Celebrating Lancer Authors Angeline Truong ’17 Champion of Stories and Health Equity Author After the Rain
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ngeline Truong never expected to publish a book, let alone see her name listed on the Amazon Bestsellers list for Asian-American literature next to authors she admires. Her debut novel, After the Rain, published in December 2020, is a coming-of-age story that follows Lily, a Vietnamese girl from a refugee family, from childhood through college as she tries to understand her identity and her relationship to her family. “I wanted to write a novel that gave kids heroines who are people of color, who have families that remind them of their own families,” Angeline says. Themes of motherhood, family and the refugee experience often are represented in her writing, and Angeline’s personal family history as Vietnamese refugees has deeply influenced her work and other pursuits. This spring, Angeline graduates from Stanford University, with a concurrent bachelor’s in human biology, concentrating on the social and cultural determinants of mental health, and a master’s in community health and prevention research. She hopes to attend medical school and follow her interests in communitybased research and access to culturally competent health care. Eventually, she would like to combine her experience as a doctor and a writer to treat patients. Her next project — a partnership with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma — is combining her passions as she collects the stories of births, marriages, children and life as told by women who escaped from the Khmer Rouge for her next book. She’s also gathering the stories of how the pandemic has affected the care and treatment of torture survivors to create a caretaker’s guide for future pandemics and crises. “I want to use storytelling and patient-focused narratives to inform healing from trauma in a culturally informed way,” she says. “I think it’s a very different and innovative framework for treating traumatized people and refugees.” Angeline’s holistic approach to medicine parallels the interdisciplinary education she received at Saint Francis. Swimming varsity for four years taught her discipline, and biology and chemistry classes with teachers Linda Segal and Jennifer Thomas laid the foundation for her interest in science. She remembers specific passages discussed in AP English Language with Meighan Wilson Friedsam ’97 and continues to exchange book recommendations
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PROGRESS Spring 2021
“I wanted to write a novel that gave kids heroines who are people of color, who have families that remind them of their own families.” with Len Christensen, her AP English Literature teacher. It was an emotional reading of her original poem in Anthony Kunkel’s Creative Writing class, though, that emboldened her as a writer: “Writing is inherently a confessional practice. You’re writing love letters to your community, to your family, to strangers, and you’re baring your soul for everyone to see. That is terrifying.” By working to improve medical care for those who are vulnerable, she hopes that her storytelling will help her serve a community that is dear to her heart. “I saw that there was a space [of unwritten stories] that I wanted to break into, and I just did it,” she said. “It was empowering to know that I could do something like that, and I feel like I can do similar things in other arenas.”
