Chinatown by Thuận

Chinatown (New Directions, 184 pp. $16.95, paper; $9.99, Kindle) by the acclaimed Vietnamese novelist Thuận (translated by Nguyen An Ly) is a compact story that encompasses worlds of time. This post-post-modern story is written in one continuous paragraph with no breaks of any kind, emphasizing that it’s a collection of words packed between two covers.

Chinatown is a breathless stream-of-consciousness story that speeds along although the narrator remains sitting in one place as we become aware of her thoughts. Thuận (Đoàn Ánh Thuận) was born in Hanoi in 1967 during the height of the American war, and lives in Paris. This is her twelfth novel and the first to be translated into English. She is a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature.

The story begins with a Paris Metro train stopped at a small station sometime in the early 2000s. An abandoned duffel bag is found that could be a bomb and has brought all movement to a halt.

A middle-aged Vietnamese woman on the train begins to think back on her life. She recalls a past love, Thuy, who remains a constant memory. He was her friend during their early school years. Born in Vietnam, his “slanted eyes” and Chinese ethnicity made him an outcast in school and the village.

Although the two became close, her parents never mentioned his name during her three years of high school and five years at university in Russia. They were married for a short time and had a son. They’ve been apart for twelve years. He works as an architect in the Cholon section of Saigon, known as Chinatown.

Thuận

As her thoughts bounce around, the narrator realizes how stressful her life has become in France. She teaches at a secondary school in a Paris suburb and speaks French with a jumbled accent. Aside from memories of her past love, she ponders a son and a male friend she refers to as “the guy.” But Thuy is always on her mind. While her greatest fear is that she will never see him again, she also thinks she “can’t imagine” meeting him again.

Her thoughts stray to her hairdresser and how to cook a snake. She also inserts short sections of what may become a chapter in a novel she’s writing. She occasionally recalls memories of a dreamed-of future.

There are frequent repetitions of a single thought, both within a page and from one page to another. My first look at this book, with its unbroken pages of text, led me to fear it might be difficult to read. It turns out I shouldn’t have been concerned because the lack of chapters and other page breaks led naturally to a nonstop reading experience, and the book flows as the story unfolds.

Chinatown is an interesting story told in a most interesting way.

–Bill McCloud

Love Found and Lost by Kim Vui

Love Found and Lost: The Kim Vui Story (Texas Tech University Press, 260 pp. $26.95, hardcover; $8.99, Kindle), is an interesting and important autobiography by a Vietnamese actress and singer who was the most glamorous—and famous—star in the South Vietnamese entertainment industry in the 1960s and 1970s. This is also the story of Saigon’s nightlife and film scene during the American war years.

Kim Vui was six years old in 1945 when the Japanese surrendered to the United States near the end of World War II, which led to chaos in and around Saigon as the French tried to regain control of their former colonial capital. Amid the uproar, Kim Vui fled with her family to the Mekong Delta to begin a new life in the countryside. The next year she saw French forces murderously rampaging through her village. The family subsequently returned to Saigon.

With fond memories of singing in her Catholic church, Kim Vui began performing in theaters in Saigon at an early age. In spring of 1955, after France had lost all its Indochinese colonies, the sixteen-year-old Vui was pregnant by a young man she would only see once more in her life.

After her first child was born she finished secondary school and returned to singing in restaurants. Kim Vui also worked in a government program taking music, dance, and propaganda into the countryside to support the noncommunist South Vietnamese regime during the war against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

South Vietnam was developing a small film industry and Kim Vui starred in her first movie in 1957. Ten years later, with Saigon now “a capital in the midst of war,” she had become a popular entertainer, known as a singer of “tragic love songs.” But having failed to find true love, Kim Viu writes, “I made myself ignore the past, live in the present, and always look to the future: to forget the illusion of love and think only of my children.”

In 1968 she took part in an Asian ensemble that had a few gigs in Las Vegas. Returning to Vietnam, she starred in two films with anti-communist themes. After marrying an American civilian, she moved to the U.S. with her children and parents. After that “marriage of necessity,” she wrote, “I would learn that one can survive, even in the absence of happiness.”

The actress and singer Kim Vui was known as “the Sophia Loren of Vietnam.”

She would eventually find herself taking one final stab at finding true love. Despite multiple marriages and occasional other relationships, Kim Vui was doing all that she thought she could to make a safe, successful, life for herself and her six children.

