Banyan Moon by Thao Thai (Mariner Books, HarperCollins)

Although Tolstoy may have been wrong when he said “Happy families are all alike,” he was definitely amiss when he decided unhappy families were all different. Unhappy families universally share a crucial similarity that defines their status; they all conceal secrets.

Secrets fill every corner of the Banyan House, a crumbling mansion in Florida that Minh purchased long ago as a family home. There her daughter Huong took refuge from a dangerous husband, raising her daughter Ann in tandem with Minh, who quickly supplants Huong in Ann’s affections. From her earliest childhood, Ann has an adversarial relationship with her mother, much as Huong does with Minh. Only when Huong tells her daughter that her grandmother has died, does Ann leave her established adult life and return to the Banyan House, a place that no longer holds the woman whom she has always loved and trusted above anyone else.

She returns carrying a secret, one that she has yet to tell the man she thought she would marry, the one who has recently confessed to an act of infidelity. As her mother once did, Ann looks for a sanctuary in the Banyan House, but the child she brings with her is months away from being born. 

This secret is swiftly uncovered by Huong, who’s determined to repair the prickly, damaged relationship that connects her with her daughter. United in the task of cleaning the Banyan House that Minh has filled with unused and unnecessary objects, the two women work under the oversight of an invisible observer, the restless spirit of the family matriarch. Slowly Minh discloses her secret, one that her family has never known. Huong and Ann are not descendants of the man they were taught to revere as their father and grandfather.

As a flood of secrets gradually comes to light, what begins as a run-of-the-mill beach book takes on a depth that’s surprising and puzzling. Although the subjects of greed, sibling rivalry, domestic violence, and the return to a hometown that no longer seems to fit have all been covered again and again in a multitude of novels, Banyan Moon carries an eerie magic that makes this all seem fresh, new, and riveting. 

How does Thao Thai manage to pull this off? From the very beginning, with its cliched friction between the privileged wasp background of Ann’s fiance clashing against her own artistic and “exotic” life, this story carries a luster that pushes readers into its many different layers of story. Although Thai is a writer who doesn’t shy from well-worn descriptions that are perilously close to being threadbare, she has the gift of creating irresistible characters--and it’s Minh, Huong, and Ann who carry this novel. Each of their voices is distinctly different and they coexist without the slightest trace of unease. Their stories flow and interweave together, never feeling intrusive or inauthentic. Their lives flare into being, making the supporting characters seem almost nonessential and certainly pallid. The strength and complexity of their different personalities gives an edge to the end of this novel. Will these women be able to move beyond their history and their secrets, taking secure possession of what seems to be a happy ending?~Janet Brown

Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin (Henry Holt and Company)

“There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies--everything in between is speculation.” But “in between” lie three long months and within that space, Anh loses her childhood. 

She and her two brothers are sent away from Vietnam on an eight-day voyage to Hong Kong, aboard a “rotting and cracked boat.” Her parents and her other siblings will follow them later, an act that divides the family in two: the survivors and the dead. Three months after she last saw them, Anh is taken to a morgue to identify bodies that were once the other half of her family.

She becomes the only security her brothers will ever have again and her spur-of-the-moment decision to lie to an official at the Kai Tak refugee camp determines what their lives will become. Angered that an uncle who had successfully journeyed to America had given her father encouragement to follow him and die, when asked if she has any family abroad, Anh says “No.”

This one syllable puts her and her brothers on a plane to another refugee camp, Sopley, in England. Caught in the exclusionist policies of Margaret Thatcher, it will be two years before the children have a home of their own with a bed they can all lie upon at the same time with their arms outstretched, a luxurious feeling after sleeping in the narrow bunk beds of Kai Tak and Sopley.

They aren’t unaccompanied, although they will never know it. Their little brother watches them as they slowly acculturate to their London slum neighborhood. “When they laugh, it’s like a dagger in my heart,” he says, “It’s lonely and tiring to be a ghost…invisible and voiceless.”

But his voice permeates the narrative, along with the future voice of Anh’s daughter who searches for her family’s history, “trying to carve out a story between the macabre and the fairy tale.” A weird counterpoint is given in the words of an aging American soldier who had been given a key role in Operation Wandering Soul, eleven years before Anh and her brothers leave Vietnam. He and a comrade are sent out into the battle zone with a cassette player and a portable PA system “to scare the living shit out of those gooks, their lieutenant tells them. When they reach their destination and press “play,” wails, screams and sobs echo into the jungle. Years later they’re told those were meant to be the voices of those Vietnamese who died far from home, wandering souls who yearned to be buried in the places where they belong.

The story of Anh’s wandering soul finding a home for herself, her brothers, and the part of her family who lie buried under Hong Kong soil, is wrapped in a collage of history: the terrible story of over 1000 Vietnamese who are taken by Thai pirates to Koh Kra, where 160 are killed and 37 women are raped by 500 men over a period of 22 days; a letter written by Margaret Thatcher to a Vietnamese family, a string of empty words belied by minutes from an informal meeting where the Prime Minister clearly states her reluctance to take in refugees who are not white; a study of Prolonged Grief Disorder, grief that lasts beyond a few months and “signals a state of mental illness.”

Anh’s daughter is told by a therapist that her family heritage “is one of death.” Saying she doesn’t want to write about death, she’s forced to confront it as she searches for her family’s history. At last she decides to keep the deaths, keep the suffering, add some joy, and ends her book with her mother in a garden of blooming roses, thinking it is “quite a wonderful thing to be alive.~Janet Brown

Fragrant Heart : A Tale of Love, Life and Food in Asia by Miranda Emmerson (Summersdale)

Miranda Emmerson is a British writer. In 2008, she and her partner decided to have one last fling before settling down and having kids. They decided to spend one year living and working abroad in China. 

Although she and her partner Chris chose to live in China for a year, they also traveled down to Vietnam and the Mekong Delta, then went west Cambodia, enjoying the cuisines of Phnom Phen and Tonle Sap Lake. They would continue their travels to central Thailand and to the island of Penang and the city of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. 

Emmerson’s love for Chinese food started when she was still a youngster living in Isleworth, a small suburb of London, England. She describes Fragrant Heart as “a book about travel but it’s also about food. The experience of food, the discovery of it, the sensuality of eating strange things in strange lands and falling in love with the taste of other people’s countries”. 

Emmerson’s love of Chinese food started when she was still a youngster. Her family would celebrate family occasions at a Chinese restaurant called Mann’s Beijing. When the family had a bit of extra money, birthdays would be celebrated at the Four Regions Restaurant in the neighboring town of Richmond. Emmerson thought, “If Italian food tasted of home and family, Chinese food tasted of exociticism and success”. 

Her love of Chinese food would grow after meeting her friend Anne whose parents were from Hong Kong. They worked at a Chinese takeaway and she would be mesmerized by the speed and efficiency of how they worked. However, it was while living in China which really “turned her on to the possibilities and varieties of Chinese food. To start to understand the different regions and thousand different dishes that could emerge from a single wok”. 

Emmerson does remind readers that Fragrant Heart is not only a culinary travelog but is also a memoir of facing the unknown, of escaping big decisions she and her partner have yet to make and of dealing with life in general. 

Emmerson is also a vegetarian. She asks the reader, “Are you vegetarian?” and follows up with, “Want some advice? Don’t go to China!”.  She says, “the irony for the vegetarian traveler in Asia is that as a relatively wealthy visitor to restaurants and towns in the cities, everything comes cooked in and garnished with meat”. 

