The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys Issue #28

Dao Storm

By Donna Blumenfeld
Published: June 1st, 2006 | 12:00am

The woman-centered stories from this elegantly constructed collection are densely written and challenging, but the themes in Dao Strom’s second collection of short stories (her first was Grass Roof, Tin Roof) will ring true for many readers.

The first two narratives feature sisters: Mary, a repressed and faux-worldly film student, and Darcy, an aspiring musician. Both sisters’ stories intimates the influence of their secretive mother, whose past life in Vietnam is only revealed in the interlude. This piece, titled "View of Mother," is from the perspective of Christian, their younger brother, and it functions as a fulcrum for the book, exploring the mother as familiar stranger, and motherhood as a fundamental mystery.

The last two stories are about mothers with secrets of their own. Leena is a high-class Vietnamese escort transplanted by a kinky American businessman to a respectable home in Texas. Her alienation is somewhat relieved by a gang of lively commune-dwelling neighbors. Sage, perhaps the most complex character in the book, is a young mother and musician on the verge of leaving her unsatisfying partnership for the sketchiest of possible futures. All of Strom's introspective women are similar by ethnicity, and by their own sense of alienation. Each woman experiences her Vietnamese heritage through the eyes of others, as eroticization of difference or assumptions about Asian women's passivity or both.

Strom's writing is taut and controlled, descriptive but leaving out enough to let the reader do some work. Some of the gradually unfolded character revelations are genuinely surprising, due to Strom's deft handling of flashbacks and sudden leaps forward in time.

Although the characters are finely drawn with individual histories, they all tend to relate to male figures uniformly. After the third or fourth expertly written scene in which an attractive woman at a social gathering listens to a bunch of men arguing verbosely while thinking her own unusual and compelling thoughts, I got a bit exhausted by the formula. Strom’s finely wrought portraits of women in the process of transforming themselves are a little two-dimensional, but so well made you won't care.

ABOUT THIS BOOK
The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press)
By Dao Strom
352 pages
$24