Reading The Family Recipe by Carolyn Huynh is like sitting with a Vietnamese cousin in a cafe while she catches you up on the latest family drama—lots of laughing and gasps of “Trời ơi…” with every update. After the success of her debut novel The Fortunes of Jaded Women starring the hilarious Dương sisters in Orange County, California, Huynh now turns to the rambunctious Trần family of Bellaire, the Little Saigon of Houston, Texas. The tale takes inspiration from the popular bánh mì chain Lee’s Sandwiches, the HBO Max docusoap House of Ho, and a lesser-known piece of Asian American history in 1980s Seadrift, Texas. In order to decide who will inherit his money, his mansion, and the family business Duc’s Sandwiches, refugee-turned-millionaire Duc Trần assigns a mission to each of his five adult children. His firstborn son Jude’s mission is to get married, while his daughters Jane, Bingo, Paulina, and Georgia are sent to Houston, San Jose, Philadelphia, and New Orleans to bring up the revenue at each city’s Duc’s Sandwiches site. The first to complete their task within the year wins all.
The Family Recipe is less about the Trần siblings squabbling for their father Duc’s inheritance by renovating Duc’s Sandwiches shops in declining Little Saigons across America (or in Jude’s case, get married), and more about each lost Trần’s journey to learn to let go of defense mechanisms they’ve relied on to survive growing up in a dysfunctional Viet family. It takes falling in love, losing love, dodging flying bánh mìs, and a trip back to the motherland, for our flawed Trần family to begin healing intergenerational wounds. Huynh transports the reader across character perspectives, places, timelines, and genres in the span of 300 pages, gifting us with another heartfelt Vietnamese American story, even with its structural constraints.
I read Huynh to see my Vietnamese American community reflected back to me in all of our flaws, gladness, grief, and eccentricities—and Huynh delivers every time, with touching humor and nostalgia. Among the novel’s most iconic side characters are the four henchmen of Dakao Plaza, who Huynh comically re-introduces into scenes with a roll call: “Thủy from the nail salon supply store, Duy from the travel agency, Xuân from the sketchy CPA’s office, and Linh from the refillable, filtered water store.” They are the longstanding business neighbors of the original Duc’s Sandwiches location in Bellaire, well-versed in the Trần family lore and more than ready to nitpick about what the eldest daughter Jane’s done to the bánh mì place. Thủy, Duy, Xuân, and Linh’s recurring presence speaks to how their businesses, and not only phở restaurants and bánh mì shops, make up the backbone of Vietnamese strip malls across America.
Huynh’s storytelling honors that the first generation of Vietnamese Americans made immense sacrifices to build a life for their families in America after no small feat of surviving a war, but her cheeky renditions of Vietnamese elders also insist that they are not infallible war heroes or saints. In Bellaire, Jane has a heartfelt reunion with an elderly Vietnamese aunt, Bác Cai, but the moment Jane drags Bác Cai out of her everyday routine so that they can do research for Duc’s Sandwiches’ comeback, Bác Cai throws a fit: “For the past hour, Bác Cai had lodged an onslaught of complaints to Jane about how tired she was, how she needed to sit down in front of the air-conditioning, and how the younger generation was so strange. Jane was only slightly losing her mind.” Seeing Bác Cai test Jane’s patience reminds me of all the times my older relatives have frustrated me with unsolicited comments and complaints, but it’s comforting to realize that dealing with our elders’ personalities is a shared experience. Reading the way Huynh writes intergenerational Vietnamese dialogue feels fun in the same way that I can spend hours laughing at Theresa Vo (Tree) and Triet Tran make reels imitating our Viet moms when they chastise us over things like spending money. Something about this collective experience makes the berating lose its sting, and I become nostalgic for rather than annoyed by those moments I’ve shared with my Vietnamese parents and elders.
Huynh tries to make her main characters, the Trần siblings, just as funny and relatable to Vietnamese American readers as her side characters, but Huynh ends up characterizing each Trần sibling by the trauma response they had to growing up in a dysfunctional Vietnamese family. “We’re here to cash in on all the trauma that daddy dearest caused us,” Jane announces in the first chapter. Middle sister Paulina labels Jude as a sensitive “orchid child” while all the sisters are resilient dandelions, in casual reference to the dandelions versus orchids theory about siblings who grow up in an abusive household.