Their first stop in their travels of food and life starts at a hostel in Beijing. China. It is the year the city hosted the Olympics. The owners of the Red Lantern House hostel are hosting a party for their guests. They are teaching the guests how to make New Year’s dumplings that are shaped like crescent moons. And that is only the beginning. 

Emmerson and her partner move from the hostel and find an apartment in Beijing are introduced to hot-pot meals, eat noodles and rice at an outdoor stall, her partner takes a Mandarin cooking class (Chris is proficient in four languages and has a degree in Russian from Oxford). 

They eat pho and nem cuon in Vietnam. Pho is a dish made with rice noodles in a broth with either chicken or beef and herbs while nem cuon is Vietnamese spring roll. They ate some grilled chicken and tofu kebabs in Cambodia which were topped with tirk salouk swai, a mango salsa. They introduce the readers to Pernakan cuisine which is also known as Nyonya while in Malaysia before making their way back to China. 

Emmerson’s prose is easy to read and her adventures in Asia with her partner Chris are filled with excitement and fear. Their love of food and culture might inspire you to travel abroad and try things you’ve never eaten before. If international travel is out of your budget, there are always the ethnic restaurants you check out in your own neighborhood. 

Happy eating and happy travels!! What more can you ask for? ~Ernie Hoyt

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Books)

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet whose debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous became a New York Times Bestseller. The main character, Little Dog, is writing a letter to his mother. He knows it’s a letter she will never read as his mother is illiterate. It is more about Little Dog coming to terms with his own life by revisiting his past. 

Little Dog first reminisces about his mother. The way she hurt him when he was still a child. The first time she hit him, he was only four years old. Then there was the time with the remote control that left a bruise on his forearm but told his teachers, “I fell playing tag”.  Another time, he wrote about his mother throwing a box of Legos at her head. 

Little Dog writes to his mother and says he was thirteen when he finally told her to stop hurting him. He looked deep into her eyes, the way he learned to do with the bullies that used to hit him. His mother, turning away as if nothing happened. He writes to say, “we both knew you’d never hit me again”. 

Little Dog writes this letter when he’s in his late twenties. He is putting down on paper the history of his life. He knows he was born in Vietnam and was given a name that meant Patriotic Leader of the Nation. He not only writes about his mother, but his grandmother, Lan, as well. They were survivors of the war, then they were refugees, and now they were living in Hartford, Connecticut. 

He writes how Lan ran away from an arranged marriage and became a prostitute during the Vietnam War. How she married an American serviceman, then gave birth to a child, the child being his mother, Rose. However, Rose was not the child of the soldier Lan married as she was already four months pregnant when she met him. 

Rose doesn’t have much of an education as her schoolhouse collapsed after the Americans dropped napalm over the place she lived. It is because of the war that Rose suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Rose marries an abusive man but manages to leave him. 

Halfway through the novel, Little Dog makes his confession to his mother about his first true relationship - a white boy named Trevor, born and bred in America. who meets while working on a tobacco farm one summer. He was only seventeen. This relationship would continue into adulthood but would end in tragedy as Trevor becomes a heavy drug user. 

What’s fascinating about this story is the fact that it mirrors Vuong’s life, however Vuong makes no attempt to write a chronologically correct timeline of Little Dog’s life. His non-linear approach makes the story hard to follow at times. The reader is often left wondering what Vuong is actually trying to convey and although the book has received praise and many accolades for a first novel, I may be in the minority as I found it self-indulgent and tedious. If this is the new wave of fiction, I will gladly find my way back to the classics. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit and Peril by Sarah Stodola (HarperCollins)

Blame it on the British. Stuck on their soggy little island with its chilly shoreline, bordered by a sea that could induce hypothermia if an intrepid adventurer immersed so much as a single toe into its frigid waves, once they learned that a beach could be pleasant, there was no stopping them. The south of France, the coast of Italy, even England’s sworn foe, Spain, were suddenly prime targets for English bodies yearning to be warm. Time spent on a beach became the fashion for cold and restless residents of northern countries until at last the words “vacation” and “beach” became almost synonymous, first only for the wealthy and then for the masses. Today there are over 7000 beach resorts on our planet, not including the ones that have fewer than ten rooms or aren’t directly on the beach.

When the invention of the air conditioner tamed the “soupy heat” of the tropics, new destinations opened up for the world’s sun-worshippers. First came the readers of Lonely Planet guides, followed by people with more money to spend and were reluctant to relinquish the comfort they were used to. Beach shacks were supplanted by more comfortable accommodations, built for the travelers who wanted to be “far from home while never having left.”  Local residents soon realized that their beaches yielded more money than any of their agricultural efforts and suddenly resorts studded coastlines all over the world.

Sarah Stodola, like many other tourists, became enthralled with the concept of a beach vacation when she went to Southeast Asia. Although she surveys seaside destinations from the Jersey Shore to Senegal, the bulk of her explorations take place in tropical Asia. This is where the idea of the resort ranges from rustic bungalows for surfers to entire islands that only the wealthy can afford, where the cheapest accommodations begin at $2,200 a night. 

People will pay for solitude. Some pay with the discomfort of discovering an undeveloped paradise while others yearn for “barefoot luxury,” “peace without challenges,” and a “frictionless experience.” Asia has both extremes and everything in between the two. It also holds the largest number of potential tourists. Before the advent of Covid, in 2018 150 million Chinese tourists traveled outside their borders, enriching the tourist industry with $255 billion dollars in 2019. China,” Stodola speculates, “has the power to remake the global tourism industry” with India as a close contender.

Chinese travelers are already changing the beaches of Vietnam, their “fourth-most-visited destination, after Thailand, Japan, and South Korea, with 4 million Chinese descending upon this small country in 2017. Most of them flock to Vietnam’s two thousand miles of coastline, where, a developer says, “you see a new resort opening every three months.” The perils of over-development have been slowed by Covid but the signs are clearly there. Dams have prevented the replenishment of beach sand while illegal sand mining takes place offshore with impunity. It’s a small indication of how the ravenous appetite for beach holidays are endangering the coastlines of the world.

An island in Malaysia points the way that disaster could be averted. One locally-run NGO is making recycling an island-wide practice. A machine that cost only $6000 takes empty beer bottles and turns them into sand. This is mixed with concrete and used in the island’s construction projects, eliminating the need to import expensive sand from outside the island and making illegal sand mining from the sea an irrelevant operation. With thousands of beer bottles emptied constantly by tourists, this is a vastly sustainable solution.

Others are less palatable and more difficult to bring into being. With a world full of paradise-seekers who are accustomed to jumping on planes to get what they want, how to stuff that genie back in the bottle by discouraging long-haul flights? Maybe by making beach holidays what they were at their very beginning, a privilege reserved for the wealthy.~Janet Brown

Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63 by Marcelino Truong, translated by David Homel (Arsenal Pulp)

It was a normal 1960’s childhood in a Washington DC suburb, one filled with hula hoops, Play-Doh, and winter sledding “like a Peanuts cartoon…something that Norman Rockwell might imagine.” Suddenly this all changed and the Truong children were on their way back to Vietnam. Their father, a diplomat serving in the Vietnamese Embassy, was needed by President Diem, a career swerve that took his family from the land of “cherry pie, a corner store, and Coca-Cola” to Saigon, a city filled with soldiers and Skyraider warplanes, with a naval destroyer moored in the river.

Now the children eat pho at street stalls with the family’s driver, Chu Ba, while their French mother struggles to make her housemaid realize that fish sauce isn’t an ingredient in boeuf bourguignon. Their father becomes part of what American journalists call the Diemocracy, serving as the English translator for President Diem and becoming the director of Agence Vietnam-Presse. His children go swimming at the pool in the exclusive Cercle Sportif de Saigon, learn to live without glass in the windows of their modern apartment, and enact spirited battles with their captured crickets and Siamese fighting fish.

