The Vietnam War has continued to play itself out in fiction, history books, and autobiographies, but no American writer has captured the essence of the Vietnamese like Robert Olen Butler. Butler captures the lives of a people that managed to beat the odds and survive in a new country. Madison Bell wrote in the Chicago Tribune “Butler’s achievement is not only to reveal the inner lives of the Vietnamese, but to show, through their …showed first 75 words of 842 total…

…showed last 75 words of 842 total…and through his own actions, so is he. Robert Olen Butler’s stories undeniably have shown different perspectives of immigration stories through the eyes of the Vietnamese Americans. He also shows that these people have not completely forsaken their Vietnamese identity in order to assimilate into the American population. The characters within their stories have chosen, with their own free will, what they believe is a better way of life for themselves and their families.