Trauma, for this set of second generation Vietnamese Americans, is conveniently explained away by birth order, gender favoritism, their neglectful father Duc, and their depressed mother Evelyn who abandoned them. Huynh paints the Trần siblings to be self-aware enough to play “Who had it the hardest?” and psychoanalyze the mistakes they’re making in their lovers’ quarrels, but apparently not enough to start therapy. The only times we get to know Jude, Jane, Bingo, Paulina, and Georgia are limited to when they messily live out the romcom tropes of arranged marriage, friends to lovers, or enemies to lovers, or when the sisters are having their own respective meltdowns about Duc’s Sandwiches in a Little Saigon away from home – their tactics, in love and war, all informed by trauma. At some point, after the excitement to relate to these characters’ traumas wore off, I wondered if Huynh was handling the subject too casually or callously, and if it wouldn’t hurt to sacrifice a humorous, trauma-trendy quip or two to add personality and depth to these siblings.
The Family Recipe’s structure as a split-perspectives, split-time, and split-genre novel is partly why the Trầns’ character arcs feel underdeveloped. It’s hard to flesh out characters when each sibling takes turns under the spotlight for only three or four chapters of the total 44 chapters. It’s also challenging to feel immersed when the Trần siblings are starring in the romantic comedy and family dramedy of the contemporary timeline, while younger versions of Duc, Evelyn, and family friend and lawyer Huey Ngo are experiencing peak racial tensions between Vietnamese fishermen and the Ku Klux Klan in 1980s Seadrift, Texas. As a popular fiction read, The Family Recipe’s swoonworthy romance moments were much more enjoyable on my second read, when the high stakes of the historical timeline had subsided, allowing me to relish in Huynh’s hilarious creative writing.
This ambitious structure, however, achieves Huynh’s purpose of conveying intergenerational trauma. Huynh’s decision to interrupt the present with an unflinchingly painful story of racial trauma, survivor’s guilt, and young refugees putting on a brave front as they carry the mistakes they’ve made, is didactic for the adult Trần siblings. Growing up with constant reminders from elders (whether to guilt trip or to motivate) that they gave up everything for you to have a bright future, it’s no surprise that when the Trần siblings finally start processing their pain as adults, it becomes hard for them to understand that their parents lived in a more uncertain time, closer to the Vietnam War, with different, very real threats. With great tension that pervades even the romcom parts of the book, Huynh’s storytelling unveils how the pain, love, and fear of one generation of Vietnamese refugees drove them toward the decisions they made to survive, how those decisions shaped the imperfect conditions that their children were raised in, and how Duc’s Sandwiches also came to be a part of the Vietnamese community in the tragic aftermath.
To the ever-growing shelves of Vietnamese and Asian American literature, Huynh adds a story about young adult Viet folks figuring it out and shows more love to Viet Americans hailing from Texas, the South, San Jose, Philadelphia, and Oklahoma City. Carolyn Huynh is one of the writers that I trust most to write Vietnamese Americans in literature because it really feels like she’s writing for a Vietnamese American audience, rather than trying to show or prove something about our community to Western readers. Admittedly, this can mean minimal context generalizations that most Vietnamese readers have the cultural knowledge to fill in the gaps and laugh, but other readers may not. Huynh can afford to write for Vietnamese Americans today because of her Vietnamese American literary predecessors who felt the pressure to represent their community in specific ways, to the whim of Western publishers. From The Fortunes of Jaded Women to The Family Recipe, Huynh has ushered in an era of Vietnamese American humor and joy in literature. There will be more for our community to read and celebrate in the generations to come.
Cathy Duong co-hosts cà phê book club, a monthly book club that meets in coffee shops across north Orange County, CA (IG: @caphebookclub). She enjoys traveling to Little Saigons, playing V-pop on her ukulele, and analyzing diasporic Viet literature.