Western journalists come to report on the “lovely little war, with just enough adrenaline,” flying to battlegrounds for the day and returning to the peace of Saigon in time for dinner. Then an unsuccessful coup attempt by two Vietnamese fighter pilots brings the war to the capital and grenades become a routine danger. Caught in a traffic jam, the children and their mother smell “something charred” and learn later that it came from a monk who set himself on fire to protest what is now being called “the dirty war.”

This is too much for Madame Truong. Her nerves shatter, she becomes prey to manic depression, and the war enters the Truong home. The children overhear the parents’ bitter fights. Their driver is forced to sell his blood to cope with the rising inflation caused by the advent of U.S. troops. Soon he‘s drafted to serve as a soldier, one who rides at the front of an armored train.

Interspersed with this child’s view of the war is a concise history, much of it based on his father’s memories and excerpts from his mother’s letters to relatives in France. This provides a brief but detailed summary of the Diem regime, the machinations of Madame Nhu, the role of Catholicism in Vietnam, and the symbolism of the legendary Trung sisters. “We should have done it on our own, with American weapons but without their soldiers, the way the Communists did,” the father concludes years later.

The “graphic novel” format of this mingled memoir and history gives it a vivid depth that makes it emotionally wrenching, while the frequent use of Vietnamese sprinkled throughout the book gives it the feeling of watching a film with subtitles. Like Maus and Persepolis before it, Such a Lovely Little War takes what once were “comic books” into a whole new realm of literature, blending art and text to create another world of creative possibility and a work of art that should become a classic.~Janet Brown

The Dragon Hunt : Five Stories by Tran Vu, translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong (Hyperion]

The Dragon Hunt Is a collection of five short stories, some of which are based upon the life of writer Tran Vu. The stories were translated from the Vietnamese language by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong. A couple of the stories have previously been published in other periodicals. 

The lead story, “The Coral Reef” was first published in Granta: Fifty in the summer of 1995. The second story in the collection - “Gunboat on the Yangtze” is a slightly altered translation that first appeared in the anthology Night, Again : Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam which was published by Seven Stories Press in 1996. 

“The Coral Reef” is about a boat full of refugees that runs aground on a coral reef. The crew and passengers do their best to free the boat from the reef but their efforts seem to be in vain. After the first day of being stranded, there are already changes in the people as they scramble to find food and provisions from the wreckage and think only of their own survival. 

“The Coral Reef” was based on an incident in Tran Vu’s life. Tran was born in Saigon in 1962. When he was sixteen, he and his older brother fled Vietnam on a boat. The war was over but the siblings didn’t feel safe with the communist government. Their boat, filled with four hundred passengers, shipwrecked on a coral reef. 

Tran escaped through a porthole and survived in the ocean for ten days, thanks to the life jacket that was given to him by his mother, who stayed in Vietnam. He was a refugee in the Philippines until he was granted asylum in France where he currently lives. 

“Gunboat on the Yangtze” is a disturbing story about a disfigured boy named Toan, and his elder sister who currently live in a small house in Paris. The boy suffers from extreme loneliness so his sister promises to find him a girlfriend. Once elder sister’s friend sees little brother’s face, she screams and storms out of the house yelling for help. Even after leaving the house, “her ghoulish scream haunted the corridor for a long time”. 

Elder sister gives in to her brother’s demand about being loved and they start an incestuous relationship. Things get a bit more complicated when Toan says he wants to have a child of his own. What happens between them defies the imagination.

“Hoi An” is the setting for a love triangle between a married woman, a servant girl, and the man who lives in the same house with the married woman, although in a different rented room. Hoi An is a small forgotten town in central Vietnam. The married woman’s husband is an archeologist and has moved his family to Hoi An to continue his research into the Cham and Sa Huynh people. The husband seems to be oblivious of his wife’s actions which makes her bold and dangerous at the same time. 

“Nha Nam” is a story where Vu mimics the style of a well-known Vietnamese writer named Nguyen Huy Thiep. Vu’s story was inspired by Thiep’s “Nha Nam Rain”, but Vu points out that the two stories have nothing in common besides their titles. Vu says that “Nha Nam” translates to “Delicate South” and is both ancient Vietnam and the Vietnam of today.

The final story which the book takes its name from is about a group of Vietnamese exiles who gather together in a European nation to kill dragons and eat their flesh. Even after reading Vu’s notes in which he mentions “The Dragon Hunt” is a metaphor for the divide between North and South of Vietnam, not in the sense of a nation, but as a people. It’s the difference between those who remained in the country and those who left. 

This book is a good introduction to contemporary Vietnamese fiction. Vu’s own experiences add to the realism of his stories. Although a very short book, it will impress you enough to want more. ~Ernie Hoyt

Daughters of the New Year by E. M. Tran (Hanover Square Press)

Xuan “wears her American citizenship with discomfort,”  she marinates the holiday dishes of her new country in soy sauce because fish sauce is impossible to find in New Orleans, and she reads a book of Chinese horoscopes every year “like a very important yearly report.” She has to. How else can she monitor the lives of her American daughters, the Earth Goat, the Fire Tiger, and the Earth Dragon? A Metal Tiger herself, Xuan knows the importance of these annual predictions and it’s her responsibility to keep her children informed. 

Trac, the Earth Goat, has graduated from Columbia Law with the knowledge that New York shares New Orlean’s racism without realizing it. Deciding she preferred the clarity of Southern bigotry, she now practices law in her hometown while struggling with the truth that as a Vietnamese American, she’s “not we, not them.” In love with a woman who’s a white Southerner, Trac knows the only ones who can understand her position are her sisters.

Nhi, the Fire Tiger, is in the city where her mother had captured the title of Miss Saigon 1973. As a contestant in an American get-the-bachelor reality show, this girl raised in New Orleans knows Saigon is “no more home to her than Bogota or Brussels, but here she feels her ancestry. She’s surrounded by people who look like her, whose language she’s heard all her life but can barely speak, and she feels as though in Saigon she’s “both a stranger and an intimate.”

Trieu is the youngest, still living at home, the Earth Dragon who knows her sisters’ secrets and guards them from their mother. Graduating from a “magnet” school where the elementary students were all gifted and mostly white, Trieu is alien in middle school where she’s surrounded by Black and first-generation Vietnamese American kids. She’s the Twinkie, yellow on the outside, white on the inside--and as the outsider, Trieu becomes an observer whose ambition is to write. 

Just as these women begin to take shape, they dissolve into a family history, one that mirrors the history of Vietnam. Suddenly Xuan is in a boat with her mother, her sister, and thirteen other people, with jewelry and gold sewn into her clothing, in danger from starvation, thirst, and Thai pirates. Tien, Xuan’s mother, prepares her own mother for burial and sorts through photographs of a vanished life, before their family’s grand house and their rubber plantation was destroyed by a never-ending war. And back through the centuries the story goes, revealing secrets that were never told, the heroic exploits of women whom the New Orleans sisters will never know. 

A family tree traces the existence of these women, from the legendary Trung sisters who led an ancient rebellion to rid their country of Chinese rule to Xuan’s three daughters who each rebel in their own fashion. (All on the family tree are provided with their own zodiac sign, buttressing the novel’s title.)

