LOAN LE

The fiction writer and book editor writes a love letter to Vietnamese culture in A Phở Love Story.

“Hoisin sauce is not paint,” is the first sentence of Loan Le’s debut novel, A Phở Love Story. The YA romantic-comedy revolves around the lives of Vietnamese American teenagers Bảo Nguyễn and Linh Mai. Despite their families’ heated rivalry over their competing pho restaurants, Nguyễn and Mai do the unthinkable: they fall in love.

Heavily inspired by her family history, including her mother’s experience as a refugee after the Vietnam War, Le felt that it was important to feature her Vietnamese heritage in her book.

“I don't think I've ever seen Vietnamese culture infused in a story like that,” she says. “Not just the history, but the food, which is one of my favorite parts of our culture in real life — enjoying food.”

Outside of writing novels, Le is an editor for Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books, specifically for dark fiction. She’s currently working on her next YA novel, Solving for the Unknown, a companion story to A Phở Love Story that’s expected to be released next year.

When did you come up with the premise of A Phở Love Story?

​I got the idea in 2017, I think. I’ve always loved food and how it serves as a magnet where people, like my family, always gather around it.

​Food is not just sustenance. It's also emotion and care and love. I've felt that support system throughout my life, and I thought that was such a heartwarming aspect to share.

​I don't know, I'm also a sucker for the “enemies-to-lovers” trope, and I was fascinated by secrets, too. I got my masters in fiction, and one of my final essays was about secrets and how they form. I had this idea of two families and, on the surface, the thing that’s keeping them apart are the restaurants. But I liked the idea of infusing the story with something else deeper than just the top level of secrets — there's more secrets underneath. So yeah, that was really fun.

​Why did you decide to make the primary setting of your novel two pho restaurants?

​It's because of the food. When I was younger, we didn't have a lot. We stayed in this one apartment with multiple families. We were always in the kitchen, and it felt like my mom was running an informal restaurant where the moms would take over and assign roles to the children. When my mom made the egg rolls, I had to peel the wrappers because they came out frozen, so I'd be in charge of that because I wasn't capable yet of rolling an actual egg roll.

And it's interesting when you visit immigrant communities — I've seen Vietnamese communities with multiple restaurants in the same plaza, and they all have customers and stuff. So I thought I could use that. And having a little competition never hurts a story, so that was the push and pull aspect of the story.

Design by Laura Eckes / Illustration by Alex Cabal

Are any of the characters based on your life growing up or your time in high school?

​Yeah, bits and pieces. So Linh, the artist, has an art teacher named Ms. Yamamoto; I actually had a teacher named Ms. Yamamoto, too. She was my English teacher and my mentor.

​When I was writing this, she unfortunately passed away at a young age. It made me think about how fortunate I was to have her as a mentor; having Ms. Yamamoto in my life is how I found my own voice in writing. And even though she's a secondary character in this novel, she does try to steer Linh on her own path. She’s the one who encourages her to think about herself, so that’s a huge influence, in a way. Even though the character doesn't show up that much, I just had to put her in there.

What is one of your fondest memories of growing up and eating or cooking Vietnamese dishes?

​There's so many. When the women are cooking in the kitchen, there tends to be an ease to everything that happens and everyone's guards are down. Whenever I go into the kitchen, my mom and her sisters and then their daughters, they always know what to do without saying anything. It's almost like an unspoken dance. I was always fascinated watching it because I'm the one who has to be told what to do. I don't have that kind of instinct in the kitchen. I mean, now I know, at least for pho, how to pick the herbs that you eventually use and what sort of condiments we need.

But I was always fascinated by all the women who cooked when I was growing up; they had this instinct and they worked so well together with few words. I liked sitting there, just listening to people gossip [laughs]. We would visit our families in Virginia and the kitchen is always that meeting point. My cousin had this great island that everyone would just gather around while cooking or as we're enjoying our meal. So I don't have a single memory. It's more of a composite.

Why did you want to become a fiction writer?

