The war is far away, their father assured them, far up in the north. We are safe here."

He was wrong. The war in Vietnam would soon take its toll on the village south of the Mekong Delta where the first of Aimee Phan’s eight linked stories takes place. And though the bombing stopped decades earlier, the war still haunts Southern California’s "Little Saigon." We Should Never Meet is the story of the living casualties of that war.

Operation Babylift, the evacuation to the United States of thousands of Vietnamese orphans just before the fall of Saigon, is the center around which these stories revolve. Four of the stories are set in and near orphanages in wartime South Vietnam. "Miss Lien" begins with a birth and concludes with the young mother leaving her baby outside the door of Blessed Haven for the Children of God. In "The Delta," a nun and the duck farmer to whom she was engaged twelve years earlier transport a cargo of babies to an orphanage in Saigon. "The ducks stared at the tiny orphans with interest, tapping their yellow bills against the cages."

In "Gates of Saigon," a social worker who must decide whether to take her own sons to the United States argues with her landlady, who believes that good homes for orphaned children can be found in Vietnam. "I see people leaving babies at the orphanage doorstep every day," Hoa says. "No one wants to take a child now, especially when we’re losing a war." A pediatrician who intended to do volunteer work in Vietnam for two months and stayed for three years is finally on her way home in "Bound," but what kind of home will she find when she returns?

Three of the stories in this collection are set in the part of Los Angeles known as "Little Saigon." In the title story, Kim has been shuffled among "government-issued families" since Operation Babylift brought her to the U.S. "Her real birthday was unknown. She was assigned the day January first along with every other orphan whose birth certificate was missing." Now 20, Kim is wrestling with her uneasy morality and trying to find the money to move out of her ex-boyfriend’s apartment.

We learn more about Kim’s ex in "Visitors." Vinh is a member of a gang that robs Vietnamese families because "their people wouldn’t trust the police to protect them." While the reader is horrified by the violence Vinh commits, it’s hard not to feel for him when he speaks about the country he came to as a boat refugee: "It’s like I’m visiting and I’ve overstayed my welcome."

Kim’s friend Mai, a younger boat refugee, turns 18 in "Emancipation." She has lived with the same foster parents for years, and she knows that they admire her, but she is all too aware that they never wanted to create a more lasting relationship with her. "They’re no longer obligated by the state to support or even shelter me after today," she tells a friend.

"Motherland," the final story in We Should Never Meet, takes place in contemporary Ho Chi Minh City. Huan, a Vietnamese and African-American Babylift orphan, glumly accompanies his ebullient white adoptive mother as she prods him to get in touch with his roots. But he doesn’t know a word of Vietnamese and realizes that the "Amerasians who were left behind have good reason to hate Huan."

Stylistically, We Should Never Meet is a marvel, particularly considering that Aimee Phan makes her debut as an author with this collection. While these eight stories are connected, the links are subtle and at times ambiguous. The dexterity with which the author handles the interconnectedness of her characters’ lives is matched by her skill at writing unfettered by sequence. Each of these stories moves freely back and forth between past and present, and the order in which the stories are presented is somewhat chronological, but not entirely. Yet never, not once, does the clarity of the narrative suffer.

War may never be far away, but neither is compassionate attention to the consequences of war. Mai makes this discovery when she returns to her native land: "It’s not our parents’ fault. Or anyone else’s here. How could I be angry with them, expect them to do right when there was no such thing?"

Author Aimee Phan will make appearances in Seattle and Portland this month. On Wednesday, September 22, she will be at the Beacon Hill Branch of the Seattle Public Library (2821 Beacon Avenue South) at 7:00pm. The following day, she will be at Portland’s Annie Bloom’s Books (7834 S.W. Capitol Hwy.) at 7:30pm. For information on the Seattle reading, call Elliott Bay Books at (206) 624-6600 or the Washington Center for the Book at (206) 386-4650. For information on the Portland event, call (503) 246-0053 or visit <www.annieblooms.com>.