Anyone who has grown up American in a family based upon immigrant ancestors, which is to say all of us, will understand E. M. Tran’s attempt to recover her shrouded family history. Her novel is essentially a collection of linked short stories, with no single character developing into fullness. The wit and scathing observations that bring the first portion of her narrative to life fade into a patchwork of history, with characters who are as faded as blotched and deteriorating photographs from the past. This is a book that should have gone deeper-- and should have been much longer--to give its characters the life they deserve.~Janet Brown

Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen: Simple Recipes from My Many Mothers by Kim Thuy (Penguin Random House Canada)

“I depend on food to express as best I can my unconditional love.” novelist Kim Thuy says in her introduction to this cookbook. Although she herself is an accomplished cook who gave up a career as a lawyer to open a restaurant in Montreal, Thuy gives full credit to her mother and her “aunt-mothers” for the recipes that fill the pages of Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen. They are the women who taught her that food is love, “a tool for expressing our emotions.”

While most cookbooks introduce a particular cuisine and culture, Thuy’s introduces her family, beginning with her husband and two sons for whom she makes three separate meals every day between 3 and 8 o’clock, and then presenting her culinary lodestars, her mother and her five aunts.

Portraits of these stunning women introduce each section of the cookbook, beginning with The Fundamentals and ending with Desserts and Snacks. Their strong, beautiful faces and their brief introductory stories give this book an extraordinary dimension: the mother who “very easily gained a degree in aeronautical technology during our first years in Canada,” the aunt “who waited for her husband for ten years,” the aunt who kept her composure during a difficult divorce by silently conjugating French verbs, the rebellious aunt who found success in the United States, the aunt who lacks the ability to live alone but who has mastered “the art of conversation better than any of her sisters,” the aunt who is “the eternal beauty.” Thuy herself appears only at the very end, a dazzlingly radiant and “infinitely impatient” eater of desserts, with a self-description of ”Me, I tell stories.”

It’s difficult to take attention away from these women but the lessons they teach their readers are equal to that task. No detail is ignored nor previous knowledge assumed--cook rice noodles in cold water and turn off the heat as soon as the water boils; when cooking fish with turmeric, use “three times as much dill as fish;” serve heaping platters of vegetables, raw and cooked, with almost every meal; use a spray bottle filled with warm water to moisten and soften soften rice paper wrappers. And don’t forget the fish sauce, without which “most Vietnamese couldn’t cook, couldn’t EXIST,” or the fresh herbs that “leave a memory of their perfume long afterward…like a lover’s kiss.”

A bounty of soups, including one that’s made more rapidly than packaged instant ramen, one-dish meals of stir-fries and noodle bowls, vegetables that become the stars of any dining table, the hazardous and irresistible delights of fried food and the savory pleasures of grilled snacks, “slow-cooked” meals that rarely take more than an hour before they’re on the table; desserts that almost always feature fruit as the main ingredient--all of these are presented in tempting and uncomplicated recipes that range from summer food to hearty warming dishes for cold weather.

And of course there are the stories. In the middle of a war, while still living in Vietnam, Thuy’s father often made a dangerous four-hour drive to have coffee with his grandfather, coffee that was made from the beans eaten by foxes and excreted whole from their bellies. Thuy’s Saigon childhood was filled with the music of bells, announcing vendors who nestled scoops of ice cream within a small brioche--a gourmet’s version of an ice cream sandwich. She tells how her mother made dumplings in a refugee camp, rolling out the dough on the rusty metal cover of a water barrel and how in the camp her entire family once shared a bag filled with a cold and sweet soft drink, passing it from hand to hand so that each of the thirteen people had three tastes from the single straw inserted in the closed bag.

When Thuy’s first novel, Ru, received Canada’s Scotia Bank Giller Prize, the Giller jury praised her for “reinventing the immigrant story.” She quickly corrected them, saying she writes refugee literature. “Refugee and immigrant are different. A refugee is someone ejected from his or her past, who has no future…in a refugee camp you live outside of time.”

Her novels all convey that state of timelessness in its truest dizzying sense, a dream-like quality that gives her stories the opaque and distant feeling of  being “stateless, part of nothing.” Although Thuy’s fiction draws heavily upon her escape from Vietnam on a hardscrabble boat, her nights of sleeping in a cobbled-together shelter in a refugee camp, her time as a lawyer in Hanoi, her days as a restaurateur, and her mothering of an autistic child, she weaves her life into narratives that avoid sentiment or emotion, books that feel almost flattened in their straightforward and compressed plots. 

It’s within this book, through the faces and the food of her mothers, that she reveals bright flashes of who she is and where she comes from. Not quite a memoir, not only a cookbook, these secrets from a kitchen are nourishing on a number of different levels. They remind North American readers that we all are descended from refugees, people whose differences have  made our countries vibrant and our food choices delicious.~Janet Brown

Em by Kim Thuy, translated by Sheila Fischman (Seven Stories Press)

When “truth is fragmented is it still the truth?” How is it possible to  encompass all the different truths contained in a war? Kim Thuy takes the stories told to her by others, the histories she’s read, and her own childhood memories to reconstruct the war that turned her into a refugee by the time she was ten. But, she says, “Memory is a faculty of forgetfulness.” It cloaks brutal truths with the vagueness that lends itself to myths and fables. 

In concise chapters that are spread over only 148 pages, Thuy presents true facts of the Vietnam/American war as seen through characters who appear and swiftly vanish, people of tragedy and coincidence. The improbability of their stories softens the brutal reality of the truth. A Saigon woman who has been recruited as a guerrilla to kill a French planter falls in love with him, bears his child, and dies with him in their plantation that’s become a combat zone. Their daughter is taken to My Lai during a school holiday by a servant who came from there. The girl goes to sleep in a veil of privilege, wakes up to the sound of killing, and is rescued from a pit of corpses. Later the child she abandons is picked up by a street orphan. Years afterward these two children meet in another world, another life, and find a happy ending together. 

This narrative is as improbable and magical as the frothiest of Shakespeare’s plays. It has to be. Interwoven with the fantastic is the history of the coolies who tapped the sap of rubber trees, exiles from China and India who labored beside their Vietnamese counterparts and died from the workload; the testimony of a man who took part in the My Lai massacre, saying “I was told to kill anything that moved,” the moment that an American plane holding Vietnamese orphans exploded on the runway, killing 78 babies, with the 178 surviving children put on the next plane in Operation Babylift. It tells how the actress Tippi Hedren launched manicure training classes for newly arrived women from Vietnam, creating a global industry in which Vietnamese control half of the market, making a living while breathing in toxic fumes. 

One chapter gives a glossary of French words that became part of the Vietnamese language, while the most commonly used Vietnamese word that entered French was con gai, that meant both girl and prostitute. Another tells how a homogeneous country became diverse, through the children who were never known by the foreign soldiers who impregnated their mothers. 

“Naked, the earth was no longer a dance floor for sun and leaves,” Thuy says before describing the rainbow of toxins, not just orange but green, pink, purple, and blue herbicides that descended in deadly clouds and ricocheted backward so “the sprayers were also the sprayed.” She describes pho in delicious detail and then tells how hungry street children waited to drain the leavings from bowls of it after customers had walked away. She enumerates the official numbers of dead and wounded American and Vietnamese soldiers, while asking “why no list included the numbers of orphans, of widows, of aborted dreams, of broken hearts.”

“I tried to interweave the threads, but they escaped, and remain unanchored, impermanent, and free,” Thuy says as she nears the end of her novel. What she has made from that elusive fabric has the force and agony of PIcasso’s Guernica, wrapped in the deceptive sweetness of a fairy tale.~Janet Brown

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli (Harper)

The Lotus Eaters is Tatjana Soli’s first novel. She has set her story amidst the Vietnam War, or as the Vietnamese call it, the American War. It focuses on a woman named Helen Adams, a woman who dreams of becoming a photographer for Life magazine. She is also torn between two men she loves - Sam Darrow, her mentor and Nguyen Pran Linh, an ex-soldier and assistant to Darrow. 