In Love Found and Lost, Kim Vui presents a rare and satisfying glimpse into the social life of upper-class Vietnamese citizens in South Vietnam during the war. Her strengths and maternal influences shine throughout this story—a story of a woman, herself, full of love.

–Bill McCloud

Vietnam War Refugees in Guam by Nghia M. Vo

When most of us hear the term “Boat People,” we think of South Vietnamese refugees escaping to the United States after the communist takeover in 1975. Nghia M. Vo’s Vietnam War Refugees in Guam: A History of Operation New Life, (McFarland, 203 pp., $35, paper; $16.49, Kindle), focuses on a what happened to more than 110,000 people who fled Vietnam and reached the island of Guam that year.

Vo is a researcher who specializes in Vietnamese history and Vietnamese-American culture. He has written several books and many articles on those subjects. His 2021 book, The ARVN and the Fight for South Vietnam, is interesting, intriguing, and very educational. His new book also contains a heavyweight history lesson.

Vietnam War Refugees in Vietnam, which deals mainly with Operation New Life, covers three general areas: The final days of the American war in Vietnam; the flight of tens of thousands of South Vietnamese to Guam and other staging areas; and the reception they had when landing in the U.S.A. and began trying to assimilate into American culture.

For the most part, the citizens of Guam accepted and welcomed the beleaguered Vietnamese refugees with open arms. The Guamanians volunteered their time, skills and excess goods (food, clothing, toys, and more) to these strangers from a foreign country.

Vo writes very clearly and definitively about individual North and South Vietnamese people and Americans, revealing their motivations, strengths, and weaknesses. The book teems with charts that offer a clear picture of the daunting tasks faced by American military personnel and aid workers—and by the refugees themselves.

Vo lists three types of general loss: casual (property, wealth), relationship (family, friends), and country (freedom and independence). With the communist takeover of their country in 1975, the South Vietnamese experienced all three of these losses.

I highly recommend Vietnam War Refugees in Guam.

–Bob Wartman

Soldier On by Tran B. Quan

In 1978, along with 340 other Vietnamese Boat People, four-year-old Tran Quan and her family escaped their homeland. After a year in a refugee camp in Thailand, they immigrated to America.

Tran Quan’s new memoir, Soldier On: My Father, His General, & the Long Road from Vietnam (Texas Tech University Press, 240 pp. $26.95, paper: $9.95, Kindle) is an inspiring book in which she tells the story of her family in Vietnam and in the U.S.A.

Soldier On focuses mainly on two former ARVN soldiers: Lt. Le Quan (Tran’s father) and Maj. Gen. Tran Ba Di (Le Quan’s commander). Le Quan was attached to the 16th Regiment, in the Army of South Vietnam’s 9th Infantry Division; Tran Ba Di commanded the 9th Infantry Division. During years of fighting the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army, the two men met and formed a bond of recognition and respect.

The story begins with the childhoods of both Le Quan and Tran Ba Di and continues through their Army careers, their service in the war, their internments in communist re-education camps, their immigration to the U.S., and their final years.

The book is appropriately titled Soldier On, as it chronicles two men who continually tried to achieve something despite running into difficulties. Tran’s parents and the general soldiered on throughout their lives.

Upon arriving in America (Le Quan in 1979 and Tran Ba Di in 1993), the former soldiers made new lives for themselves and their families. On a combined family road trip in 2015 from Orlando to Key West, Le Quan and Tran Ba Di renewed their old friendship and built new ties.

As that trip proceeded, stories materialized. Soldier On presents those stories, which give a seldom-heard perspective of the American War in Vietnam and shed light on the everyday lives of Vietnamese military personnel. I learned a good deal about how the South Vietnamese people carried on with their lives normally during the war despite the death and destruction around them.

Le Quan’s family worked hard and achieved the American Dream: they owned a car, a house, and their own business. Tran Ba Di settled in Orlando where he worked until the age of 74.

In 2002, Tran Quan graduated from college. She joined the U.S. Army, graduated from medical school, and served four years active duty as an Army doctor.

I strongly recommend Soldier On.

–Bob Wartman

Lost in Vietnam, Found in America by Michael H. Cunningham

Michael Cunningham’s Lost in Vietnam, Found in America: A Saga of Vietnamese Boat People (258 pp. $16.95, paper; $3.99, Kindle) is Cunningham’s fifth book, two of which are novels. The former Americal Division infantryman who served in Vietnam in 1968-69 wrote Walking Point, a memoir about that tour of duty.

