When I first read the title “We Should Never Meet” for this week’s reading, the immediate first question that popped into my head was “Why?” It’s definitely an attention-grabbing title, making the reader curious by what exactly it means. It wasn’t until the very end when I realized what it meant

This title resonates with all the characters. For example, the more obvious example would be the last two examples given in the book, Huan and Mai. I think that Huan helped me realize that they should never meet their biological parents. I have mixed thoughts on why exactly they shouldn’t meet, though another fellow student mentioned in our conversation about this that it would be disappointing to them. These kids have held such high expectations for their parents, expecting them to be perfect individuals, but in the end, they would only end up disappointed by reality. They keep doing the blame game as well, blaming their “perfect” parents for abandoning them, blaming the adoption centers for whatever reason, but realized that no one is at fault in the end. Before this, I was thinking about how it would change the characters as a whole if they met their parents; how this would alter their personality, their relationships, and overall their whole life. But that doesn’t mean it’s for the better. Their struggles have led them up to the modern day, and meeting their parents would be taking away from all of that, as if the first 20+ years of their life had been for naught. Another example would be Kim and meeting the lady who ran the Vietnamese shop, with whom she developed an emotional bond to within just a couple of weeks. Once she was hit with the reality that this lady barely knew her, and she barely knew the lady, it affected her mindset in the long-run; throughout the book, it seems that she is vulnerable to forming close attachments, some unhealthily quick, with people that she considers to be like family (as she did with the lady, likely suspecting it was her mother). It’s also shown that she dislikes change, as implied by Mai who called her a child after Kim told her to stop acting older than she was. Eventually, Kim gets married to Vinh, a guy she says that she has been leading on and has been breaking up with multiple times, and has many children with him. But I definitely do not think it was out of romance; rather, I believe that it was out of not knowing what a true family feels like, thus making the decision to keep everything the way it is and live out a life with Vinh.

I also really loved the set-up of the book and how it takes multiple POV’s and gradually merges all of these stories together. The beginning definitely confused me, making me think that Kim was Lien’s child rather than Huan, but as it went on, it started to become clearer and clearer on what the narrator was doing.

Speaking of Huan, I really liked how this character, who is mentioned very little up until the final chapter, turns out to be the center of mostly all of these stories. It is implied that he is Lien’s son, he was taken to the bigger orphanage by Phuong and Truc, he is nearly adopted by Bridget, and he has a poor relationship with Kim and close relationship with Mai. It’s like the reader unknowingly learned about Huan’s life in Vietnam before Huan himself did. And it clicked together so nicely, I loved it.

Out of all the books we have read so far, I think this one is definitely my favorite. I thought that having all of these stories would make me hate it, having to keep up with every single character and their story, but the merging definitely helped. And, while I dislike cliffhangers, this book made it feel satisfying to have it, rather than full conclusion. In the end, there will never be a conclusion, as life only goes on, for both the characters in this book and people in real life.