Family in Six Tones by Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao (Penguin Random House)

Lan Cao’s life has been shaped by loss and love. At the age of thirteen, she lost her country when she  left Vietnam and came to America as a refugee. When she was almost forty, she became a mother, who from the very beginning, believed she and her daughter were “sinewed together.” Both experiences were “volcanic, invasive,” “steep paths filled with detours and stumbling blocks,” presenting her with new cultures to learn.

Harlan was a child with a father who gave her long generations of roots in America and a mother who “bequeathed Vietnam to her.” With different native tongues and separate codes of behavior, Harlan and Lan were bound to clash.  American confidence faced off against Vietnamese values, while mother and daughter struggled within a relationship that included Lan’s “shadow selves.”

Lan came to the U.S. as a child shaped by war, with parents whose past history outweighed the present and who could give her no guidance within the new life they all wrestled with. At home she was completely Vietnamese but once she walked out of her house, Lan carried the weight of becoming successful in America.

And she was. A graduate of Mount Holyoke, she went on to study law at Yale, to work at a Wall Street law firm, to achieve an academic career, and to become the author of two well-received novels. The American Dream was hers, although Lan points out this dream demands a crippling amount of work, work that her daughter would never have to face. “Americans can make their own dreams.”

As the only child of two law professors, Harlan lived a life that was idyllic in its affluence and rigorous in its training, with a notebook “full of fifth grade math that I had to do when I was just turning five.” She could “see sounds and feel letters and taste smells.” Words had colors and she was often accompanied by a purple cat that only she could see. Her best friend when she was at home was a little girl named Cecile. Cecile lived inside Harlan’s mother, a child with no body of her own.

This was one of Lan’s “shadow selves,” along with a horrifying creature that Harlan called “No Name.” These personalities emerged when Lan had seizures, in moments that nobody ever talked about and that Harlan first witnessed when she was four.. Like the purple cat and names that had their own unfading colors, this was a normal part of Harlan’s life. 

When Lan was four, she knew that her father carried cyanide pills in the hem of his military uniform. If he were captured, he would choose his own death. She grew up hearing stories of her uncle who attacked the enemy naked, at night. He and his comrades knew who to kill in the pitch darkness—any man who was wearing clothes.

But while Lan went from a life of war and struggle to one of success and comfort, Harlan’s successful childhood became a terrifying adolescence, when her father died and she became sexual prey to boys in her high school. Each of them convinced of the other’s invulnerability and perfection, Lan and Harlan became “two deaf best friends having one long conversation.”

Those conversations are made public in their two-person memoir that is scalding in its honesty and so piercing in its pain that it is difficult to read. But it ends with understanding and compassion. “I watched my mother’s heart bleed from the inside out,” Harlan concludes. As she looks toward a life of “perfect confusion, loneliness, deep  friendships, and loneliness,” she says “I’m ready.” “The stars were not aligned for us,” Lan says of her life with her daughter. “But forever here.”~Janet Brown