“Two Beings Entwined”: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of Conflict and Healing, by Renee H. Shea

Interviews   Harlan Margaret Van Cao and Lan Cao / Courtesy of Penguin Random House Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter (Viking, 2020) is a memoir written in alternating narrative chapters between Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao. Coming to the United States from Vietnam in 1975 as a thirteen-year-old refugee, Lan Cao forged her identity through education and academic achievement. An outstanding student growing up in Falls Church, Virginia, she graduated from Mt. Holyoke College and Yale Law School and began her career in corporate law. She turned to teaching and scholarship at Brooklyn Law College, William & Mary Law School, and Duke University Law School. Currently, she is the Betty Hutton Williams Professor of International Economic Law at the Chapman University School of Law. Cao is also the author of two novels: Monkey Bridge (1997) and The Lotus and the Storm (2014). Her daughter, Harlan, is a freshman at the University of California Los Angeles. Born in Williamsburg, Virginia, she moved to southern California when she was ten. At UCLA, she plans to study economics and philosophy, while continuing to write with a special interest in film scripts. She hopes eventually to lead a film production company profitable enough to support endangered species. As these “two beings entwined,” Cao writes, and “clash and boomerang” through each other’s lives, they celebrate that most complex of... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2020-09-14 19:40:45 UTC ]

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