After his discharge, Cunningham spent nearly 30 years working for the U.S. Customs Service and retired in 2007. Since then, he has been a veterans advocate and has supported philanthropic projects in Vietnam.

In writing Lost in Vietnam, Found in America, Cunningham set out to show the plight of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Boat People who fled their country after the communists took over South Vietnam in 1975. He does this very well by focusing on the travails of one family of seven, including five children.

The first half of the book describes life in Vietnam under communism and the very difficult and dangerous process of fleeing that country. The balance of the book describes the delays and uncertainties associated with emigrating legally from Vietnam and assimilating into American culture.

Lost in Vietnam, Found in America also shows how Vietnamese people during the American war went about their daily lives, traveling freely and unmolested between villages and cities. Sometimes even younger children traveled alone to and from school and to the homes of friends and relatives in other villages. Americans are so used to reading about the Vietnam War’s battles, ambushes and booby-traps that we can lose sight of the fact that millions of ordinary Vietnamese citizens did their best to live normal lives during the conflict.

Cunningham is even-handed with his observations and evaluations of people, places, and events. He gleaned most of his information from first-hand sources, primarily ordinary Vietnamese people. His book illuminates a historic event that should be remembered and studied to help prevent its recurrence.

I highly recommend Lost in Vietnam, Found in America. Mike Cunningham has done a very good job presenting his story.

–Bob Wartman

Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen

Susan Nguyen’s poetry collection, Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 78 pp. $17.95, paper and E-book), tells the story of a young Vietnamese/American girl growing up in a new land and in a home without a father. It’s a time when she is coming to terms with her sexuality while reckoning with memories and stories she’s been told about her past.

In “The First Language,” “Suzi” is growing up in Virginia and recalling her father, who has “disappeared,” including teaching her how to catch tadpoles in her hand. “The trick wasn’t just to stay still but to stop breathing.”

Four poems have the title, “Letter to the Diaspora.” In the first, a line about “the american dream,” is crossed out, a dream in which Suzi “walked my dead dog with a diamond leash.” In “Cicada Summer,” she is

careful not to crush

the winged insects beneath her feet, fearful of littering

the ground with broken glass.

In “Beast Angel,” she is dreaming in her sleep.

I open the garden of my body

Let loose hunger. Let loose the nest of field mice

and the coiled snake. In this light, I pray

to hold stillness like a gun.

In “If I Say My Body Is Grieving,” Suzi’s mother tells her, “Our country no longer exists.”

In “Wish List,” Suzi earns money by plucking hairs from her mother’s armpit. This is the same mother who we later learn “tapes her eyes wider each day.” In other poems Suzi practices leaving lip-imprints so she can add one to her signature in a boy’s yearbook and struggles with learning the sadness of fireflies gone dark.

In “The Boat People,” a separate section in the middle of the book, Suzi considers the great number of deaths in Communist reeducation camps after 1974, as well those who died in attempts to flee Vietnam “On open water.”

They traveled on small fishing junks

origami boats

arms and legs folded

one over the other

trawlers

smuggling thousands of

bodies

searching for international

water

living on empty

for weeks and months

looking for coastline

that did not push back

In “Suzi Searches for Ecstasy,” she fails to find it in the backseat of a car.

in his hands she wants to be a bird opening its wings, spreading them from car door

to car door, she wants to feel the tremor of his throat, to sing through her feathers

Susan Nguyen

Susan Nguyen has a unique style in which she frequently separates words and phrases—not with punctuation or typical line breaks, but by using empty spaces. Her poetry collection is an all-encompassing expression of history, memory, and longing as they come together in Suzi’s mind.

As with the best poetry, this collection is both enlightening and challenging.

Susan Nguyen’s website is susanpoet.com

–Bill McCloud

Running Toward the Guns by Chanty Jong

Running Toward the Guns: A Memoir of Escape from Cambodia (McFarland, 167 pp., $29.95, paper; $17.99, Kindle) is a sleeper. At first glance it seems to be a pleasant little book that recounts, in almost transcription-from-interview prose, an eight-year-old girl’s escape from Cambodia in 1975. But soon the reader realizes that nothing pleasant happened to Chanty Jong after she was taken by the murderous Khmer Rouge and forced to endure what became a holocaust against the Cambodian people.

Jong’s father was an elementary school principal in Phnom Penh. She was in the third grade and just learning to read. That meant she was on the way to joining a learned family in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge, who were wreaking havoc on the Cambodian people during the infamous Pol Pot regime.

