By Bao Phi
A boy and his father fish a Minneapolis pond before dawn, because a good catch means the family eats.
It's still dark. The boy's father wakes him, they buy minnows from a man at the bait shop, and they walk down to a pond in Minneapolis to fish before the father's first job starts. Other people fish here for fun. They don't. If nothing bites, dinner is thinner. They build a small fire. They wait. And in the waiting the father talks, a little, about another pond, a long way away, where he fished with his brother when they were boys. The brother died in the war. Then it's light, the fish are in the bucket, and the boy goes home to a house full of brothers and sisters and a mother leaving for work, and the whole thing has taken about an hour and told you everything about this family.
Nobody in this book arrives anywhere. That's the point of it and the reason a class needs it. The boy is American, Minneapolis is his city, English is his language, and the war is his father's, sitting in the back of the car where he can hear it but not reach it. That is the life of a huge number of children whose classmates assume they must have a dramatic crossing story, and who have instead a much quieter inheritance: parents who work two jobs, a language they're slightly embarrassed of and then ashamed of being embarrassed of, and a dead uncle they never met. Bao Phi writes in short flat sentences that leave the feeling underneath them, so the words themselves are easy while the book is not. Thi Bui's art does the rest. It's the one book on this shelf where the plainest English carries the heaviest load.