Tran, Ly

Ly Tran graduated from Columbia University in 2014 with a degree in creative writing and linguistics. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Art Omi, and Yaddo. House of Sticks: A Memoir (Scribner) is her first book. Tran is just a toddler in 1993 when she and her family immigrate from a small town along the Mekong river in Vietnam to a two-bedroom railroad apartment in the New York borough of Queens. Her father, a former lieutenant in the South Vietnamese army, spent nearly a decade as a POW and resettled through a humanitarian program run by the U.S. government. Soon after they arrive, she joins her parents and three older brothers in sewing ties and cummerbunds on their living room floor to make ends meet, working long hours at home and later as a manicurist alongside her mother at a nail salon. At school, Tran feels the mounting pressure to blend in. But she can’t see the blackboard, and her father – imagining a government conspiracy – forbids her from getting glasses. House of Sticks is a coming-of-age tale set against clashing cultural expectations, and a work that NPR called “an unsentimental yet deeply moving examination of filial bond, displacement, war trauma, and poverty.”