The descriptions of her tribulations written by Jong with the help of her American family physician, Lee Ann Van Houten-Sauter, are graphic in their details of the violence and the jungle camps where she was forced to work as child slave laborer, building roads by hand, as well as the areas she fled through as she made her way to a refugee camp in Thailand. She survived there for months until an interview with a UN aid official afforded her the opportunity to emigrate to America.

During her captivity, the Khmer Rouge camps were overrun by Heng Somren fighters, supported by the Vietnamese. During one raid Jong ran toward the oncoming troops through a hail of bullets in an effort to escape the Khmer Rouge, a act that gives the book its title.

Learning English was always one of the her goals, yet she arrived in the U.S. with the barest knowledge of vocabulary or grammar. She began studying the language in earnest after she arrived. Jong came to the realization, through meditation and self-examination, that all was not right within her psychologically. She describes the best self-diagnosis of intense PTSD I’ve ever read.

In the last 50 pages of this book, Jong takes the reader through the memories and mental jungles that have populated her sleep—and nearly every waking moment. She also describes her therapeutic use of deep meditation, grounding techniques, identifying triggers, compartmentalizing, and memory confrontation.

Even with a few grammatical and punctuation errors, this book offers a true, self-help opportunity for struggling survivors of most traumatic events—not just the horrors of war. This small book also was a pleasure to read—and to experience.

–Tom Werzyn

Soles of a Survivor by Nhi Aronheim

Nhi Aronheim’s Soles of a Survivor: A Memoir (Skyhorse, 288 pp. $24.99, hardcover; $16.99, Kindle) is a worthy autobiography. In it, Aronheim tells the story of her escape from post-war Vietnam and resettlement and eventual success in the United States. Aronheim, who fled her native country in 1987 when she was 12 years old, shows herself to be a motivated, highly driven individual.

She was born into a large, prominent family near Da Nang. Her father was a respected physician who also treated injured American troops during the war.

When communist forces took control of the entire country in the spring of 1975, her father was taken to a re-education camp and soldiers marched through the family’s well-appointed home taking anything of value. They said that under Communism everyone was equal and no one should have too much wealth. Eventually, the father left the family and Aronheim, her mother, and her siblings were forced to leave their home.

As the family was about to be sent to a re-education camp, her mother bribed a bus driver to take them to Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. Arriving with only the clothes on their backs, they lived illegally in one room. Aronheim earned money for the family by selling counterfeit cigarettes.

Her mother longed for the opportunity for the family to escape, but knew it would be too difficult to attempt it as a group. So, in total secrecy, she helped her twelve-year-old daughter cross the border into Cambodia with the hope of getting to America. At this point in the memoir, we have reached the end of the first chapter, with nineteen more to go.

The book’s title is how Aronheim’s husband refers to her feet as a result of all the walking she did during her escape. It was a harrowing experience, during which, she says, she found herself “staring down death time after time,” and that each time was “as terrifying as it was the first time.” She spent time in a refugee camp in Thailand, and remembers watching showings of “ET” and “The Sound of Music” without her or anyone around her understanding what was going on.

Nhi Aronheim

Against heavy odds, this young woman managed to make it out of the refugee camp and fly to the U.S. where she thrived academically and went on to good jobs in telecommunications and the mortgage industry, and then became a wife and mother. This book celebrates a life of achievement that started in most unlikely fashion.

More and more stories are now being told by Vietnamese refugees who have made the best they could of their lives while also helping make America a better place to live. Nhi Aronheim says she hopes her book will encourage readers “to never give up, never give in, and always stay positive.”

Examples of how she lived that philosophy can be found on nearly every page of this inspiring book.

The author’s website is nhiaronheim.com

–Bill McCloud

Snow’s Kitchen by Amy M. Le

Snow’s Kitchen: A Novella and Cookbook (Quill Hawk Publishing, 262 pp. $34.99) is Amy Le’s delightful wrap-up of a trilogy of autobiographical fictional tales telling the story of her family’s escape from Vietnam after the end of the American war and the challenges they faced resettling in the United States. Snow is Amy’s mother’s name, which explains the intriguing title of her debut novel, Snow in Vietnam. That first novel tells the story of her mother’s difficult life in Vietnam and the harrowing escape she made with Amy, who is called Dolly, and a young nephew.

