From ‘Heat’ to Deceit : Parker’s Encore Novel Examines Underside of Vietnamese Venue

The Saigon Cabaret, a popular Vietnamese nightclub on the edge of Little Saigon, lies at the far end of a Garden Grove shopping center--just down from an appliance store and next door to a tropical fish shop.

On weekend nights, the nightclub is packed with people, mostly Vietnamese couples in their 30s, 40s, and 50s: a well-dressed, older crowd that likes to tango, waltz and do the cha-cha, and grows nostalgic listening to band singers who are more likely to sing in Vietnamese and French than in English.

But this was a Thursday night and, at 8:30, the parking lot beneath the orange-and-blue neon Saigon Cabaret sign was nearly empty when T. Jefferson Parker ducked inside the dimly lit club.

On the eve of the publication of his much-anticipated second novel, “Little Saigon,” Parker had returned to a source of his inspiration.

His summer white pants and white shirt aglow under the club’s black lights, Parker skirted the tiny round tables with the cane-backed chairs and headed for the bar.

“Things have really changed around here,” said Parker, perching on a stool and eyeing the mirrored walls that had replaced the bamboo siding in the club in the months since he was a frequent visitor.

The decor and atmosphere of the Saigon Cabaret served as the model for the Asian Wind Cabaret, the fictional Vietnamese nightclub where the novel’s gripping plot is set in motion:

Vietnamese singer Li Frye, a one-time spy for the Americans during the war and now a folk hero to her people, is kidnaped from the club by three hooded figures with machine guns. The occasion is the 38th birthday of Li’s wealthy Orange County land developer husband, Bennett Frye, a Vietnam War veteran who gained a chest full of medals and lost his legs in the process. When Li is pulled, shrieking, off the stage after the gunmen spray the jammed club with gunfire, Bennett and his 33-year-old brother Chuck--the Frye family misfit who is the novel’s protagonist--take off in hot pursuit.

The novel, as serious-minded as it is action-packed, deals with the underside of Little Saigon as well as international intrigue that stretches to Hanoi. Parker, who put Orange County on the literary map with “Laguna Heat” in 1985, populates his novel with Vietnamese gangs, expatriate resistance leaders and freedom fighters in Vietnam and Cambodia. It is laced with intrigue, corruption, deceit and murder.

Parker, a former newspaper reporter, did his homework to capture the exotic flavor of Little Saigon, a place where, as a character in the novel says, “There is always a feeling . . . that things may happen.”

During the 2 1/2 years he spent writing the book, Parker visited Little Saigon about twice a month, meeting everyone from affluent Vietnamese professional people to the man on the street--and the guy in the bar.

In fact, it was during one early research trip in the fall of 1985 that Parker discovered the Saigon Cabaret while on a police ride-along. He returned on a Saturday night.

“It was packed,” recalled Parker, 34. “I saw bow-tied waiters and about 300 Vietnamese dressed to the nines: The men were in suits, the women in dresses and skirts, and there was a lot of Vietnamese music. But it was the look on their faces. It just about floored me: They seemed nostalgic, homesick. It was just so obvious they craved this music and craved the company of being together. This is as close to being back in Saigon as they could get.”

That night, Parker met Wendy Asano, the club’s owner and sometime singer, who came to this country from Vietnam 18 years ago with her two children. Like many of the people Parker met in Little Saigon, the Asanos have become his good friends.

Yet Parker is not sure how his multihued portrait of Little Saigon, due to hit bookstores in late August, will be received by Orange County’s Vietnamese community.

“I’m very curious; It’s kind of wait-and-see at this point,” he said, drawing on his cigarette and then chuckling. “I don’t know how anybody is going to react to it.”

The first thing you notice when you get to Jeff Parker’s two-story, wooden, ranch-style house on a gravel road in rustic Laguna Canyon is the green-and-white souvenir street sign over the carport that says, “Jeff Boulevard.”

