Excerpt from All That's Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She piled buns and noodles onto paper plates for the teachers, her armpits growing sweaty enough that she could feel them squeak under her white button-down, her rimless eyeglasses sliding down the broad bridge of her nose. Her family rarely hosted guests, and white guests other than the Avon lady were the rarest of all. Ky could remember only one other occasion when a white person had visited: When he was eight, Denny had befriended a freckly orange-haired boy who once came over to play G.I. Joes. Ky's mother, suspicious of white people—convinced that they might steal—made him stay outside the house. Denny and his friend played in the doorway, with Denny sitting inside, the white boy sitting outside. Ky, who was thirteen at the time, told her mother that she was pretty sure this wasn't normal, and that even though she herself had no white friends, she was willing to vouch that Freckles wasn't a thief.

"They don't seem to mind," her mother said, poking her head from the kitchen to watch the two boys go to war with their figurines.

But Freckles must have told his mother, and she must have minded, because he never came by again.

Minnie, who back then was over at Ky's house every day after school, had said that Ky's mother was onto something. "White people are thieves," she said between blowing huge bubbles of grape-flavored Hubba Bubba gum. "Captain Cook! Christopher Columbus! The French! White peeps are OG thieves to the max, man."

"What are you talking about?" Ky said.

Minnie theatrically smacked her own forehead, rolling her eyes as far back as they'd go. "God, Ky, they've stolen your faculties, too."

"My what?"

"Your mum's not crazy, man ..."—Minnie cocked a finger gun at Ky—"she's smart."

While it irritated Ky that Minnie always seemed to take her mother's side, she secretly appreciated how normal her friend made her feel. When Ky later recounted stories of her parents to her white friends in college, they made no attempts to reassure her that her family was like every other refugee family, that their values and actions were typical of immigrants from Vietnam. Instead, they observed that her mother sounded paranoid, that she might benefit from talking to a therapist. And whenever Ky brushed up against their judgment, she was reminded that the act of sharing her family's stories was a kind of betrayal, a way of setting her parents up to fail in the eyes of outsiders, a way of inviting such outsiders—who had no grasp of what her parents had been through or how deep their love was for their children or that Viets just did things differently—to laugh at, and not with, her. During those times, Ky missed Minnie most.

"So, how long are you back?" Mr. Dickson said, twisting a clump of noodles with his plastic fork like it was spaghetti. His eyes moved between Ky's face and the TV screen behind her, where a news anchor showed a graphic of the growing hole in the ozone layer.

"I'm sorry?" Ky said, snapping back to the room.

"They were talking about how bad that hole was in the eighties," Mr. Dickson said, angling his chin at the screen. "Can't believe we've made it to the nineties and they still haven't figured it out."

Ky turned to the screen, where the news anchor had cut to coverage of the impending bushfire season.

"Uh," she said, straightening her back because she didn't know what else to do. "Right."

"Anyway, I was saying," Mr. Dickson said after clearing his throat of noodles and returning his attention to Ky, "how long are you back?"

Ky was surprised that he knew that she no longer lived in Sydney. But of course Denny had told his teachers; he'd been wide-eyed about her move to Melbourne for school, about her internship with the Herald Sun, her first printed bylines. He'd even asked if he could live with her, just for a bit, so that he could know what life was like outside of Cabramatta. She'd said they could talk about it on her next trip home. She hadn't expected that trip to be for his funeral.

Excerpted from All That's Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien. Copyright © 2022 by Tracey Lien. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.