The second novel, Snow in Seattle, begins in 1980, six months after the end of the first one. Snow in Seattle finds the small family dealing with the Pacific Northwest weather, American TV shows, and the idea of always-plentiful food. Seeing our country through the eyes of these new arrivals allow American readers to see ourselves in new ways.

Amy Le says she wrote Snow’s Kitchen in one month. I can believe it because of the natural flow of the story as it unfolds. She’s not sitting down at her writing table trying to make things up; rather, she’s relating things as she mostly recalls them. Le wrote the first two novels as a way of honoring her mother, who died of cancer in 2017. This work is intended to honor her mother’s love for food by sharing her recipes, which drew from cultures of the East and West.

In this book Amy, now going by the name “Christine,” moves through adolescence. Here are the book’s first two sentences: “The first boy I ever kissed was named Dung. Let that marinate for a second.”

Her mother has remarried and the family has moved to California. Her mom delightfully pronounces “ugly” in three syllables, “uh-guh-lee,” and once when excited she exclaimed, “Oh. My. Good. Nest!”

But all is not well in Christine’s teen life. She succumbs to peer pressure and her mother wants her to improve her “broken Vietnamese.” But the most serious issue is her relationship with the new stepfather.

Amy Le

He barges into her bedroom without knocking, reads her diary, and calls her vile names. “I hated being Vietnamese then,” she writes. “Our society was built upon the stupid, patriarchal, male-chauvinistic belief that the man was in charge. A woman’s role was to be obedient, subservient, and cater to her husband. I denounced my ethnicity, my Vietnamese name, my language, and everything that was associated with the culture.

“In feeling that way, I also inadvertently denounced everything that Mama represented, everything that she was, and I hurt her more than I understood.”

Amy Le maintains a consistent voice in all three books, as she continues to show her mastery of realistic dialogue. To get the most from this book I recommend first reading the first two in order. All three are great to share with family members and very much suitable for book clubs.

As a bonus, Le includes more than 100 pages of recipes with photographs.

Amy Le’s website is amy-m-le.com

–Bill McCloud

Prisoner of Wars by Chia Youyee Vang

Learning intimate facts about how other people live is an enlightening experience. Once again, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee history professor Chia Youyee Vang fulfills that promise with Prisoner of Wars: A Hmong Fighter Pilot’s Story of Escaping Death and Confronting Life (Temple University Press, 168 pp. $74.50, hardcover; $24.95, paper and e book).

Although the book’s title highlights prison life, only one chapter is devoted to that experience. The book’s theme primarily deals with Pao Yang—who helped Professor Yang with the book—and his family’s survival under constant hardships. “A core condition among human beings across time and place is that of suffering,” Vang says.

This is her fifth book about the Hmong diaspora, preceded by Hmong in Minnesota (2008); Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora (2010); Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women (2016); and Fly Until You Die (2019).

She excels at storytelling by incorporating pieces of interviews verbatim into her narrative, a technique that amplifies the emotional impact of the speakers. With Prisoner of Wars, she uses Pao Yang’s words to attain a new height of emotional insight. “What you will read are my truths,” Pao Yang says. Quotations tirelessly gathered by Vang from Paos Yang’s family members and friends strengthen his recollections from the past.

Capt. Pao Yang flew hundreds of close air support missions in T-28D fighter-bombers in Laos for Gen. Vang Pao. Shot down and captured in June 1972 at the age of 24, he was listed as missing in action. When he failed to return home following the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, his family decided that he had been killed in action. A botched prisoner exchange allowed the Lao People’s Democratic Republic to hold Pao Yang as a slave laborer until October 1976.

Chia Youyee Vang

The decision to classify him as KIA deeply affected his family. His wife grieved, remarried, moved to the United States, and left their son in Laos.

Once he was finally released Pao Yang faced drama after drama: reuniting with his mother and son, a second marriage, a dangerous escape from Laos to Thailand, deprivation in a refugee camp, eventual entry to the United States, and a free life of hard work, low paying jobs, failed businesses, and illness in a foreign land. Sorrow accompanied the joy he found.

I have read similar tales, but none as intriguing as this one.

Many Americans might classify Prisoner of Wars as another reflection of the intricacies of America’s so-called Secret War in Laos. To me, the revelations those interviewed by Professor Vang make the book a valuable narrative about people everywhere who are dispersed worldwide because of war and other conflicts. Uncertain settlement in a foreign land and practically non-existent job opportunities often are lifelong and unwarranted hardships for such migrants.

The story of Pao Yang’s family clearly makes this point.

—Henry Zeybel