The story opens with the fall of Saigon. The time is April 1975. At this time, Helen had been in Vietnam for over ten years. She and Linh are on their way out of the country. Linh may be Vietnamese but he has papers that will allow him to flee on one of the last flights out of the country. As the two rush to the U.S. Embassy, Lihn is shot and injured. Helen is determined that they will both leave, although unknown to Lihn, she plans to stay to cover the changeover. 

The story then goes back to the beginning when Helen first goes to Vietnam. After losing her brother in the war, Helen decides to go to Vietnam and tries to make a name of herself as a photojournalist. There she meets prize-winning journalist Sam Darrow. It is not love at first sight as Darrow treats her like a child but he takes her under his wing and she develops a love for him knowing full well that he is a married man and constantly feels as if she is being watched by his assistant Linh. 

After Darrow is killed in a helicopter accident, the bond between Helen and Linh gets stronger. However, Linh is a very private man. Helen does not know as yet that he was a former soldier fighting for the North but deserted the army and headed to Saigon with his wife. Helen does not know the burden Linh carries with him wherever he goes. His wife is dead, he is a deserter, and yet he is also attracted to Helen. 

The love triangle between Helen, Sam, and Linh and their relationship with each other seems to play out as a soap opera at times and the background of all three characters makes you care for them as real people. Their strong personalities can sometimes be aggravating but when you take into consideration the time and circumstances, one can imagine that you need to be strong in order to love and survive in a war zone. 

Soli was inspired by the female journalists who worked in Vietnam during the war. In her research she came across people such as Catherine Leroy, Kate Webb, and Barbara Gluck but it was the true story of Pham Xuan An, “a North Vietnamese intelligence agent who also was working undercover as a journalist for Time magazine” which would set her on her path to completing this novel. 

The Vietnam War may have ended for both countries and for Helen and Linh, but that didn’t stop the world from continuing their various conflicts. The war may have officially ended in 1975 but the next conflict to make headlines was the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the beginnings of the “killing fields”. 

It is one thing for governments and people to say, “Never again!” Yet it seems apparent that we as a people haven’t learned anything from our past. Following Vietnam, there was the genocide in Cambodia, the Bosnian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and now Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack on the Ukraine. When will there be a time when people say “Never again!” and really mean it? ~Ernie Hoyt

Monsoon by Di Morrissey (Macmillan)

Monsoon by Australian author Di Morrissey is the story of two women who grew up together and have ties to Vietnam. Sandy Donaldson has been working with an NGO for the last four years and her contract is about to expire, however, she doesn’t really want to leave the country she has come to love. She persuades her friend Anna, whose mother was a Vietnamese boat person, to come and explore her mother’s heritage. Anna is reluctant to leave Australia and feels she has no ties with the country as her mother died when she was a very young girl. 

Sandy has one other connection to Vietnam. Her father, Phil Donaldson is a veteran who served in the war and was at the Battle of Long Tan, a battle that took place at a rubber plantation in Phuoc Tuy province. The clash involved Australia’s D Company, 6th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (6 RAR) seeing action against the Viet Cong and People’s Army of Vietnam. Phil Donaldson was a member of the 6th Battalion. He comes home a bitter man and resents the fact that his daughter is helping what he still considers “the enemy”. 

I wasn’t familiar with Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, so the Battle of Long Tan was a bit of a history lesson for me. I know I may get some flack for this as it’s sexist but I would classify this story as chick-lit. It is without a doubt aimed more towards women and the romance they may find in a foreign country. However, It is also a story about coming to terms with one’s identity. 

Sandy and Anna meet Tom Ahearn, a former war correspondent for an Australian newspaper. He was in Vietnam around the same time as Sandy’s father and may have interviewed him at a hospital that housed wounded soldiers who saw action at Long Tan. 

It has been forty years since the siege at Long Tan and the government of Australia is finally giving it the recognition the soldiers thought it deserved. A ceremony is to be held and many of the surviving veterans are planning to attend. Only one person is adamant about not attending - Phil Donaldson

Monsoon is a very moving story of people facing the ghosts of their past. Phil with the demons that haunt him. Anna, coming to terms with what it means to be Viet Kieu, a foreign-born Vietnamese, and finally there is Sandy’s relationship with her father who never speaks about the war, what he saw, or what happened to him. Most of the characters are people you can care about except for Anna’s boyfriend Carlo, who seems to be a two-dimensional model of an egotistical, narcissistic specimen of machismo that’s just a bit over the top. 

Monsoon blends present day Vietnam with the memories of war and the damage it has done to both people and country. The streets of Ho Chi Minh City and Saigon and other locales come to life with Morrissey’s vivid descriptions, as does the food and the atmosphere of each city, from the World Heritage designated Halong Bay in the north to the island of Phu Quoc in the south. It’s enough to make you want to visit the country yourself.~Ernie Hoyt

Behind the Fire by Steven D. Salinger (Warner)

Steven D. Saligner’s debut novel Behold the Fire is a thriller set in the streets of New York. The murder of a man comes to the attention of NYPD homicide detective and Vietnam vet Mel Fink. However, at the scene of the crime, there was no sign of a struggle, no signs of a break in, and nothing was stolen. 

The victim was Franklin Grelling. He was an employee of Parker Global, a big defense contractor for the Pentagon. The company maintains that Grelling was “a traveling salesman with a fancy title”. Grelling’s partner, Barton believes the murder was related to drugs or to a relationship gone bad. Grelling spots a map of Vietnam on the wall and has a hunch that Barton is dead wrong about why the victim was murdered. 

Clear across the globe, in the jungles of Cambodia is Army Corporal Isaac Johnson, known to everybody as Zach. He is listed as an M.I.A. from the Vietnam War. Johnson was held captive in the Cambodian jungle by the Khmer Rouge for over twenty years. After saving a fellow American and former POW Ev Ransom and illegal arms dealer who works as a broker for Parker Global. 

Ransom agrees to try to return Johnson to his home in the U.S. It is Ransom that sets in motion a roller coaster ride that affects Washington and its relation with Vietnam as Ransom sends the fingerprints of Johnson to an MIA/POW activist senator named Antel Grantham. This is the proof the Senator has been waiting for even though the Pentagon has denied the existence or knowledge of any MIAs. 

To complicate matters even further, Fink has taken a liking to the wife of the first victim and Marissa Grelling seems to have ties to Ev Ransom and Parker Global as well. And the was another murder. The victim is also an employee of Parker Global. The mode of operation was the same as that of Frank Grelling. 

Fink’s continuing investigation leads him to find that the killings were done by a professional. He has also determined that the assassin is Cambodian. The only piece still missing from the puzzle is why the assassin has singled out personnel from Parker Global. What is the connection between Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam and Washington? Does Corporal Isaac Johnson ever get to set foot in his home country again? These are the questions that will keep the reader involved in the story up until its ultimate end.

