“When my high school friends read the memoir, they were like, ‘What about all the art stuff?’ I just didn’t have room. What got left out of the book, Tran tells me, were the visual arts. It tells the story of the Tran family’s flight from Saigon to become the sole Vietnamese family in a small Pennsylvania town, where the author tries to weave himself a nest of safety and belonging out of cultural artifacts, from Star Wars on. The book is full of playful language-puns and jokes that spring from the gap between Tran’s family’s native Vietnamese and the American English he grew up with, twisted round with allusions to pop culture, literary classics, skateboarding lingo, and punk rock. If your social media feed includes bookstores, literary magazines, or bookish people, you’ve probably seen Tran’s face as it was at the age of seven, above the scribbled title Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In. I haven’t met Tran before, but I have some reason to feel I know him: I’ve spent hours with his younger self, as represented in his widely acclaimed memoir published in 2020. When I arrive to meet Phuc Tran at Tsunami Tattoo, he’s got a few minutes to go on the cyberpunk cityscape he’s creating on a client’s lower arm, so I settle onto a tufted velour bench in the beautifully decorated waiting room and flip through the tattooers’ portfolios that sit on a vintage coffee table. The Portland powerhouse balances his (many) roles. Classicist, Tattoo Artist, and Author Phuc Tran Spills the Ink

Sigh gone phuc tran