Summary

"War Years" is a short story about the unnamed 13-year-old son of Vietnamese immigrants who run a grocery story in San Jose, California. It is set in the summer of 1983 and is narrated in firs-person, by the boy, who is remembering the events of the summer years later.

In "War Years," the story opens with the narrator claiming that nothing his mother did surprised him before Mrs. Hoa came into their lives. The story begins in the summer of 1983, when the narrator was taking summer school classes in English. The classes were a break, a vacation of sorts, from the Vietnamese spoke in his home and in his parents' grocery story, New Saigon. The narrator tells the reader about the food stocked at the store, the types of specialties that would remind the Vietnamese community in San Jose of home, but the narrator...