Salinger’s story is fast-paced and exciting. The character development is great and makes you want to help Fink solve the crimes. His descriptions of New York City and the jungles of Cambodia are detailed and make you feel as if you are in the middle of all the turmoil as well. The action may not be enough for fans of John Rambo but this story doesn’t get preachy about alleged MIAs still being held prisoner in Vietnam or Cambodia. The book will appeal to fans of W.E.B Griffin and other military and detective fiction. ~Ernie Hoyt

Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham (Picador)

Back in the 13th century, a Chinese diplomat named Chou Ta-Kuan may have been the first travel writer to voice the phenomenon that the 20th century called culture shock. Brought up to believe his country was the measure of all things, he was unsettled by the glory and splendor of the Khmer empire’s capital, Angkor Wat. Like many travelers who ventured into unknown worlds long after his death, Chou offset his rumpled world view with scathing derision of habits that differed from his own. This is a palliative that contemporary travel writers continue to use as an antidote to discomfit, from Paul Theroux to an obscure Englishwoman who made the ill-fated decision to make her home on Pitcairn Island and lived to tell the tale.

Andrew X. Pham was broadsided by culture shock. He never expected it to happen when he went to Vietnam. He was returning to a place where he had lived for the first half of his childhood.  He was coming home.

Pham’s parents left when Vietnam was still emerging from its war with the U.S. From the time he was ten, Pham lived with a new language, new customs, and memories of his old home. Nearing the end of his twenties, he’s lost his job, his apartment, and a sister who dies after choosing to become his brother. Faced with the prospect of moving in with his parents, he takes his savings, his bicycle, and a few clothes and gets on a plane to Vietnam. His plan is to bicycle from Saigon to Hanoi and use the story of his journey to propel his career as a freelance writer. He knows the language, he knows the codes of behavior, he’s a seasoned cyclist. What could go wrong?

Thomas Wolfe could have answered that question. Pham enters a country where his memories have been eradicated during the past decades of rebuilding and change. Without knowledge of the progress that’s taken place since the end of the war, he’s disgusted by the poverty that surrounds him. He discovers he’s no longer seen as Vietnamese; he’s a Viet-kieu, one who left for the safety and comfort of another country. Worse still, he’s a Viet-kieu who came back with no gifts for relatives and who is so careful with his money that he’s perceived as stingy. Suddenly Pham is an outsider and an unwelcome one at that. 

Rejected by the people he thought were his own, Pham’s vision fixates on the misshapen, the crippled, the women with with “hungry vacant eyes,” men who “perk up like coyotes” when they see him pulling into town in his American clothes, on his American bicycle. He meets a taxi-dancer whom he thinks he could love, until she discovers he won’t be her avenue to a green card. In Hanoi he becomes the patron of a boy who lives on the streets and is passed on from traveler to traveler. He leaves town without saying goodbye.

“The sight of my roots repulses me. And that shames me deeply.” Pham admits. The only monument that impresses him are the tunnels at Cu Chi and the kindnesses shown him as he makes his journey seem to be outweighed by the anger and envy that he excites along the way. One old man takes him home, gives him a place to sleep, and shares meals with him, telling him “Here is my home, my birthland, and my grave.” A younger man tells him, “Some call you the lost brothers. You are already lost to us.” And Pham at the end of his journey realizes “my search for roots has become my search for home,” and that home is not Vietnam.

His honesty in recounting his multi-leveled odyssey is stark and blunt; the story he tells is a young man’s way of looking at the world. At the same time, this is a tale of adventure through in an unknown land, which Pham describes without overlooking its beauty. His descriptions are riveting and appreciative glimpses of the natural world and his bicycle trip rank right up there with the worst journeys ever taken, in terms of pain and injury. His travels are underpinned with family history and tragedy, both in Vietnam and within the U.S., making readers wonder if the price of immigration may be too high a cost in the long run.~Janet Brown

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith (Random House)

How far will far will we go to find the life we were meant to live? How do we learn to use what lives inside us, haunting us? 

Winnie Nguyen, half Vietnamese, half white American, comes to Saigon on a one-way ticket, bringing with her “a passport, two sets of clean clothes, and her own flesh.” The suitcase she carries is almost empty. So is Winnie. She becomes an English teacher because it’s the easiest job for a foreigner to get, she reads cheap novels as her class pretends to work on amorphous assignments, she buys clothes in drab colors that will let her fade into the background. She has no friends yet no reason to return home. When she disappears, nobody, not even the man who has taken her into his life and his bed, has any idea where she might have gone. Winnie has lived without a trace and her disappearance mirrors the way she lived.

Binh is an orphan, brought up by relatives. She’s a rebel, a child without fear, who’s followed faithfully by two brothers. When the boys grow up and leave her, Binh remains in the village, still a girl who follows no rules and has no ambition, until she becomes obsessed with revenge.

Winnie is a woman who has never felt at home in her body. Binh has never been at rest within hers. They wouldn’t have ever met if not for the two brothers who loved Binh and left her when they went off to live in  Saigon. Long, the younger brother, has tried his best to love Winnie. Tan, the older of the two, has been cursed by a death that troubles his dreams and brings Binh back into his life.

This novel begins with a page that holds the names of all the characters, followed by several detailed maps. They are essential clues to the story, which moves with what seems to be a dizzying incoherence between 21st century Saigon and the highlands of Vietnam from colonial times through the Japanese occupation. The characters are so diverse that they seem random. They are not. Each one of them, from the homesick French farmer who yearns for the taste of gougère to the peasant girl who is seduced by a dissolute plantation-owner, from a fortune-teller who can transform his face into a mask of inhuman flexibility to a wealthy villager’s beautiful daughter who goes missing in a forest that’s infested with venomous snakes—they all carry clues to solving the jigsaw puzzle that Violet Kupersmith has skillfully constructed. 

The ghosts of Southeast Asia are a horrific lot that put the pallid spectres of the West to shame. Kupersmith has added a new one to the pantheon, one that can become either a blessing and a torture. But this is not just a ghost story, or a mystery, although it combines both of these elements. Within its rich and enigmatic plot is a satirical examination of expats in a world that they try desperately to sanitize, a portrait of Saigon that embraces its ugliness as firmly as it describes the city’s allure, the psychological dissection of an unraveling personality, and the fragmented history of lost girls who each find their own way of belonging in the world.

Kupersmith has written a novel so compelling that it’s tempting to race through it in one sitting yet it’s complicated enough that it calls for another reading to immediately follow the first. She’s created a world that’s both repulsive and seductive—one that’s gone unvisited until she brought it into life.~Janet Brown

Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen (Knopf)

Huong comes from Vietnam to New Orleans with two small children. She’s haunted by war, armed with a handful of words in English, hates the word “refugee” and feels a surge of bitter humor when she’s placed in public housing that has been given the name “Versailles.” With an academic husband whose field is French literature, she recognizes the irony. 

In Vietnam, “theirs was a house of love...it was all they ever needed. And with love they would survive.” When Huong receives a postcard telling her to make a new life because her husband will never join them, love is what makes her keep this truth in a hidden box, a secret from her sons--and that love is what keeps this novel from being a dark and tragic story.

Even though her oldest son searches for a different sort of family in a gang of Vietnamese street toughs and her youngest finds affection and mentorship in the gay community, even when her secret comes to light and divides her family, even when one single slap in the face sends her youngest away from home to eventually live in Paris, Huong keeps love alive in a persistent flame, along with her ability to create a stable center in an uncertain world.

“Huong likes emergencies. She thrives on figuring out how to avoid danger, how to stay alive….she would save them all if it came down to it.” And when Katrina falls upon New Orleans, she’s ready. She knows the art of survival, which she anchors with her love.