​I grew up with a huge family and, as an introvert, I never really liked to be in crowds and I usually found myself in a corner by myself reading because everyone was so loud and it was too much sometimes. So I think that affected my internal process of constantly making stories, thinking to myself, and just wondering about people and my family. My imagination was really nurtured at a young age. My parents were just puzzled by my reading habits because I read so much and I would get so many library fines when I was younger. I just read constantly, and I think they were just baffled by that because they're not readers.

​None of my family members are readers. They tend to just read the news or watch TV. All the books at my childhood home are probably mine. So they were puzzled, but they never really stopped me. My dad would take me to the library and when I started to write, my mom would save my work. She still has it in this drawer in her bedroom that is completely full of plaques and diplomas — all in one drawer. My parents worried about the security of writing because the pay is atrocious, but they always supported me.

I grew up in Cheshire, Connecticut, and there aren't a lot of Vietnamese people there, so it was almost like my family was my community — my own village. And I couldn't have asked for a better way to grow up.

A lot of people refer to your story as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. Do you see your story that way?

​No, actually. I just sort of accepted it because it’s an easy way to pitch it. There's so many similarities, but in my mind, I never really thought of it when I was writing. It's more of just the idea of opposing families. I think compared to other enemies-to-lovers tropes, my characters are not exactly enemies. They don't really hate each other, truly. It’s more that they just didn't understand each other.

What are some of the challenges you face as a writer and as an editor?

​I'm actually one of the fortunate few because my editor, Jennifer Ung, is Asian American too, so I paired up with someone whose family had gone through similar things. Her parents had also escaped the war, and we bonded over that. She just understood what I was writing about and that was so wonderful because, of course, I want to publish a book that speaks to a large audience. But at the same time, I did want to target readers who come from immigrant backgrounds and people who grew up being in between those cultures. So it was such a breeze and a great process to have my writing edited by someone who immediately understood that.

There was no pushback about the Vietnamese language throughout my book. I purposely made it so that it would truly reflect how my mom and dad would speak to me. They want me to speak in complete Vietnamese, but I stumble all the time, so we switch in and out. There's a lot of code switching between speaking Vietnamese and English. So whenever there's a scene with the child and the parents, I wanted to make that dialogue as real as possible where the child speaks English and then the parents speak Vietnamese back — this back and forth.

I guess the challenge was after my book was published and reading reviews like, “They should have put a glossary in or footnotes.” But it's not an academic paper, it’s meant to be enjoyed. Google it if you want! [laughs]

​And then, as an editor, it's hard. I think my first two years were the “make it or break it” years. There was a moment where I wanted to leave the industry just because I started in a job that was not editorially focused. I was more in charge of managing schedules and meetings and not doing reading on my own. So after those two years of basically hell, I was able to move into more editorial-focused roles, and my two supervisors were people of color.

​To see how they moved and functioned in the face of a whole sea of whiteness, that was really gratifying to see. I grew from their mentorship a lot. I came to understand that, just because the industry is predominantly white, that doesn't mean that you should get lost in it.

What do you hope your readers will feel when they read A Phở Love Story?

​When I was growing up and reading young adult fiction, there was a lot that I was missing out on; not only the culture — well, actually, it was mostly the culture part. I would read a book and obviously I'd read about the teenager going through their own thing, but their family would kind of be absent from the story. It'd just be about them. But for me, when I was growing up, my family was actually in my story a lot and they were really involved. I couldn't have seen myself as separate from them.

So I wanted to portray that in the book of how, in a way, family being a part of your story can be a bad thing, but also a good thing. I think my characters eventually realize that they are who they are because of their parents and what they have gone through.

Also, the books that focused on Vietnamese characters when I was growing up seemed to be really connected to the Vietnam War, which is a huge part of our history, of course. But I think as everyone's growing older, that's gonna be a part of our history that's just history, you know? So I wanted to explore what happens after that, especially with the children of immigrants. That's a different struggle in itself.

I want people to feel joy. My book's really cheesy and I want them to enjoy that cheesiness and I want them to walk away hungry. I hope people will feel like it touches their heart in some way.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. All images courtesy of Loan Le.