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The Unwanted
by Kien Nguyen
Average Customer Rating
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Pub. Date: April 2002 (reprint)
ISBN-13: 9780316284615
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Nonfiction. Kien Nguyen grew up an outsider in his native land. His once prosperous family, thrust into poverty at the dawn of a new political regime, lived among neighbors who treated them as an unwelcome remnant of the colonialist past. Kien himself, a child of mixed race (his father was American), was among the most unwanted. Told with a stark, poetic brilliance, Kien's account of his early years-from the fall of Saigon, when at age eight he watched the last U.S. Army helicopter leave without him and his family, to his eventual escape-is a work of profound emotional resonance, at once harrowing and inspiring. The Unwanted unforgettably records a universal human experience played out in extreme circumstances: the forging of an identity, a life. |
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Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War
by Trin Yarborough
Average Customer Rating
Publisher: Potomac Books
Pub. Date: August 2006
ISBN-13: 9781574888652 |
| Nonfiction. More than 100,000 children were born during the Vietnam War to GI fathers and Vietnamese mothers. Those who weren't among the few thousand who came to the U.S. before the war's end faced formidable obstacles in a society that didn't accept their mixed parentage. Yarborough tells the story of five such Amerasians, who were among those who entered the U.S. as young adults under the 1988 Amerasian Homecoming Act and then struggled for a second time to survive. In addition to interviewing the five extensively, Yarborough also talked with a Buddhist nun, social workers, resettlement workers, police gang officers, and others to understand how mixed-race children born of wars and occupations are treated, and the ways shifting laws, policies, and social attitudes affect their entire lives. |
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The Vietnamese Americans
by Hien Duc Do
Average Customer Rating 
Publisher: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
Pub. Date: December 1999
ISBN-13: 9780313297809 |
| Nonfiction. Vietnamese first came to the United States as refugees in the 1970s, after the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese Americans, written by a former Vietnamese refugee, is the only in-depth resource especially for students and general readers with a solid introduction to Vietnam, the history of Vietnamese immigration, and a forthright analysis of Vietnamese Americans' struggles to forge a better future. As their adjustment process is chronicled from the perspectives of the family and ethnic community, the label of the model minority is debunked to reveal both minor economic successes and serious problems such as high school dropouts and gang activity. |
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Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora
by Andrew Lam
Average Customer Rating
Publisher: Heyday Books
Pub. Date: September 2005
ISBN-13: 9781597140201 |
| Nonfiction. In this powerful collection of essays, Lam, a syndicated columnist and National Public Radio commentator, explores his identity as a Viet Kieu (a Vietnamese national living abroad) residing in the United States. On April 28, 1975, 11-year-old Lam and his family fled Saigon aboard a crowded C130 cargo plane just two days before the fall of Saigon to Communist forces (a day Lam would come to know as an "American rebirth"). His father, a respected South Vietnamese general, followed soon after, reuniting with the family in California, where they would begin at the bottom rung as they struggled to fulfill the American Dream. Looking deep within himself and his fellow Viet Kieu, Lam seeks to "marry two otherwise dissimilar and often conflicting narratives." Lam, who grows to realize that home is "portable if one is in commune with one's soul," embraces the journey of self-discovery and concludes that one's identity is not fixed but "open-ended." (Library Journal) |
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Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam
by Robert Templer
Average Customer Rating
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Pub. Date: September 1999
ISBN: 0140285970
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| Nonfiction. A powerful and vivid account of Vietnam, one of the most beautiful, ravaged, and misunderstood countries in the world. In Shadows and Wind, Robert Templer paints a fascinating and fresh picture of a country usually viewed with hazy nostalgia or deep suspicion. Here is Hanoi, an increasingly tense and troubled city approaching its millennium but uncertain of its direction. Here are people emerging from a long wilderness of malnutrition, discovering a new lifestyle of leisure and luxury. And everywhere are the anomalies that burst the bubble of optimism: a vastly expensive luxury hotel sitting empty in an unknown town six hours from an international airport; museums crammed with fake exhibits. And there remains the one-party Communist state, still wrapped in secrecy and corruption, and making for an uneasy bedfellow with the rapacious capitalism it now encourages. Shadows and Wind is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Vietnam that now has emerged from a century of conflict with both foreign powers and with itself. |
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