House of Sticks: A Memoir is a New York City Book Awards Hornblower Award Winner, rated 4.8 stars on Goodreads, and one of Vogue and NPR’s best books of the year. It was written by Bronx Science alumna Ly Tran ’10 and published in 2021.
Ly Tran, who was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the United States at a young age, faced many hardships growing up, which she writes about in her memoir. She delves into the complexities of being an immigrant in the United States, including trying to find a sense of belonging and one’s self.
The United States of America is a country of immigrants, often compared to a melting pot of cultures and identities. Many immigrate to the United States in order to obtain the ‘American Dream’: an idea that anyone, regardless of background, can achieve success through hard work and determination.
This dream drives immigrants to come to this country looking for a better future for themselves and their children. Immigrant parents often help stoke the flames of determination to fuel the melting pot, hoping that their future will be better as a result of joining it. However, if the flames heating the pot are too strong, the mixture inside the melting pot that is the determination of the children of immigrants can bubble over and spill out, causing passion and drive to turn into stress.
That is, with too much determination, comes the weight of expectation.
Immigrants in this country can often feel a divide between their culture and traditions with the norms and expectations of a new country. Coupled with expectations and pressure from family, the divide only intensifies. Assimilation is often the word associated with such an event. Cultural assimilation plays a large part in the immigrant journey, as it is the process in which groups adopt cultural norms and expectations of the society they are now a part of. This desire to be a part of a new world can often lead to a loss of their original cultural identity, creating issues over self identity.
This boiling pot is reflected in Ly Tran’s story. Her family immigrated to New York City, one of the most culturally diverse cities in the country. However, she faced struggles that resulted from a clash of American ideals with Vietnamese traditions. She was unable to see the chalkboards in school due to her dad refusing to buy her glasses, as he believed that they were a part of a government conspiracy. From this clash, she dealt with a loss of passion, and struggled with a sense of identity.
However, an opportunity led to a new chapter in Ly Tran’s life: the Bronx High School of Science. The school had planted the seeds for her desire to write. House of Sticks is a book taught in the several of Bronx Science’s English classes so that current students can find a part of themselves in Ly Tran’s story. This year, several classes read and analyzed House of Sticks during Socratic seminar discussions in which they discussed the ways in which memoirs function as a glimpse into someone’s past life.
When Tran was accepted into Bronx Science, Ly Tran struggled with her own identity and self image, often reading to escape such issues. It was here that Ly Tran was able to find a reflection of herself in some of the books that she read while at the school, causing the first sparks of her passion to write a book to ignite.
At the Bronx High School of Science, home to many first generation Americans, Ly Tran’s memoir resonate with any students who struggle with discovering a sense of personal identity. It is because of this connection that Ly Tran was invited by the Bronx Science Foundation to make a visit to the school on Thursday, May 29th, 2025, to meet with students who had read her book in their English classes. During Tran’s visit, she hosted a seminar for current students about her book and the struggles of immigration.
The seminar was attended by many upperclassmen who have read ‘House of Sticks,’ either due to their teacher assigning it to them for their English class or because they chose to read the book on their own.
This seminar was around 41 minutes long, taking an entire class period, enabling students to ask questions, either relating to the book or Ly Tran herself.
Ms. Sophia Sapozhnikov, an A.P. English Literature teacher at the school, taught the book in her class, and she brought her students to come to the seminar so that they could ask Tran further questions. The seminar’s audience consisted not only of students, but also of older faculty members, some of whom had taught Ly Tran when she attended the school from September 2006 to June 2010.
Ms. Sapozhnikov also shared her own stories about Ly Tran.
Toward the beginning of the seminar, Ms. Sapozhnikov shared that she had worked as a college mentor during the year that Ly Tran was a high school senior. She had heard from a colleague about a student who was struggling because her parents prioritized her help in the nail salon over schoolwork and college applications. “That story stayed with me for many years. I wondered about that student and whatever happened to her,” Ms. Sapozhnikov said. Reading ‘House of Sticks,’ she told Tran, allowed her to finally realize the context and continuation of this story. “You were that student. It’s pretty incredible.”
Many people tend to look for reflections of themselves in the stories they read. The ability to connect with a story allows readers to feel as though they are not alone in their struggles. This, along with the desire to feel represented, is what often drives readers to choose a favorite book.
Before the seminar discussion, students compiled a primary list of questions for Tran in a master document, allotting time for general questions and more specific questions later on.
One of the questions on the main list was: Who were the writers that influenced you or inspired you?
“In the 9th grade or the 10th grade we read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and all throughout my life I was a voracious reader,” Train said. Mentions of this book are found in Ly Tran’s memoir as being the start of her dreams to write her own story.
