanthropic, coloring her interactions and the text as a whole. She pines after her friendship with Hoa and cherishes it, yet bats away every single one of Chandler’s attempts to demonstrate that he cares about her (much to my chagrin). Linh acts of her own accord; her defiance gives her life as she moves along in the text while I cheered alongside her and, at times, begged why she was behaving in that manner.
While her interactions with her friends are humorous, her internal monologue does not waver, constantly questioning the world around her. Her skepticism is frustrating at times, but is what ultimately drives the story. Her distrust in men goads her into stalking her mother and her dates. Her concern that Chandler may just be courting her as part of an elaborate scheme/prank/fetish charges every one of their interactions, making moments where she reveals vulnerability all the more valuable.
Her relationship with Vietnamese, and more broadly Asian culture, is another point of exploration in the text as she straddles two cultures, displaying both American individualism in her dress (traditionally all-black, cropped hair, serious and austere) and the expectation of separation to a certain degree from her mother and their family life; but also immense yearning to be closer to her identity in how she constantly assesses her own Vietnamese-ness and if she is performing it adequately, whether in her mother’s house or at her father’s funeral. She questions Peter’s Americanness and if it would interfere with his relationship with her mother, if “Peter’s lack of trauma from war mean[t] he could be loving.” For their shared Thanksgiving meal nearing the conclusion of the novel, she and her mother “filled [their] plates with a mixture of American and Vietnamese food…Two cultures were eaten together and swallowed with no consideration of how the flavors would or would not mix.” The small domestic gestures of the house appear to be where Votang most stresses Linh’s relationship to her Vietnamese identity.
Altogether, Linh Ly is Doing Just Fine speaks to readers in an intermediate stage in their life, middling between childhood and adulthood experiencing their most familiar and intimate dynamics shift: between themselves and their families, themselves and their friends, their romantic interests, to name a few. As readers, we have the privilege of watching Linh grapple with her present in a manner that evokes our own. The book explores the lonely yet crowded nature of one’s twenties in a way that leaves room for the reader’s own self-insertion and interpretation. The details that Votang incorporates to denote the familiar feelings of alienation, grief for growing older, the desire for closer relationships with those around us, and demarcations of Linh’s Asian identity are recognizable and touching, making the book a familiar read and experience while remaining fresh.
Linh Ly is Doing Just Fine
by Thao Votang
Alcove Press
Adalyn Tâm An Ngô is a poet and writer of Little Saigon, California, currently pursuing her Master of Arts in Teaching at Brown University, concentrating in Teaching Secondary Social Studies. Previously, she lived in the mountains of Vietnam under a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Award where she taught English at Son La High School for the Gifted. She recently graduated from Bowdoin College, where she received the Richard Jr. Poetry Prize (2021) and the Philip Henry Brown Prize for extemporaneous English composition (2023).