It is 1936 in Culver City, California. Issa (Issabel) Bui, a 20-year-old ingénue, is auditioning for a film role. She can just manage speaking her line. She has no training, only the ambition of the naïve and beautiful and the confidence that she can make it based on who she is and what she brings. She fears she will experience a visitation from her living grandmother, Bà Ngoąi, in this moment of stress. So opens Van Hoang’s novel Silver and Smoke.
Issa and her friend Olivia Nong, both American-born women of Vietnamese descent, have dreams of making it in Hollywood. They live with Issa’s mother, who works at a laundry in a hotel in the night shift. Olivia was orphaned before moving in with an uncle and eventually finding her way to the Bui family, where she has been a part for years. Issa’s father had passed when she was six years old, so her mother has been the family’s main provider for years. Theirs is a hand-to-mouth existence. The children have been latchkey children for years and have a mutual love for each other and some street smarts mixed with the naivete.
Had they stayed in the protection of Bà Ngoąi, Issa’s grandmother, based out of Chinatown, they could have benefitted from her social network and gangster connections. Within her reach is real estate and some illicit moneys from drug dealing. She is a powerful matriarch, who is trying to run her empire with the aunties of the clan, while the uncles are challenging her for power. The novel reads:
Her grandmother was a shaman who specialized in mediating between the breathing and the dead, and she was so famous that people traveled from Las Vegas and New York, even Vietnam, to see her. A year into her career, as the family lore went, she gained the attention of Mr. Song, a notorious crime boss who controlled most of the underground dealings in Chinatown Los Angeles, and rose to power within the echelons of the underground elite.
One of the characters observes that she built her empire by “raising the dead.” But Issa’s mother has vowed to leave their influence because of her concerns of their dabbling with the spirit world. Issa Bui has a bloodline of shamans. While she does not pursue that occult knowledge, she is not unaware of its lure, if not its mortal risks. Alongside the world of the living is the spirit world and spiritual warfare of different types.
If they can make it in Hollywood, they may achieve the escape velocity away from poverty and assimilation into the clan’s opportunities. Their poverty leaves the family without any connections in the industry. They do not even have a telephone in the house. Hoang writes of Issa:
She found comfort in the certainty of a movie, of a story well told, found it all fascinating. She longed to be an actress. The art of pretending she was someone else, yes, but also the chance to be part of something bigger, something experienced and witnessed by millions of people. She wanted that life, knew she was destined for it—a long-lost home waiting for her in the distance future. She just had to find her way there.
Issa and Oliva go to auditions. They do table readings. They crash parties to try to meet influential individuals. They have no formal education in terms of acting. For them, it is a treat just to see a movie with a spare dollar bill. They have the optimism of youth that anything is possible. They find occasional bit parts. Then, they conjure the spirit of Ava Lin Rang, an Asian actor of the silent era, and she uses her ghostly wiles to make opportunities for the two women.
Their youth and being Asian turns heads. While they speak English without accents, based on their looks, the people around them might choose not to understand them. In the film space, they may have roles for maids. They are stereotyped perhaps into war parts. They are offered roles as nurses. Even the guards at a Hollywood party know the unspoken truths of larger racist American society and the women’s outsider status. The women use their knowledge of greater society’s biases to play a director to attain a role: they pretend that they are famous in Vietnam even though they have never been to Vietnam. They will play up their exotica if it benefits them. At one point, they act in “whiteface.”
Their parts are often simple and small. They are not all that clear about the over-arching story of the films. The directors read as b-level with perhaps shoestring budgets. They are in films with names like Banana Cakes. The projects around them have names like Avocado Sunset, Love in the Afternoon, and Still Green Waters.
The afterlife is portrayed as full of mahjong and tea. Nothing of the prior life on Earth is truly forgotten. If humans were petty in life, their spirits are so in the afterlife. Those who were spouses in life may want nothing to do with each other in death. All relationships between the living and the dead are transactional. In a few precious places, there is something that might approach true care between people.
Van Hoang balances the plotlines of the novel well. She writes with a velvety subtlety. Hoang is the author of The Monstrous Misses Mai. Silver and Smoke is her second novel. She also writes for junior readers, with books based on folktales and ancient lore. She has a bachelor’s in English from the University of New Mexico and a master’s in library information science from San Jose State University. Hoang was born in Vietnam and grew up in Orange County, California. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
