Shade and Breeze is the debut work of Quynh Tran, a writer and graduate of the prestigious Biskops-Arnös Writers’ School in Sweden. The novel is a collection of vignettes centering on a young Vietnamese schoolboy and his daily life with Má and his older brother Hieu in 1990s Jakobstad, a small coastal town in the Ostrobothnian region of Finland that speaks both Finnish and Swedish. Tran’s own family settled in the same Finnish town in 1989, a few months after Tran was born in a refugee camp in Malaysia, but the novel is not autobiographical. Originally written in Swedish (Skugga och svalka), Shade and Breeze has been translated into six languages. Tran’s innovative debut has been highly acclaimed for its contribution to Swedish-Finnish literature, winning the Runeberg Prize and Borås Tidning’s Debutant Prize in 2022, and the Svenska Yle Literature Prize in 2021. The English edition is a collaboration with the notable writer, editor, and literary translator Kira Josefsson. Tran’s debut novel opens a rare window into the diasporic Vietnamese experience in Finland, with recognizable scenes like listening to Trịnh Công Sơn in the car or running off to play with other kids while the adults are playing cards, that speak to a shared overseas Vietnamese experience. With every vignette, every prosaic tableaux, every ekphrastic poem, Tran’s simple writing style steadily chisels the contours of his characters and their relationships, remarking on Vietnamese identity and family life in the Nordic countries in the process.
Vietnamese people began to arrive in Finland throughout the late 1970s and 1980s from refugee camps in Thailand, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, through the Orderly Departure Programme of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The Vietnamese were the first group of “quota refugees” accepted in Finland as a part of its Third Country resettlement programme, becoming the first “visible minority” in a largely homogeneous country that historically saw more emigration than immigration. Their resettlement paved the way for groups that arrived in the decades after, including Somali, Iraqi, Kurdish, and Iranian refugees. The number of people with Vietnamese background in Finland has grown from almost 2,000 in 1990 to over 17,000 in 2024. Narratives of the Vietnamese Finnish experience (at least in the English language, which many people in Finland also speak), particularly from the majority which settled in Helsinki, have been gathered by researchers from a national policy perspective to understand the impacts of refugee integration services. Paris by Night (PBN), the musical variety show well-loved by overseas Vietnamese, featured Vietnamese Finnish singer Roni Trong in PBN 84, 87, and 89, after he rose to fame as a finalist of Idols Finland. With Tran’s sketches of the small town of Jakobstad in Northern Finland and road trips to Tampere and Larsmo, and the narrator’s school conversations of Swedish words, Shade and Breeze is a unique addition to contemporary fiction relating to experiences of migration in Sweden and Finland from a Vietnamese Finnish perspective.
Aside from the Finnish-Swedish markers of place and language, Tran’s work blends in with other diasporic Vietnamese novels about the refugee family’s adjustment in a new country. Shade and Breeze is not preoccupied with memories of Vietnam and the traumatic past, as “the beginning” for this eight-year-old narrator is a photograph of the refugees’ arrival at the snowy Oravais airport, welcomed by their Finnish sponsor Gunnel:
Children and adults, visibly cold but happy: squinting, grimacing, thumbs-up, fifteen to twenty of us in jackets that are too big and have strange logotypes. Má is holding me in her arms, Hieu next to her, close. Among us too, the Finns, thumbs in the air. Open mouths. Remarkably enthused faces… Gunnel who hugged each and every one of the arrivals, including the adults, as though we were her own children. Gunnel. That cheerful stranger who talked to everyone though nobody could understand her. The wind that howled against the large airport windows.
The observational, poetic language of Tran’s storytelling reminds me most of Ru, the French language novel by Kim Thúy that records a young girl’s memories of her Vietnamese family’s resettlement in Canada, another cold climate like Finland that starkly contrasts with the motherland. While Thuy’s narrator Tinh adopts a reflective tone as an adult looking back on her childhood, however, Tran’s unnamed narrator preserves the naivety (and perhaps emotional detachment) of an elementary schoolboy who sits in the backseat of the car, listening to his mother’s daily rambles about their life in Finland and the people around them.
Shade and Breeze records the socialization of a Vietnamese Finnish boy who witnesses Hieu’s teenage rebelliousness and listens attentively to adults’ conversations about topics beyond what his eight-year-old mind can grasp. By watching his mother act differently whenever Hieu’s white girlfriend Laura comes over after school, the narrator begins to process how his Vietnamese family is different. “Má at the mirror, tense, practically vibrating…Laura had come today, again, yet another day with Laura,” Tran writes, where Má’s ambiguous “vibrations” can either be positive excitement or cautious anxiety surrounding this outsider. But soon, the narrator sees how Laura’s presence brings out a more social, chirpy side of his mother—not just a strict single mother or breadwinner, but someone who indulges in home decor and tells jokes. With Laura around, Má plays hostess, and Hieu and the narrator finally get to enjoy Ma’s baking and use the special cake forks with floral decorations that Gunnel had gifted them. She receives Laura’s praises and validation in return: “Laura chewed and talked at once: it was incredible, she had never eaten anything like it. Má laughed heartily at this.”