In a literary world that has provided countless stories of dysfunctional families, Eric Nguyen has written a novel filled with light, hope, and beauty. He presents Huong and her children through their different perspectives, in chapters that skirt despair in favor of radiance. An old Chinese shopkeeper gives the oldest son a bowl of soup and saves him from an act that would have changed his life forever. A used car salesman courts Huong by taking her to an orchard of fruit that she never expected to see in this new country and wins her heart with bunches of sweet, freshly picked longan and a taste of her previous life. The youngest son discovers who he is in a deserted swimming pool, where he and the boy who kisses him are “both stars, the two of them...Floating. Free.”

It’s unusual to find tenderness in a novel nowadays but Nguyen provides it, untainted by saccharine sentimentality. Huong and her children learn where the nature of home resides; “this had become her city,” Huong realizes after spending years in New Orleans, “the place she lived but also a place that lived in her.” And on their different paths, both of her sons find what lives within them.

The radiant truth of those separate voyages toward that discovery is inspiring, humbling, and indelible. Nguyen, in his debut novel, has evoked a gentle yet realistic vision of family life as it could be and as it should be.~Janet Brown

You Don't Belong Here by Elizabeth Becker (PublicAffairs)

“Go! Go! Go!” The command echoed through the cargo plane as soldiers jumped from an open door in the first offensive airborne assault of the Vietnam War. Among all who leaped into the sky, perhaps only one of them had already completed 84 jumps, a French photographer named Catherine LeRoy.

Someone took her picture as she stood in line, waiting for her turn. Her eyes were wide, excited, and completely alive, her jaw was set, two cameras were draped around her neck. As she fell, she photographed the bodies in parachutes, hundreds of them, and she was one of the guys.

This is what LeRoy wanted. The only woman photographer for two years In a world of men, she proudly announced “They forget I’m a gal.” In fact, she was so little that often the troops forgot she was there at all. “Timid, skinny, very fragile,” her mentor Horst Faas described her after their first meeting. She was young too, arriving in Saigon on a one-way ticket soon after she turned 21. 

Her goal was to become “a man amongst men,” although she was able to personify French female chic when she chose to. Told by other photographers, “This is for boys,” she almost lost her press credentials because she became “too loud, too coarse.” But her photographs were what saved her, along with her unflagging courage. From the hills of Khe Sanh, she took intimate battle portraits of the troops. “Where were you,” one of them asked her when he saw his face in the papers, “I didn’t even see you.” But she saw them. She loved them, and she stuck with them.

When she left Vietnam after almost three years,  she was exhausted. She’d been captured by North Vietnamese troops during the battle of Hue, was allowed to take their photographs, and was released in a matter of hours. She had been hit by mortar fire, was carried off in a stretcher with 35 holes in her body, and came back to take more photos. “I follow this profession out of love,” she said.

She returned to Vietnam to witness the fall of Saigon, photographing the rising of North Vietnam’s flag in the Presidential Palace. She died of cancer before she was forty, leaving a book as her legacy, Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam. 

Frances Fitzgerald arrived in Saigon when she was 25, in the same month of the same year as Cathy Leroy, although the two of them might never have met. The daughter of a CIA deputy director, Fitzgerald had money and connections, as well as a burnished beauty. She flew in on a round-trip ticket and planned to move on to Singapore but soon after her arrival she met the Washington Post reporter, Ward Just.  The two of them immediately embarked on a relationship that would last for years, one that gave Fitzgerald instant access to information and a shield from the sort of gossip that had tried to demolish Catherine Leroy. 

Unlike other women journalists in Vietnam, Fitzgerald had no need to scurry after work. She came to Vietnam with highly placed publishers as her friends. “Every article she sent was published: in the Daily Telegraph Magazine, Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly.” With a mother whose closest friend was Adlai Stevenson and a father who was a man with political clout, Fitzgerald had been given 100,000 dollars when she graduated from Radcliffe (a sum worth 830,000 dollars in 2019). She had the luxury of writing whatever she wanted. As Just said, “She was looking at things in a completely different optic,” not soldiers on the battlefield but the logistics of the war, “the aid missions that didn’t work,” the destruction of villages. Her focus was one that which Just would adopt himself, years later, in his novel A Dangerous Friend.

Fitzgerald’s landmark book on Vietnam, Fire in the Lake, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for history, remaining a classic of its time.

She would return to Vietnam in 1974, reporting from Hanoi in a twenty-three-page New Yorker article, still wrapped in the privilege that allowed her to exercise her brilliant talent. Of the three journalists profiled in this book, she’s the only one who’s still alive.

Kate Webb also came to Saigon in 1966, eight months after Fitzgerald and LeRoy, when she was 23. Like LeRoy, she arrived on a one-way ticket with no assurance of a job. Even though she’d left Australia as a reporter with Rupert Murdoch’s Mirror, her offer to serve as a Vietnam correspondent for that paper was greeted with “general laughter.” She freelanced for her first year in Saigon until she made a name for herself with her report on the Tet Offensive which she described as  “a butcher’s shop in Eden.” After first rejecting her earlier with “What the hell would I want a girl for,” UPI finally hired her to report on “second tier” stories, not the battles but the “political machinations” of the South Vietnamese government and military. Like Fitzgerald, Webb looked for the “context,” the historical and political movements behind the drama of the war. When she was sent into the field, she wasn’t afraid to use “strong personal narrative,” her own and those of the soldiers. Webb ‘s goal was to replace the “impersonal language of an Army war report,” which she did with precision and without sentiment. 

Perhaps because of what had been done to Catherine LeRoy, Webb became a loner. In the competitive world she worked in she had “no enemies,” and was known as the kind of person who drank whiskey in opium dens. She hated being called a “girl reporter,” as much as she disdained women’s liberation. She was a journalist, pure and simple.

Then this journalist who believed in keeping a low profile became the story. Captured with colleagues in Cambodia, Webb marched with her North Vietnamese captors for 23 days and discovered when she was released that her obituary had appeared in the New York Times. The first words she heard as a free woman were “Miss Webb, you’re supposed to be dead.”

Suddenly the journalist who had always maintained her distance was a media star--and she was deathly ill.  Diagnosed with cerebral malaria, Webb was put into a coma and submersed in an ice bath, becoming, as she said later, a “living martini” for weeks.

In crucial ways, Webb never recovered. Her nerves were shattered and her drinking increased. UPI sent her to Hong Kong, where she was on the desk typing messages back and forth with a Khmer reporter the night Phnom Penh fell. When he told her he had to sign off because the Khmer Rouge had found him, Webb began drinking martinis without stopping until she was carried out of the bar at four the next morning. 

She filed stories from the USS Blue Ridge navy command ship when “more than 6,000 people, including about 900 Americans were flown out of Saigon,” as she wrote in her last report from Vietnam. She died when she was 64, of cancer, on an Australian farm, with the knowledge that she told her own story in her own words, with her own facts, in On the Other Side, ending it with the wish that she could have a beer someday with the men who had captured her. 

LeRoy, Fitzgerald, and Webb eclipse the author who wrote about them while inserting herself prominently in the opening and closing pages of You Don’t Belong Here. Although her writing is flat and mediocre, Elizabeth Becker deserves thanks for bringing the work of these journalists back into public attention. With luck LeRoy’s and Webb’s books may come back into print, joining Fitzgerald’s as an illumination of a time and place that we need to remember.~Janet Brown

Of Monkey Bridges and Banh Mi Sandwiches by Oanh Ngo Usadi (O&O Press)

When Oanh Ngo Usadi and her siblings talked about winning the lottery, their father told them “We already won the lottery by being here in America.” He was a man who had lost his successful businesses and his Saigon home after Vietnam was reunified, who took his family to live in the countryside and then got them on a boat to another country. “Turning back is not an option,” he told his family and they never have.