Parker, who keeps a boogie board and swim fins in the trunk of his car and sprinkles his conversation with ‘60ish surfer slang (the word “bitchin’ ” is a favorite), appears much as he was before “Laguna Heat” turned him into what he describes as a “semi-public figure.”

But the car in the carport--a 1987 black Thunderbird that replaced his little ’82 Plymouth Champ--and the house itself are symbols of the changes in Parker’s life since “Laguna Heat.”

Parker made the down payment on his house with money from the movie sale of “Laguna Heat,” and he bought the car with royalties. But, more than anything, “Laguna Heat” gave Parker the financial freedom to be what he had always wanted to be: a full-time novelist.

The room in which Parker does his writing is up a narrow staircase near the back door. It is a sparsely furnished room, with a well-stocked, brick-and-board bookcase at one end and a table with his personal computer and another bookcase at the other. He spends five hours a day, six days a week, in the writing room, despite the lure of a connecting sun deck.

Sitting down in the living room, where an aquarium under the window holds his California king snake, Dean, which he caught in the front yard, Parker acknowledged that “Laguna Heat” completely changed his life.

“It was a radical shift,” he said, recalling that the same week the book came out he was laid off as a technical editor at Ford Aerospace & Communications in Irvine. “The next day I was a full-time, working novelist.”

To suddenly have his book reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek magazine and New York magazine, and to have “Laguna Heat” reprinted in 13 foreign countries and then be turned into an HBO movie starring Harry Hamlin, was, he admitted, “a little intimidating at times.”

“I got a tremendous reception for the book,” he said. “It was as successful and door-opening as anything could be.”

“Laguna Heat” sold 25,000 copies in hard cover and 225,000 in paperback. “Little Saigon” promises to do even better.

St. Martin’s Press is giving the novel an impressive first printing of 125,000 copies and backing it with a $125,000 advertising and promotional budget. That includes a 10-city promotional tour for Parker in October, which will come on the heels of his September wedding to Cat Bagley, 31, lead singer of the Orange County band Cat & the Bytes.

Although he has read the typically laudatory book-jacket endorsements from fellow authors, Parker doesn’t expect to see any reviews of “Little Saigon” until after the official Sept. 27 publication date.

He is, admittedly, a “little apprehensive” at the prospect.

“I’m really curious to see what the verdict is going to be,” he said. “I think it will be divided between love and hate. I think (the book) is bold enough and different enough to cause that. I don’t think it’s going to draw a lot of tepid reaction.”

Before he began his research, all Parker knew about Little Saigon was what he read in newspaper articles about the growing Vietnamese community in Garden Grove and Westminster. There are, he said, an estimated 300,000 Southeast Asians in the state, with 80,000 to 100,000 Vietnamese living in Orange County.

The idea for doing a novel set in Little Saigon evolved from Parker’s visit to a Costa Mesa liquor store in 1984 while he was finishing up “Laguna Heat.” He was waiting in line to buy cigarettes when the man in front of him, whom he identified as a Vietnam vet, stepped up to the Vietnamese woman at the cash register. Before the man could speak, the woman placed a pack of Lucky Strikes on the counter.

“How did you know I was going to order that?” the man asked.

“I just knew,” said the woman.

Parker was intrigued and when it was his turn at the register, he asked the woman the same question. But the woman, who spoke little English, gave him the same reply and, he said, “it remains a mystery.”

Nevertheless, the incident set Parker’s writer’s imagination into high gear: How did she know what kind of cigarettes to give him? Had they known each other in the war? “I was just floored,” he recalled. “I wanted to know what was going on” in the Vietnamese community.

In writing “Little Saigon,” Parker was faced with the question that confronts every writer whose first novel is a success: Will the second novel top the first?

“I thought about that, absolutely,” he said. “You want to do better than your last project. Of course, you’ve got a lifetime writing your first novel and three years to write the next one. It’s a different process between the two.”

