Aimee Phan is an Vietnamese-American author. She was born and raised in Orange County, California. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she won a Maytag Fellowship. Her first book, We Should Never Meet, was named a Notable Book by the Kiryama Prize in fiction and a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, USA Today and The Oregonian. She worked as an Assistant Professor in English at Washington State University from Fall 2005 to Summer 2007, and now works at California College of the Arts. A Vietnamese American (Vietnamese: người Mỹ gốc Việt) is a resident of the United States who is of Vietnamese descent. ... Cities in Orange County Orange County is a county in Southern California, United States. ... This article is about the U.S. state. ... The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed internationally. ... Virginia Quarterly Review styles itself as A National Journal of Literature and Discussion. ... USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. ... October 2, 2004 edition. ... Washington State University (WSU) is a major public research university in Pullman, Washington. ... Founded in 1907, California College of the Arts (formerly California College of Arts and Crafts) is a regionally accredited, independent school of art and design in Oakland and San Francisco, California, USA. It is one of the premier fine arts and design institutions in the United States. ...

Books (novels)

• We Should Never Meet

This graceful, spare debut collection of eight loosely connected short stories follows the lives of four Vietnamese-American orphans, three of them evacuated from Vietnam in the weeks before the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War in an effort called Operation Babylift. Huan, Mai, Kim and Vinh live in Orange County, California's Little Saigon. Beautiful, troubled Kim and her gang-member boyfriend, Vinh, are victims of a faulty foster-care system; studious Mai fares slightly better, though her vegetarian hippie foster parents never go so far as to adopt her. Huan is the lucky one, adopted by parents who love him even when he "sneer[s] that they treated him like a charity case, their trendy Vietnamese baby." The stories of the four orphans alternate with tales of the wartime journey of one baby--finally revealed to be Huan--from an orphanage in the Delta valley to an adoption center in Saigon and on to the U.S. Phan unswervingly captures the cruelty of children who have themselves been cruelly treated and the grief, denial and alienation created by loss, yet allows Mai and Huan to come to an uneasy peace with their pasts on a trip to Vietnam as adults. The tales of wartime Vietnam are less immediate than the present-day stories, but this is a wrenching, poignant collection laced with pity and horror. Agent, Dorian Karchmar. (Sept.)

Awards

• 2004 Association of Asian American Studies Book Award
• Finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards in Fiction
• 2005 Kiriyama Prize Notable Book

External links

• We Should Never Meet
• Aimee Phan
• Someone You’d Love to Meet