The shattering of a mug consequently fractures Ma’s overly-friendly facade before Laura, revealing to the narrator that how Má disciplines her children is a strictly private family matter. One day, the narrator and Hieu watch Laura accidentally drop one of the family’s four mugs. Má immediately yells at Hieu when she discovers the mess: “She berated him. Choice, forceful words. He was useless. She berated him in front of Laura.” Her discipline is consistent with the other times that she has beat him as punishment for his actions. But Laura’s presence as an outsider changes everything, regardless of whose fault it was:
Normally it didn’t take much for Hieu to blush and direct his attention to the floor, but this time he was looking straight ahead, and suddenly Má understood.
Laura squirmed, she was about to say something, maybe apologise, but Má had already transformed: she peacefully went to get the broom and asked them to step aside, go somewhere, go watch television with the little one, oh my, watch the splinters, for god’s sake.
The young narrator is keen enough to observe the silent negotiation between Hieu and Má, how Hieu deflects Má’s gaze. In front of Laura, Má must act in accordance with what is publicly acceptable in Finland, where this type of discipline is abusive and not tolerated, even if her discipline may be socially acceptable to other Vietnamese people. Má must save face for her outburst and peacefully transform back into the doting hostess. The narrator continues to think about Laura long after her breakup with Hieu, as Laura’s presence as an “other” in the family’s private life is one way that the young narrator begins to discern the differences between growing up Vietnamese and growing up Finnish.
While Shade and Breeze mainly focuses on Má and Hieu, some of the vignettes are monologues from family friends, where we can imagine the young narrator passively sitting at a table while his mother and her friends are de-stressing and gambling and chatting about their lives in a new country. Uncle Teo is a recurring character who loves talking about Japan’s superiority in movies and technology, and proudly believes that “there’s no difference between us [Vietnamese] and the Japanese.” The novel’s title follows from his comparison of the West and the Orient’s difference in appreciation for shade and breeze, direct exposure versus subtleties. “In Asia the roofs are made large and wide like parasols, so that shade falls over a larger area,” he considers. In contrast, roofs constructed in the West provide little shade, and houses are constructed “to let in as much light as possible… Unbearable…” because Westerners “like things that are superficial, clear.”
Another monologue comes from Lan Pham, a Swedish-Vietnamese translator who served as the bridge between the sponsor Gunnel and the refugees, and became Ma’s closest friend until they had a falling out. In “Lan Pham’s Tirade,” she imagines starting an Oriental hotel business, ordering kimonos from China for “the whiteys” who “love this stuff” to dress up and take pictures against a Japanese landscape wallpaper. “And we’ll need to be clever when we serve them, or, what’s that word- wise! We’ll be wise women from the jungle… I mean the countryside… Hahahaha!” she jokes of the reality of being Asian in the homogeneous Nordic countries. As the first generation of Vietnamese people living in Finland, Uncle Teo, Lan Pham, and Má have their own comments and stereotypes about white people. They are well-aware of how the host country views them as the perpetual foreigner, enough to joke about how they can use it to their advantage. There is always more to the grateful, indebted refugee, and Tran’s writing, like eavesdropping, creates a space for the first generation to freely “talk back” in the language of the majority, without judgement or confrontation about what they truly think after living among Finns for a while.
The vignettes in Shade and Breeze are the many frames in a rather straightforward movie about a Vietnamese Finnish boy’s childhood, although the second half of the novel is interspersed with fantastical passages, such as the magical realist appearance of a leopard in the blueberry fields of Finland, that showcase the narrator’s calling to creative writing. The simplicity of form and syntax in Shade and Breeze gives the impression of a less filtered and more honest presentation of Tran’s characters, although at some expense of monotonous storytelling. Tran’s work spotlights private family matters that the narrator’s Vietnamese mother would be shocked to read, given her paranoia upon learning that Hieu turned in a poem to his therapist and would not tell her what he shared, but Tran writes toward the discomfort of disclosure with an effortless objectivity.
The novel’s closing vignette is monumentally titled “Vietnamese People Everywhere,” like a stamp attesting to the experiences of lesser-known communities of overseas Vietnamese, which Shade and Breeze has achieved. Tran released his sophomore novel in Swedish and Finnish this past April, När andra njuter. In revisiting themes of family relationships and being an outsider in the Nordic countries, the rising writer Tran adds to the narrative plentitude of diasporic Vietnamese literature and the literary fields of Finland and Sweden.
Shade and Breeze
by Quynh Tran
translated by Kira Josefsson
Lolli Editions
Cathy Duong co-hosts cà phê book club, a monthly book club that meets in coffee shops across north Orange County, CA (IG: @caphebookclub). She enjoys traveling to Little Saigons, playing V-pop on her ukulele, and analyzing diasporic Viet literature.
