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Detective Out of His Depth; Ex-Surfer Stalks Secrets in California's `Little Saigon'

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From: The Washington Post
Date: 19881004
Author:Paul Preuss

LITTLE SAIGON

By T. Jefferson Parker

St. Martin's. 355 pp. $18.95

Ever since Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee" popularized the Mysterious East way out West, fiction writers have been mining a rich vein of California incongruity. In his second novel, T. Jefferson Parker opens a new seam in the old lode.

Little Saigon is real, a community of Vietnamese refugees who have settled in the Orange County town of Winchester, where, writes Parker, "the street signs were done in Old English lettering and the buildings sported hints of the Tudor." This teddibly British hamlet embraces a market, its ...

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