Moving tale of grief and guilt

All That’s Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien, HQ Harper Collins, $34.99 .. .. .. ..

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Ky Tran is the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee family. Ky is working as a journalist in Melbourne. One morning she gets a phone call from her anxious mother. Her younger brother Denny, who has done brilliantly at school, wants to go out to celebrate his graduation with his friends. Rather impatient with her strict parents, Ky is quite short with her mother. She says, “Just let him go.”

Rather than go partying with his classmates after his graduation, Denny and two of his quieter friends decide to go to dinner at a popular restaurant called Lucky 8.

That night, for no apparent reason, the brilliant, guileless, optimistic Denny is brutally murdered. Ky’s parents are traumatised by the event. There were 12 other diners that night and all claim to have seen nothing. The police have no witnesses. The investigation appears to have been dropped.

Ky, suffering pangs of guilt that she had not kept in touch with her brother as much as she should have, comes home for the funeral and cannot believe that her little brother has been murdered for no apparent reason and no police investigation. A request from the police for an autopsy is denied by the parents for cultural and religious grounds.

Ky demands an explanation from the police. Their home town has spewed a culture of Vietnamese gangs and drug dealing. Without specifically stating, Ky believes their theory is that Ky became involved with drugs, which Ky refuses to believe. There is nothing in their background to substantiate this.

Ky now manages to get a list from a detective of all the people present at Lucky 8 at the time. She is determined to interview as many as she can.

Each interview reveals another layer of of the place that shaped both her and Denny’s life exposing poverty and abuse for some, the effects of refugees in a completely foreign culture, the hardships for her parents struggling with a language while their children became more and more alien and even a little resentful towards them.

It is a story of friendship, culture and trauma. It is a story of reconciliation with family.

This is sad story beautifully told. I felt humble reading it. It touches on the hurts that seem to have to be endured when growing up different. It is a brilliant, thought-provoking first novel.

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