Parker said the toughest part of the story was to make the novel’s hero, Chuck, “qualified for the task of cracking the mystery, because he’s not a policeman, not an investigator, not a tough guy, really. And to get him to be able to use his wits and skills was difficult. It’s hard to write a thriller with a hero who is not a stock hero.”

Drawing on his own background as a reporter for the Daily Pilot in Costa Mesa and the Newport Ensign, Parker solved the problem by making Chuck a former newspaperman: someone who knows how to ask questions and has experience stepping into situations in which he might not be wanted.

But Chuck Frye is still not the typical hero: The one-time surfing champion owns a money-losing Laguna Beach surf shop, he got fired from his newspaper job a couple of weeks before the story opens and his wife has just filed for divorce. He is, said Parker, “down on his luck in all the ways that matter.”

Because Chuck is tall, slender and fair-skinned--and a former newspaper reporter, to boot--it seems safe to assume there are more than passing similarities between the character and his author. “I think there’s a lot of me in Chuck,” said Parker. “In a sense, I think, his quest in Little Saigon to find his sister-in-law was kind of like my quest to find out about the refugees and the way they live.”

In creating the character of Bennett, the Vietnam veteran turned successful land developer and community leader, Parker said he purposely wrote against the grain of the Vietnam vet cliche: the down-and-out loser still plagued by memories of the war.

Although Parker is waiting for the inevitable comparisons to be made between his two Orange County-set novels, he said “Little Saigon” is vastly different from “Laguna Heat.”

“Laguna Heat,” he said, is more of a classic mystery in terms of tone, subject matter and plot. He views “Little Saigon” as far more ambitious.

“It deals with some current-day social and political issues that ‘Laguna Heat’ didn’t really try to do,” he said. “It describes a refugee community in this country that’s never been described in fiction before in any kind of detail. And it involves a character (Chuck) who is more complex in a lot of ways. He’s less mature, less formed than (detective) Tom Shephard was in ‘Laguna Heat,’ (but) you’ve got more to teach him as the book goes on.

“Stylistically it’s different too. ‘Laguna Heat’ is very much monotone, pretty even. The effects I was going for were fright and suspense, and it’s a fairly dark story. ‘Little Saigon’ is richer, I think: spooky and intense in some parts and light and frivolous in others.”

Although most of the action in “Little Saigon” centers in the Westminster and Garden Grove areas, Parker hasn’t abandoned Laguna Beach as a fictional locale. Chuck lives in a “cave house” built into the rocks in Laguna Canyon.

A real-life rickety old apartment house near the Fahrenheit 451 bookstore on Coast Highway doubles as the home of a female character Chuck meets on the beach.

Parker also has fun with Newport Beach, which he describes in the book as “a stronghold for conservative high-rollers . . . where their children drive Carerras and BMWs, purchase their educations at USC, marry each other, then head into solid careers.”

Throughout the book, Parker mixes the real--such as the Ziggurat federal building in Laguna Niguel--with the fictional: Edison and Hyla Frye, Chuck and Bennett’s millionaire father and mother, live on Frye Island, a private island in Newport Harbor with an antebellum house, a helipad and separate quarters for the security staff. A boxing scene takes place at the Sherington Hotel, the fictional counterpart of the Irvine Marriott, which offers boxing on weeknights.

As for the names of the many Vietnamese bars, restaurants and businesses mentioned in the book, Parker said he used the real names “unless something dire happens there.”

Parker recently signed a two-book deal with St. Martin’s Press for his next two books to be written over the next six years. And as far as he can tell, he’ll continue writing books with Orange County locales. “I’m just going to follow my heart on topics and settings,” he said. “You’re bound to draw your novels out of your experience, and I’ve lived here all my life.”

In fact, he’s already working on his third novel, an action thriller set in Newport Beach. “It deals with the old nautical people on the peninsula, of which there are now but a precious few. But that way of life is still alive.”

Any concerns he might have had about having his second novel top the first do not seem to be present as he delves into No. 3.

“I’m 50 pages into it,” he said, laughing, “and it’s definitely the best thing I’ve ever written.”