When Saigon fell, Oanh’s father said, “This is our home. We’re staying here.” Even when he was forced to take them to live as peasants in a rural province, this man gave his children the gift of appreciating what they had--a taste of the first durian produced by their orchard, the color and fragrance of the blossoming trees, the celebration of Tet. But he was foresighted enough to bring gold and jewelry that would ensure safety in the future, stitched into the clothing that his children wore when they left Saigon.

Oanh and her brothers learned to use an outdoor privy, to think of wilted banana leaves as toilet paper, to cross bridges made of logs that were tied together with vines, “monkey bridges,” called that name because using them made people stoop like monkeys. They learned never to waste rice and to listen for interlopers when their father used a forbidden radio to hear news from broadcasts of Voice of America. 

After being held at gunpoint by an envious neighbor and nearly killed when robbers came to steal the community’s supply of valuable fertilizer, Oanh’s father realized it was time to leave Vietnam.  On a small fishing boat crowded with almost 160 people, engulfed in the odors of “sweat, vomit, urine, the sea,” after three days of “misery and boredom,” he brought his family to a holding site in Malaysia and eventually to the United States.

In Port Arthur, Texas, Oanh took on a new importance when she picked up English more easily than her parents. She was the one who took the rent each month to the curmudgeonly landlord and told him about any needed repairs. She was the one to successfully plead her own case when the school she attended tried to demote her from 5th to 3rd grade. Within three years she no longer needed ESL classes and she had learned how to stand up for herself.

Her parents found jobs in a relative’s bakery but her father had dreams of going into business for himself with a banh mi sandwich shop. “I’m going to give McDonald’s a run for its money,” he told his family and when he brought his dream to life, it was a family affair into which everybody poured their energy .

His other ambition was that his children go to college and that he would pay for it. Oanh’s older siblings began to study SAT handbooks and when Oanh explored the books for herself, she “fell in love with English.” 

“In a land of immigrants, a sense of belonging was possible. It just needed time,” she wrote in an essay before leaving for Rice University. Time was what her father gave her--a life of possibility and accomplishment.

A book that carries hope and fulfilled dreams, Oanh’s memoir is a tribute to a man who refused to turn back and who instilled persistence and ambition in his children. More than ever,  Of Monkey Bridges and Banh Mi Sandwiches is essential reading for us all.~Janet Brown

Family in Six Tones by Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao (Penguin Random House)

Lan Cao’s life has been shaped by loss and love. At the age of thirteen, she lost her country when she  left Vietnam and came to America as a refugee. When she was almost forty, she became a mother, who from the very beginning, believed she and her daughter were “sinewed together.” Both experiences were “volcanic, invasive,” “steep paths filled with detours and stumbling blocks,” presenting her with new cultures to learn.

Harlan was a child with a father who gave her long generations of roots in America and a mother who “bequeathed Vietnam to her.” With different native tongues and separate codes of behavior, Harlan and Lan were bound to clash.  American confidence faced off against Vietnamese values, while mother and daughter struggled within a relationship that included Lan’s “shadow selves.”

Lan came to the U.S. as a child shaped by war, with parents whose past history outweighed the present and who could give her no guidance within the new life they all wrestled with. At home she was completely Vietnamese but once she walked out of her house, Lan carried the weight of becoming successful in America.

And she was. A graduate of Mount Holyoke, she went on to study law at Yale, to work at a Wall Street law firm, to achieve an academic career, and to become the author of two well-received novels. The American Dream was hers, although Lan points out this dream demands a crippling amount of work, work that her daughter would never have to face. “Americans can make their own dreams.”

As the only child of two law professors, Harlan lived a life that was idyllic in its affluence and rigorous in its training, with a notebook “full of fifth grade math that I had to do when I was just turning five.” She could “see sounds and feel letters and taste smells.” Words had colors and she was often accompanied by a purple cat that only she could see. Her best friend when she was at home was a little girl named Cecile. Cecile lived inside Harlan’s mother, a child with no body of her own.

This was one of Lan’s “shadow selves,” along with a horrifying creature that Harlan called “No Name.” These personalities emerged when Lan had seizures, in moments that nobody ever talked about and that Harlan first witnessed when she was four.. Like the purple cat and names that had their own unfading colors, this was a normal part of Harlan’s life. 

When Lan was four, she knew that her father carried cyanide pills in the hem of his military uniform. If he were captured, he would choose his own death. She grew up hearing stories of her uncle who attacked the enemy naked, at night. He and his comrades knew who to kill in the pitch darkness—any man who was wearing clothes.

But while Lan went from a life of war and struggle to one of success and comfort, Harlan’s successful childhood became a terrifying adolescence, when her father died and she became sexual prey to boys in her high school. Each of them convinced of the other’s invulnerability and perfection, Lan and Harlan became “two deaf best friends having one long conversation.”

Those conversations are made public in their two-person memoir that is scalding in its honesty and so piercing in its pain that it is difficult to read. But it ends with understanding and compassion. “I watched my mother’s heart bleed from the inside out,” Harlan concludes. As she looks toward a life of “perfect confusion, loneliness, deep  friendships, and loneliness,” she says “I’m ready.” “The stars were not aligned for us,” Lan says of her life with her daughter. “But forever here.”~Janet Brown

A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin)

Sydney Parade comes to Saigon in 1965 as a civilian, believing that foreign aid is a form of nation building, and holding a devout faith in the domino theory. He’s employed by the Llewellyn Group, an organization formed by and connected to the U.S.government, existing outside of any chain of command. The Group is in Vietnam to facilitate the distribution of rice, the providing of vaccinations, the repairing of dikes, the building of roads and bridges and schools. Parade is told their victories will be reflected in the hearts and minds that their work will win, not in body counts, and he believes that. The man who tells him that does not.

Dicky Rostok is an ambitious cynic. His invisible agenda is based upon the principle that knowledge will give him mastery and power. His instrument in gaining this is Parade, whose family is loosely connected to Claude Armand, an owner of a rubber tree rubber plantation that’s close to enemy territory. 

“We’ve got to know things that the rest of them don’t know from a source of information they can’t figure out,” Rostock tells Parade, “And then Llewellyn Group will count for something. Not before.” Armand and his American wife are the ones whom Rostok is certain will give him the information that nobody else will have and it’s Parade’s job to get it.

The Armands live “between the lines.” To them the war is a nuisance that they would be able to ignore, if the American forces would only stop bombing their rubber trees. But the lines blur for them when an American plane is shot down near their home and a young American with political connections is captured. To deflect the glare of attention that this brings them, they give Parade information that will provide Rostok with his power while destroying lives, including their own.

“I will insist at the beginning that this is not a war story,” is the opening sentence of A Dangerous Friend, and the war remains peripheral throughout the novel. Instead it’s the story of people who give their hearts and lives to places they don’t understand, expatriates who believe that “when you have lived in a place and loved it that you belong to it.” But as Parade says to Madame Armand, “I’m thinking we live in different countries. I’ve invented one and you’ve invented another, and somewhere there’s a third that’s undiscovered.” Neither of them yet know what Parade’s father told him years earlier, “Thing about a foreign country, you never know what you don’t know.” They haven’t learned that acquiring this knowledge can be dangerous.

“There were many things that could be taken from you that were more precious than life.”  Rostok gets what he wants while other people lose their innocence, their homes, their faith.

Ward Just has written a companion novel to Graham Greene’s classic, The Quiet American. While both books show the destruction caused by ignorance mingled with power, Just’s novel is suffused with a love for Vietnam and for the people who believe it’s their home. It too deserves to be a classic.~Janet Brown