“I would look for glimpses of myself in literature to feel less alone and at the time, there was not a lot of Asian-American literature, there wasn’t a lot of literature about immigrants struggling, and so I felt very alone. But then I read The Bluest Eye.”
Literature is often what connects many people, as people do see reading as a means to escape the struggles of reality. Connections to literature and representation in these books can often provide comfort to those dealing with similar issues, as it proves that they are not alone in their struggle.
“It is about a little black girl who yearned for a pair of new eyes because she felt that it would give her more worth in the eyes of society. And here I was, a little girl, yearning for a pair of new eyes. For different reasons, of course, but it was the first glimpse of representation that I ever felt, and that truly moved me. And so it was the first book to ever make me cry,” Tran said.
The reason that Tran connected so deeply with the book was because of the overarching issue that the main character was facing: a young girl struggling to meet cultural expectations and to find her place in society. The reflection that Ly Tran had when reading this book allowed for a glimpse of belonging, as she is not the only one who is struggling with such an issue. From this, Tran was able to start cultivating and building up her voice, as she yearned to meet cultural expectations, not out of necessity but rather out of love.
For Tran, writing her memoir was no easy feat, as she had to overcome her inner struggles rooted in past trauma. During the seminar, Tran admitted to the students, “I think when I first started writing this book, I was full of resentment and rage, as you can probably tell why. My relationship with my father was a very fragile one. There was a lot of abuse, neglect and just even being out in the world with my experiences in the nail salon in Brownsville, Brooklyn was also really challenging, so… I didn’t start off thinking or knowing my destination. I just started off with a desire to understand exactly what happened to me. It was from this desire to understand that I really started to unravel the truth of what happened, not just what I experienced, but what my parents experienced, and my brothers.”
Tran’s self-reflection while writing her memoir enabled her to come to terms with the dark chapters of her life. “And from there, forgiveness and love were cultivated,” Tran said.
As the last few general questions were answered and the seminar came to its conclusion, during the final minutes, students were able to ask more specific questions to Ly Tran. Nora Torok ’25 asked, “In regards to your dedication of the book, you wrote, ‘this book was written for my mother and for my father, not out of a sense of duty, but because I love them.’ I was wondering, as an author and a writer, why did you make the choice to kind of include that second line when most times it would just be, ‘dedicated to my mother and father?’”
Ly Tran responded, “Well, the epigraph in the beginning is this Vietnamese proverb that is drilled into us as children to cultivate filial piety. And so for so much of my life, I felt like I had this duty to them, this obligation, to be filial, not to tell on them, so to speak, not to say to anybody what was really happening at home. And it wasn’t until I was able to allow my anger to show and open up those flood gates that I was able to see them as humans. You know, during so much of our lives, we think our parents are these sort of godlike people, but at the end of the day, they are just human. And so it’s to recognize their flaws, to celebrate their flaws even, and their humanity was what came out of this book, and it made me love them so much more. And so I wanted to spin or to kind of dismantle this proverb and tell them I’m not doing this out of the filial obligation that you want me to have. I’m doing this purely out of love.”
Ly Tran also grew closer to her mother through writing her memoir. Originally, she thought that, because the book was in English, her parents would not read it, allowing her to “dodge a bullet.” However, when the Vietnamese translation came out, she decided to send it to her parents. It took great courage for her to overcome one of the biggest challenges in life: confronting her parents about the past abuse and trauma she dealt with. Yet, she did not let this stop her as she promised to herself to share her story.
“I knew one day that I wanted to write a book, and since that voice was so difficult to cultivate and to finally claim it, I felt like I really needed to protect it. So I made a pact with myself that I would not ask anyone for permission to tell my story. Not my parents, not my brothers, not anybody in my life except for myself.”
Since the seminar could only last for a single school period, 41 minutes, given students’ other classes to which they needed to attend, Tran was not able to answer every single question. But she was able to give advice that resonated with the current students of the school. Bronx Science is very diverse, and many students come from immigrant backgrounds and households, resulting in similar feelings of disconnect from their own heritage and having a sense of duty placed on them to excel in this land of opportunity.
Tran offered some advice to students trying to overcome both expectations presented by the country and expectations of their heritage. “I think it’s different for everybody. There are many aspects of it and so, just live your truth as authentically as possible. So whatever you gravitate towards, just know that you’re doing it for yourself, not for your familial expectations, not to cultural expectations, but just because you derive joy from living your life in that life.”
Alumna Ly Tran ’10 offered some advice to students trying to overcome both expectations presented by the country and expectations of their heritage. “I think it’s different for everybody. There are many aspects of it and so, just live your truth as authentically as possible. So whatever you gravitate towards, just know that you’re doing it for yourself, not for your familial expectations, not to cultural expectations, but just because you derive joy from living your life in that life.”