by Camilla Gibb ~ Doubleday Canada ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2011
Maggie Ly realizes early in her life that a career in art does not need to be defined by her lack of talent. She becomes a curator and seizes an opportunity to return to Vietnam to catalogue a collection of art which somehow survived the war in a bomb shelter. She has her own agenda - to look for her father, a dissident artist who vanished after the fall of Saigon.
Her search leads her to Hung, an elderly itinerant cook whose pho is legendary, and it is Hung’s story that is the heart of Camilla Gibb’s new novel. Hung has made pho at his street cart for decades, moving from place to place, creating a daily challenge for his dedicated customers who continue seek him out, chopsticks and bowl in hand.
Through years of poverty, war and hardship, Hung has endured, changing little as the city changed around him. In the years since the war, Hanoi has become modern, bustling tourist city brimming with energy and youth.
The importance of family and community flows through Gibbs’s novel, with the elderly Hung holding the threads which gently bind the characters to each other. They embrace Maggie, sympathizing with her need to find the truth, to understand her beginnings so she can finally feel that she belongs. “She had always felt herself [to be] an alien to some degree ...you have no attachment to the history or geography of a place ... your roots are buried in some faraway earth.”
